As soon as a person began to comprehend his own nature, he rightly saw his difference from other living beings in the mind, more than replacing him, so physically weak, both claws and fangs. By virtue of our very structure, we are instinctive rationalists and therefore tend to fetishize our main tool, as well as to prejudice its capabilities. Even hardened cynics still have the hope that the keys to all doors are hidden in the mind. One has only to sort out some questions on the shelves, dispel misconceptions, bring in due clarity and collect the missing information, as we and the whole world will embark on the road to a brighter future. The brightest exponents of this ubiquitous position were Socrates, the Stoics and philosophers of the Enlightenment. They zealously believed that a person was unhappy, that he was doing bad or evil only because of illusion,errors of one's own mind, errors of knowledge. If he really understood what is good, he would immediately be transformed, and therefore enlightenment, debunking of illusions, accumulation of knowledge is the only way to happiness and ethical improvement. You just need to understand everything and explain everything to everyone, and then it will certainly be good - and certainly for a long time.
Meanwhile, everyone had to notice the somewhat discouraging fact that often we know very well how we should act and in which direction to move, but still we cannot or, moreover, do not want to do this. The point is not even that we doubt the verdicts of our own mind - on the contrary, complete clarity can reign on this score; but all the same, this precious knowledge turns out to be incapable of moving us from our place and, it seems, has no real consequences. Finally, it also happens that a person not only does not follow his own and perfectly perceived interests, but acts to his own detriment, perfectly aware of this. The great artist of the human soul, Dostoevsky, opened and described dozens of similar cases with anatomical precision (read, for example, the brilliant first third of Notes from the Underground),not invented by him for literary effect, but taken from everyday life and from his own soul. Socrates is silent, Diderot and Rousseau lower their eyes, Kant does not shake hands - in the ideas of rationalists it cannot be that knowledge and reason write out such somersaults and, in a practical sense, completely fold. So that a person knows exactly what will be better, but does not do, and even more so in spite of doing the opposite? Come on, it can't be! More precisely, within the framework of this system, it simply means that a person “does not understand enough”, “does not know enough” of something, and new, more perfect explanations are required. However, what is the nature of this insufficiency, how is it possible at all, and have there really been few explanations and were they so bad?Diderot and Rousseau lower their eyes, Kant does not shake hands - in the ideas of rationalists it cannot be that knowledge and reason write out such somersaults and, in a practical sense, completely fold. So that a person knows exactly what will be better, but does not do, and even more so in spite of doing the opposite? Come on, it can't be! More precisely, within the framework of this system, it simply means that a person “does not understand enough”, “does not know enough” of something, and new, more perfect explanations are required. However, what is the nature of this insufficiency, how is it possible at all, and have there really been few explanations and were they so bad?Diderot and Rousseau lower their eyes, Kant does not shake hands - in the ideas of rationalists it cannot be that knowledge and reason write out such somersaults and, in a practical sense, completely fold. So that a person knows exactly what will be better, but does not do, and even more so in spite of doing the opposite? Come on, it can't be! More precisely, within the framework of this system, it simply means that a person “does not understand enough”, “does not know enough” of something, and new, more perfect explanations are required. However, what is the nature of this insufficiency, how is it possible at all, and have there really been few explanations and were they so bad?but did not, and even more so in spite of doing the opposite? Come on, it can't be! More precisely, within the framework of this system, it simply means that a person “does not understand enough”, “does not know enough” of something, and new, more perfect explanations are required. However, what is the nature of this insufficiency, how is it possible at all, and have there really been few explanations and were they so bad?but did not, and even more so in spite of doing the opposite? Come on, it can't be! More precisely, within the framework of this system, it simply means that a person “does not understand enough”, “does not know enough” of something, and new, more perfect explanations are required. However, what is the nature of this insufficiency, how is it possible at all, and have there really been few explanations and were they so bad?
On the other hand, in history and life, at every step you come across people who know so much and represent so little. The most vivid example seems to me to be the image of a professor of philosophy - for example, not even an ordinary one, but an outstanding, intelligent, talented one. This is a person who, by virtue of his own occupation, is the repository of the wisdom of the human species. The instinctive rationalist in us expects that he should walk without touching the ground, as if soaring above the world of mere mortals, and barely crawl through the doorways around his head and dazzle him with a radiance to tears in his eyes. Alas and ah - with disappointment we find that he is not only deprived of the relying air cushion, but also stumbles no less than ours, and even more often. Moreover, which is completely strange, this knowledgeable person can be frankly stupid in many ways, even ridiculous and,of course, he is no closer to the cherished human happiness than the ignorant. But if knowledge and reason, as rationalists promise, are such powerful instruments of transformation, who would seem to be closer to moral and other perfection than their undoubted carriers?
The error of superficial rationalistic interpretation lies, like many errors, in the details - in the lack of differentiation and the refusal to distinguish where it is fundamentally important. When Heraclitus, in his famous words, said: "Much knowledge does not teach the mind," he meant that one should know not much, but essential. This is true, but we need to go even further. What is important is not what you know, but how you know it, the depth of penetration of knowledge into our life and its practice - this is the key link missed in rationalism. In the example described above, one gets the impression that everything known and thought out by the venerable professor, all the cream of wisdom taken from human culture, only wetted his gray mustache and had a minimal effect on the structure of his life. I will allow myself to call this type of knowledge and assimilation “mechanical”. Mechanical assimilation is only a quantitative addition of some information to the amount of information we have, it is external in nature and does not transform our life, it does not form the basis, does not integrate into our I.
The opposite of mechanical assimilation is "organic" - the process of dissolving knowledge in our blood, when it begins to flow through the veins and becomes an integral part of our being, actively transforming personal ethics and the whole picture of inner and outer life. Thus, if we radicalize the Heraclitean thesis, it’s not much knowledge that doesn’t teach the mind, but any knowledge doesn’t teach the mind, it doesn’t teach anything at all, and it’s worth a penny if a person doesn’t take it deeply and truly into himself.
The paradoxical truth is that if suddenly by divine command all people received answers to all questions and all the dots were finally placed, nothing in the world would fundamentally change. The fundamental mistake of Socratism and the Enlightenment, which is also dominant in the modern world, is the naive belief that rational discourse, enlightenment and persuasion will certainly have, if they are sufficiently convincing, a strong and benevolent influence on the paths and destinies of people. But development is equal to philosophy and history testify: until the truth is perceived organically, until it becomes an intimate inner event and enters the flesh and blood, external awareness, knowledge and even its true understanding are in vain. Knowledge, like understanding, is two simplest and initial stages, while real work only begins afterhow they are achieved, and it consists in the organic implementation of understanding, the revitalization of its mechanical dead body.
These observations explain another notorious fact, namely such an annoying impotence of reasoning, admonishing other people with even the most convincing and weighty arguments. Let's say our arguments are irreproachably irreproachable and to us - oh, a miracle! - managed to convince the other of the validity of the thoughts expressed. Alas, this does not mean at all that this triumph of reason will have any influence on the further life decisions of this person. Any thinker and public figure in history is well aware that the bulk of his admirers and supporters are people who sincerely support the proclaimed ideas, but at the same time do not change their own lives in accordance with them and always have at the ready many reasons why they don’t fits or fails. Moreover, according to the bizarre logic of the human soul (again,remember Dostoevsky) rational discourse in its crushing instructiveness often offends a person, makes him want to act in spite and in spite of, to take revenge on another for his righteousness: "Oh, you are so smart …". More often, even a mechanical agreement cannot be reached, since, as you know, one clever fool is able to come up with so many objections, evasions and questions that even one hundred wise men cannot cope with him.
This situation can cause despair, encourage us to search in vain for errors and imperfections in the logic of persuasion, but only as long as we naively believe in the power of purely mechanical knowledge. The latter can and should serve as a guide for deeper comprehension, but pinning one's hopes on it, as has always been done, is a fatal miscalculation. Philosophy and any spiritual teaching are therefore only at the first stages of their "theory", a certain set of concepts and information. How much a person has advanced in it, we always learn not by what he knows and what he says, but by what he is as a whole. Its true essence is always activity in the organic, that is, practical, realization of the acquired knowledge. This is also where the definition of wisdom lies. He is not wise who knows what is unknown to others; he is wisewhose knowledge is deeply integrated into his life and intertwined with each other, forming a single living system.
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In other words, wisdom is a measure of the organic assimilation of a person's knowledge and experience, a proportion between mechanical and organic in the inner baggage of a person. It is not necessarily associated with logical correctness, "truth", the validity of human beliefs. Socrates and Diogenes were much wiser than our notorious professor, although the latter's judgments are stricter, deeper, more reliably protected from objections and he, perhaps, is much more perceptive than these great men of antiquity. People like Socrates, Diogenes, Buddha were in no way smarter than the intellectuals of our time or theirs, there is no need to be naively deceived about this, but they lived to an immense degree by what they knew - and this is the basis of their greatness. The first task of each of us, therefore,does not consist in obtaining any kind of mechanical education and other quantitative increments in terms of information, but purposeful activity for the organic integration of what we already have. This is the main problem of philosophy and culture - how to make knowledge alive, and not at all the meaning of life, how many categories does the mind have, are ideas or matter primary, and everything like that.
© Oleg Tsendrovsky
