Wisdom, sleeping..
  • Home
  • Four Pillars of Wisdom
    • Why Wisdom, a Provisional Foreword
    • Doubts
    • Ethos or How I Learned Some Wisdom
    • The "State of the Art" - an impression
    • A Nutshell History of Worldly Wisdom
    • What is Wisdom?
    • The first pillar of wisdom: wise knowledge
    • Good Judgment is the second pillar of wisdom
    • Wise Conduct is the third pillar of wisdom
  • Articles
    • Secret Life of the Obvious
    • Powerful inaction, conspicuous absence, bountiful void
    • The Power to Make Things Simple
    • Three kinds of Criticism
    • Critical thinking is disobedient, not correct
    • Strategy of Surprise
    • The Rectification of Meaning
    • The n plus minus one principle: higher, wider, different...
    • The Fascination of Paradox
    • A choice of choices
    • Des choix de la spiritualité
  • Blog
  • This reminds me of a story

Learn from the Chinese before they teach us

29/2/2012

1 Comment

 
Picture

We Europeans, should learn some subtlety from the Chinese before they come to teach us; our technical culture fell into the strange belief that what we cannot grab does not count so that we can safely neglect it; even as we know well that there is more than what meets the eye.

Are we still of such stuff as dreams are made on? Not anymore; we are trained with reason to sweep away everything which is not manifest, material and explicit; the non action and the absent are too elusive to be serious; as for the potential of the not yet being, it is too protean for statistics. Impressions and hunches based on lack-of-signs are baseless superstition; common-sense or good-sense about what is missing is folklore. As for imagination, it is for arts and entertainment.

This attitude is born from the faith that everything is determined by matter, by vectors...and by money; the rest - spirit, mind, feeling, memory, intuition, beliefs, dreams, will, even who we are - are mere glittering, not to be trusted.

                                                                  *

There is hope though; quality intellect can be educated to account with intangibles and negative events. We can learn from the East to be haiku poets, to use the present and the absent, the precise and the subtle, what is and what we want, at the same time – to understand, to decide and to do. This needs not remain Chinese for us.

There are alternatives to our standard model of reasoning, ways in which you acquire a rich non-linear movement of mind complementary to analysis and explication:

You emulate the understanding style of Lao Tzu, you imitate the Tao of water, you check the rules of Sun Tzu, you chance the ruses of the 36 Strategies; the same way you refine your mind with the Sufi turns of mind of Nasreddin Hodja, the myriad recipes of the folk sayings of the world, the ever-returning destinies people live according to the archetypes of the great myths, religions and masterpieces of the world literature canons.

We fill our mental coffers not only with ideas and procedures but also with forms, shapes, mental tools and choices of emotion, skill of looking and understanding, angles and points of view for looking at the World, balances for weighing the importance, the goodness lenses for beauty and ugly.

If you feel this is interesting, click here.

1 Comment

The importance of that which is not there

23/1/2012

16 Comments

 
Picture


““I see nobody on the road,” said Alice.

“I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone.

“To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why, it’s as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!”” [1]

Well, the King, and we all, should look twice.

​What is not there may be, in practice, as important as that which is; at times even more important for what we feel, think, decide and do;

For two reasons:
-    first, because objects missing, persons absent, vacant space, which are not physically present, things that keep not occurring when they should, signposts absent, weigh heavily in our real life; moreover, needs neglected, events not taking place when their time has come have consequences., What we do not say and do not do, acts from which we abstain or the ones we neglect or miss, count.

-    second, because that which is vacant, unfilled, not sated, not yet started, not frozen in the irremediable past, still without form, everything still potential, hides – like infinity –many more possibilities than that which is formed, taken and completed. This is why in danger you should keep your hands free...and you plans open.

Good sens would say - and it even stands to reason - that we should mind carefully both presence and absence, both the full and the empty, positive action and negative conduct, to understand, when we are to plan and to decide to make things happen or to prevent them.

​Why is this rich field so methodically ignored in our Western civilisation?

Shapeless content and empty form hide rich potential.

                                                                                         *

This may look like for some as far-fetched playing with words but is in fact feet on ground, very practical, as all good theories are [2].

In my life as an advisor, I learned to ask such surprising questions to detect the significant things which were not there but counted:
-    What should be here and isn’t? What did I expect to find here and do not see?
-  Is there sufficient space to move and do what we want to do? Sufficient intervals and "no man's land" to allow coexistence of differences? Sufficient slack and  pause to think?
-    Beyond things pressing to do, what is urgent to abstain from? The priority is to act or to wait?
-  This being what is conspicuously allowed and recommended and this, what is forbidden here; what is then not forbidden nor mandatory, omitted from instructions and thus, implicitly doable? What escapes attention because of being too big or too small, too fast or too slow? Where are the loopholes for possible action?
-   This, what we hear, being usually remembered what was curiously forgotten?   What is ignored and in denial?
-   I see here yet another case of the king being naked; that being a fact, why is nobody saying so? What else is unsaid or silenced?
-   Is there some uncharted territory - around or elsewhere - which we can put to use? Is all space taken?
-  How narrow is the box in which these people live, in which the problems are defined as impossible to solve and opportunities absent? Could we consider a wider horizon? In fact what can I imagine *from nothing*, which could to be here but isn't now? Something that I could bring from far away?
-    ...


Other people, no doubt serious - and usually more competent than I in their discipline - come and look carefully at precisely what is present; they are very good at that, the experts, separating not observables from fact and discarding intuition and absence as if they did not count.

The experts at establishing how things really are, are often chained to what is given and less prone to think of making things to be as we want them to be. They itch to measure. do and to fix. Such people are quite bad at considering the not present but important, the invisibles, the hollow, the not done, the ignored, the forgotten, the unusual but not impossible, or simply the loopholes. They are extremely poor at working constructively with "negatives" like ignorance and misunderstanding, bad feelings, instituted error, unsatisfied desires and the like. They are at pains to prescribe - when needed - to do nothing, to leave things alone and wait; to let happen and to let live. Maybe this is the tragedy of the professional advisor; the client wants to measure and pay for what you do, being not subtle enough or not empowered to pay the preventing of bad loss to happen before it becomes visible.
​
                                                                                         *

It was very well said that "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”[3]

We may need to redefine intelligence -instead of believing that it is perfect reasoning towards the right answer to problems as given -  rather as an ability of doing something else: constantly preventing bad things to arise, not doing errors amidst complication, of halting the doing of them when they occurred. Evading some given problems instead of persevering and multiplying them, of going around obstacles instead of clashing with them, not acting when it is not needed and allowing things to happen... or is that wisdom rather than mere intelligence? I'm joking, of course it is!

Read deeper if you want...
--------------------------

[1]Carroll Lewis, THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS AND WHAT ALICE FOUND THERE, Macmillan, N.Y., London 1899 ]

[2]Lewin Kurt, “The Research Center for Group Dynamics at M.I.T.” Sociometry 8 (1945), p.128

[3]"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”- Quote Investigator comments suggests crediting William Bruce Cameron instead of Albert Einstein. Cameron’s 1963 text “Informal Sociology: A Casual Introduction to Sociological Thinking” contained the following passage “It would be nice if all of the data which sociologists require could be enumerated because then we could run them through IBM machines and draw charts as the economists do. However, not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” [WCIS] 1963, Informal Sociology, a casual introduction to sociological thinking by William Bruce Cameron, Page 13, Random House, New York.

16 Comments

    Categories

    All
    Absence
    Advice
    Aging Parents
    Agree To Disagree
    Akrasia
    Animal Rights
    A Time For Everything
    Axioms
    Bad Silence
    Beast
    Being Wise
    Books
    Carpe Diem
    Choice Of Choices
    Choices
    Communication
    Compassion
    Complexity
    Consulting Difference
    Counsel
    Credibility
    Critical Spirit
    Critical Thinking
    Criticism
    Critique
    Death
    Disenchanters
    Dying For Ideas
    Emptiness
    Error
    Evil
    Expression
    Extremes
    Facts Are Friendly
    Fast Thinking
    Foolishness
    Freedom
    Free Thinking
    Free Will
    Friendly Criticism
    Future
    Gatherer Attitude
    Given And Made
    Golden Rule
    Good Judgement
    Goodness
    Hostile Criticism
    Human Needs
    Humility
    Impossible
    Intangibles
    Intelligent Stupidity
    Intuition
    Justice
    Kindness
    Knowing People
    Learning From History
    Leaving The Table
    Life
    Listening
    Locus Of Control
    Losing With Grace
    Making Things Simple
    Measure Of All Things
    Moderation
    Montaigne
    Motivation
    N±1
    Nasreddin Hodja
    Need To Know Everything
    Not Doing
    Not Knowing
    Objective Criticism
    Obvious
    One Truth
    Out Of The Box
    Owning Your Words
    Paradox
    Parting
    Peace
    Point Of View
    Power
    Preparing Against Surprise
    Preparing For Surprise
    Preparing The Surprise
    Pride
    Progress
    Promise Of Science
    Protagoras Of Abdera
    Readers
    Reciprocity
    Rectification Of Meaning
    Religion
    Representation
    Resilience
    Respect
    Right To Be Wrong
    Right To Error
    Rite Of Separation
    Science
    Seekers And Finders
    Shapes
    Signs Of The Beast
    Silence
    Simple People
    Sincerity
    Sleeping Wisdom
    Small Wheel
    Socratic Method
    Spontaneous Thinking
    Strategy
    Stupidity
    Subtlety
    Surprise
    The King Is Naked
    Theodicy
    Three Kinds Of Criticism
    Too Big Too Small
    Truth
    Uncertainty
    Use Of Error
    Values
    Void
    What Happens To Me
    Why Memories
    Wisdom
    Wisdom Of Ends
    Wisdom Of Means
    Wrong Thing Right

    RSS Feed

© 2011 - 2020 Ioan Tenner & Daniel Tenner