On clumsiness
Despite our desire for another state of affairs, and despite our attempts to see ourselves as suave and elegant creatures, our lives are spent in constant clumsiness. We all pitch in, muddling our way through a awkward world, and we all look about in amazement at the sheer ineptness of it all. We do not so much sometimes lapse into being clumsy than constantly try to be less clumsy than we are, and try our darndest to escape our inevitable awkwardness. We stutter, stumble, stub our toes, spill our coffee, dance badly, miss the beat, and belatedly realize that what we took to be a droll witticism was seen as oafishly offensive. In other words, it is not so much a case of clumsiness being something we occasionally slip into, with calm and poise being the natural state of affairs, than the case of gracefulness and aplomb being radical breaks with this natural state. Not only are you and I clumsy, all our friends are too, and their friends, as well as this whole damnable creation we call the world.
Despite this, there is very little in the way of a theory of clumsiness, not to mention the lack of a philosophy of gracelessness. This might go to show that inquiries into the human condition still cling on to the hope that this state could be seen as a state of grace, with man standing proud on the very apex of creation. Still, the human animal is a peculiarly awkward and ungainly one, with little of the physical elegance of e.g. a large animal. One could argue that any theory of human behavior is, always already, a theory of clumsiness – it is just a roundabout one, created in order to salvage at least a little grace.
Stating this might sound like the cynical lashing out of a disgruntled teen, prepared to take vengeance on a world s/he doesn’t feel attuned to, but my interest in clumsiness should not be interpreted as cynicism. I do not find humanity less worthy just because I think clumsiness is omnipresent. On the contrary, I feel that the ungainliness of man is an interesting and intellectually stimulating fact, and that it might be our powers of approximate behavior rather than our faculties for exact rationality that define us. Therefore I believe a theory of clumsiness is needed. I shall return to this.
