Culture
The naif appears as a cultural type in two main forms. On the one hand, there is 'the satirical naïf, such as Candide'. Northrop Frye suggested we might call it 'the ingenu form, after Voltaire's dialogue of that name. Here an outsider...grants none of the premises which make the absurdities of society look logical to those accustomed to them', and serves essentially as a prism to carry the satirical message. Baudrillard indeed, drawing on his Situationist roots, sought to position himself as ingenu in everyday life: 'I play the role of the Danube peasant: someone who knows nothing but suspects something is wrong...I like being in the position of the primitive...playing naïve '.
On the other hand, there is the artistic 'naïf - all responsiveness and seeming availability'. Here 'the naïf offers himself as being in process of formation, in search of values and models...always about to adopt some traditional "mature" temperament' - in a perpetual adolescent moratorium. Such instances of 'the naïf as a cultural image...offered themselves as essentially responsive to others and open to every invitation...established their identity in indeterminacy'.
During the 1960s, 'the naifs turned toward mysticism and Eastern religions', feeding into the Hippie movement. 'Hippie culture, bastard of the beat generation out of pop, was much like a folk culture - oral, naive, communal, its aphorisms ("Make love, not war", "turn on, tune in, drop out") intuited, not rationalized'. Its druggie protagonists 'had a childlike wonder that we could produce such weirdness from ourselves...assumed with the bravado of youth that we'd make it back to tell of what we saw'.
A "recovering" naïf might have to learn that 'I had to stop presenting myself as a blank canvass to others. I was allowing people to paint their fantasies on to me so that when I finally let them know what I was like...I was already in too deep for the extrication to be painless'.
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Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“The aggregate of all knowledge has not yet become culture in us. Rather it would seem as if, with the progressive scientific penetration and dissection of reality, the foundations of our thinking grow ever more precarious and unstable.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“Children became an obsessive theme in Victorian culture at the same time that they were being exploited as never before. As the horrors of life multiplied for some children, the image of childhood was increasingly exalted. Children became the last symbols of purity in a world which was seen as increasingly ugly.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“Let a man attain the highest and broadest culture that any American has possessed, then let him die by sea-storm, railroad collision, or other accident, and all America will acquiesce that the best thing has happened to him; that, after the education has gone far, such is the expensiveness of America, that the best use to put a fine person to is to drown him to save his board.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)