Ideas
for a conversation with Ed Harker on 6th February 2007 in the
masters educational enquiry group, Department of Education, University of
Bath, 5.00-7.00 1WN 3.8.
http://www.futurelab.org.uk/events/past/be_pres/gc01
(This is the link for a talk Claxton gave at
a Futurelab conference)
"Language, and the ways of knowing
which it affords liberates; but it comes with snares of its own. Although it
allows us to learn from the experience of others, and to segment and recombine
our own knowledge in novel ways, it creates a different kind of rigidity. As
Aldous Huxley said: 'Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim
of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary
inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's
experience; the victim insofar as it ... bedevils his sense of reality, so that
he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things'."
Guy Claxton, Hare Brain Tortoise Mind (1997) Fourth Estate, London [page 46]:
The modern mind has a distorted image of
itself that leads it to neglect some of its own most valuable learning
capacities. We now know that the brain is built to linger as well as to rush,
and that slow knowing sometimes leads to better answers. We know that knowledge
makes itself known through sensations, images, feelings and inklings, as well
as through clear, conscious thoughts.
—Guy
Claxton, Hare Brain Tortoise Mind, p. 203
Seeing through an existing,
invisible assumption, which is often the key to creativity, requires a mind
that is informed but not deformed; channeled but not rutted [p. 72]
Perhaps the most significant
of all these interesting findings is that the group who are most at ease with uncertainty and doubt, the most
able to 'live with it', are the group who are most able to make successful use
of the inadequate information they have. They can use their unconscious resources to
help them make good guesses in uncertain situations, and are willing to do so.
[p. 74, emphasis added]
Recent
scientific evidence shows convincingly that the more patient, less deliberate
modes of mind are particularly suited to making sense of situations that are
intricate, shadowy or ill defined. Deliberate
thinking, d-mode, works well when the problem it is facing is easily
conceptualized. When we are trying to decide where to spend our holidays, it
may well be perfectly obvious what the parameters are: how much we can afford,
when we can get away, what kinds of things we enjoy doing, and so on. But when
we are not sure what needs to be taken into account, or even which questions to
pose — or when the issue is too subtle to be captured by the familiar
categories of conscious thought — we need recourse to the tortoise mind. [p.3,
emphasis added]
We find ourselves in a culture which has lost sight (not the least in its
education system) of some fundamental distinctions, like those between being
wise, being clever, having your 'wits' about you, and in being merely well
informed. We have been inadvertently trapped in a single mode of mind that is
characterised by information-gathering, intellect and impatience, one that
requires you to be explicit, articulate, purposeful and to show your reasoning.
We are thus committed (and restricted) to those ways of knowing that can
function in such a high-speed mental climate: predominantly those that use
language (or other symbol systems) as a medium and deliberation as a method. As
a culture we are, in consequence, very good at solving analytic and
technological problems. The trouble is that we tend, increasingly, to treat all
human predicaments as if they were of this type, including those for which such
mental tools are inappropriate. We meet with cleverness, focus and deliberation
those challenges that can only properly be handled with patience, intuition and
relaxation.
To tap into the leisurely ways of knowing, one must dare to wait. Knowing
emerges from, and is a response to, not-knowing. Learning - the process of
coming to know - emerges from uncertainty. Ambivalently, learning seeks to
reduce uncertainty, by transmuting the strange into the familiar, but it also
needs to tolerate uncertainty, as the seedbed in which ideas germinate and responses
form. If either one of these two aspects of learning predominates, then the
balance of the mind is disturbed. If the passive acceptance of not-knowing
overwhelms the active search for meaning and control, then one may fall into
fatalism and dependency. While if the need for certainty becomes intemperate,
undermining the ability to tolerate confusion, then one may develop a
vulnerability to demagoguery and dogma, liable to cling to opinions and beliefs
that may not fit the bill, but which do assuage the anxiety.
Guy Claxton, Hare
Brain, Tortoise Mind - How Intelligence Increases When You Think Less,
pp.6. The Ecco Press, 1999.
Fritjof Capra, Uncommon Wisdom: Conversations with
remarkable people (1988) Bantam, New
York [page 76-77]:
"Logic is a very elegant tool," he
[Gregory Bateson] said, "and
we've got a lot of mileage out of it for two thousand years or so. The trouble
is, you know, when you apply it to crabs and porpoises, and butterflies and
habit formation" -- his voice trailed off, and he added after a pause,
looking out over the ocean -- "you know, to all those pretty things"
-- and now, looking straight at me [Capra] -- "logic won't quite do ... because
that whole fabric of living things is not put together by logic. You see when
you get circular trains of causation, as you always do in the living world, the
use of logic will make you walk into paradoxes." ...
He stopped again, and at that moment I
suddenly had an insight, making a connection to something I had been interested
in for a long time. I got very excited and said with a provocative smile:
"Heraclitus knew that! ... And so did Lao Tzu."
"Yes, indeed; and so do the trees over
there. Logic won't do for them."
"So what do they use instead?"
"Metaphor."
"Metaphor?"
"Yes, metaphor. That's how the whole
fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the
bottom of being alive."
Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (1996) Bloomsbury, London [p. 294]:
"The logic of the emotional mind is associative; it takes elements that symbolize a reality, or
trigger a memory of it, to be the same as that reality. That is why similes,
metaphors and images speak directly to the emotional mind. ... If the emotional
mind follows this logic and it's rules, with one element standing for another,
things need not necessarily be defined by their objective identity: what
matters is how they are perceived; things
are as they seem. ... Indeed, in emotional life, identities can be like a
hologram in the sense that a single part evokes a whole. "
Brian Goodwin, How the Leopard Changed its Spots: The Evolution
of Complexity (1994) Phoenix, London
[page 32]:
"The point ... is not to conclude that
there is something wrong with Darwin's theory because it is clearly linked to
some very powerful cultural myths and metaphors. All theories have
metaphorical dimensions which I regard as not only inevitable but also
extremely important. For it is these dimensions that give depth and
meaning to scientific ideas, that add to their persuasiveness, and colour the
way we see reality."
Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind (1987) University of Chicago Press. pages xiv-xv:
"Metaphor [is] a pervasive mode of
understanding by which we project patterns from one domain of experience in
order to structure another domain of a different kind. So conceived metaphor is
not merely a linguistic mode of expression; rather, it is one of the chief
cognitive structures by which we are able to have coherent, ordered experiences
that we can reason about and make sense of. Through metaphor, we make use of
patterns that obtain in our physical experience to organise our more abstract
understanding. Understanding via metaphorical projection from the concrete to
the abstract makes use of physical experience in two ways. First, our bodily
movements and interactions in various physical domains of experience are
structured, and that structure can be projected by metaphor onto abstract
domains. Second, metaphorical understanding is not merely a matter of arbitrary
fanciful projection from anything to anything with no constraints. Concrete
bodily experience not only constrains the "input" to the metaphorical
projections, but also the nature of the projections themselves, that is the
kinds of mappings that can occur across domains."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Viking Portable Nietzsche, p.46-7, (Walter Kaufmann translation):
" What then is truth? A mobile army of
metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphism -- inshore, a sum of human relations,
which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and
rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to
a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they
are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have
lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.
We still do not know where the urge for
truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by
society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary
metaphors -- in moral terms, the obligation to lie according to fixed
convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all ... "
Stephen Pinker, How The Mind Works (1997) The Softback Preview, London [page 355]:
Space and force pervade language. Many
cognitive scientists (including me) have concluded from their research on
language that a handful of concepts about places, paths, motions, agency, and causation
underlie the literal or figurative meanings of tens of thousands of words and
constructions, not only in English but in every other language that has been
studied. ... These concepts and relations appear to be the vocabulary and
syntax of mentalese, the language of thought. ... And the discovery that the
elements of mentalese are based on places and projectiles has implications for
both where the language of thought came from and how we put it to use in modern
times.
Karl Pribram, 'Metaphors to Models: the use of analogy in
neuropsychology' in Metaphors in the History of Psychology, edited by David E. Leary (1990) Cambridge University
Press [page 79]:
"Brain scientists have, in fact,
repeatedly and fruitfully used metaphors, analogies, and models in their
attempts to understand their data. The theme of this essay is that only by the proper use of analogical reasoning can
current limits of understanding be transcended. Furthermore, the major
metaphors used in the brain sciences during this century have been provided by
inventions that, in turn, were produced by brains. Thus, the proper use of analogical
reasoning sets in motion a self-reflective process by which, metaphorically
speaking, brains come to understand themselves."
[JL- my embolden.
While Pribram recognises "brains come to understand themselves" is
metaphorical, is he aware that, in the same sentence, "sets in
motion" and "reflective" are also metaphors?]
Robert Stetson Shaw, quoted in James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New
Science, Viking, New York, 1987. p.
262:
" 'You don't see something until you
have the right metaphor to let you perceive it' [Robert Stetson] Shaw said,
echoing Thomas S Kuhn."
Composing a Life
What Do You Do For A Living, Dad?
If any of my kids ever asked me that question,
the answer would have to be: "What I do is composition." I just happen to use material other than notes for
the pieces.
Composition is a process of organization,
very much like architecture. As long as you can conceptualize what that
organizational process is, you can be a "composer" - in any medium
you want.
You can be a "video composer," a
"film composer," a "choreography composer," a "social
engineering composer" — whatever. Just give me some stuff, and I'll organize it for you. That's what I do.
Project/Object is a term I have used to describe the overall
concept of my work in various mediums. Each project (in whatever realm), or
interview connected to it, is part of a larger object, for which there is no
"technical name."
Think of connecting material in the
Project/Object this way: A novelist invents a character. If the character is a
good one, he takes on a life of his own. Why should he get to go to only one
party? He could pop up anytime in a future novel.
Or: Rembrandt got his "look" by
mixing just a little brown into every other color - he didn't do
"red" unless it had brown in it. The brown itself wasn't especially
fascinating, but the result of its obsessive inclusion was that
"look."
...A composer is a guy who goes around
forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of
unsuspecting musicians.
Want to be a composer? You don't even have
to be able to write it down. The
stuff that gets written down is only a recipe, remember? ... If you can think
design, you can execute design — it's only a bunch of air molecules,
who's gonna check up on you?
Just Follow These Simple Instructions:
1. Declare your intention to create a "composition."
2. Start a piece at some time.
3. Cause something to happen over a
period of time (it doesn't matter
what happens in your "time hole" — we have critics to tell us
whether it's any good or not, so we won't worry about that part).
4. End the piece at some time (or keep it going, telling the audience it is a "work
in progress").
5. Get a part-time job so you can continue
to do stuff like this.
Frank Zappa, "All About Music," an
essay taken from Creators
on Creating : Awakening and Cultivating the Imaginative Mind, edited by
Frank Barron, Alfonso Montuori, and Anthea Barron, pp.195 - 197. A Jeremy P.
Tarcher / Putnam Book, 1997.
Within the plane of the eternal and the inevitable, there are events that can
happen that are not destined to happen. We can call this the noninevitable. You
can create events that are not inevitable. You can make choices that are true
choices–they are independent of destiny. For me, the true gift and
blessing of life is choice. The inevitable will take care of itself, the eternal
will always be there, but the noninevitable is the real plane of the human
spirit. . . . One way to spend a
lifetime is to give birth to noninevitable occurrences. We can create what
doesn't have to be created. To
create what you must is not a matter of choice, but to create what doesn't have
to be created is truly precious.
Robert Fritz, Creating:
A guide to the creative process, pp. 163, A Fawcett Columbine Book,
1991.
A human being should be able to change a
diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write
a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take
orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new
problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight gallantly.
. . . specialization is for insects."
Robert Heinlein, Time
Enough for Love, Ace Books Reissue, 1994.
"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and
blow, "is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You
may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening
to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the
world about your devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in
the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to
learn. Lean why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which
the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or
distrust, and never dream of regretting. Look at what a lot of things there are
to learn — pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn
astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then,
after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and
theocriticism and geography and history and economics — why, you can start
to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning
to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start
out again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough.
T.H. White, The Once
& Future King, Ace Books Reissue, 1996.
In civilizations with long nows, says Brian Eno, "you feel a very strong
but flexible structure . . . built to absorb shocks and in fact incorporate
them." Once can imagine how such a process evolves: All civilizations
suffer shocks, yet only those that absorb the shocks survive. This still does
not explain the mechanism however. In recent years a few scientists (such as
R.V. O'Neill and C.S. Holling) have been probing a similar issue in ecological
systems: How do they manage change, and how do they absorb and incorporate
shocks? The answer appears to lie in the relationship between components in a
system that have different change rates and different scales of size. Instead
of breaking under stress like something brittle these systems yield as if they
were malleable. Some parts respond quickly to the shock, allowing slower parts
to ignore the shock and maintain their steady duties of system continuity. The
combination of fast and slow components makes the system resilient, along with
the way the differently paced parts affect each other. Fast learns, slow
remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is
continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and
occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and
constancy. Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power. All durable
dynamic systems have this sort of structure; it is what makes them adaptable
and robust.
Stewart Brand, The Clock
of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, pp. :34, Basic Books, 1999.
Few fallacies are more
dangerous or easier to fall into than that by which, having read a given book,
we assume that we will continue to know its contents permanently or, having
mastered a discipline in the past, we assume that we control it in the present.
Philosophically speaking, "to learn" is a verb with no legitimate
past tense.
Robert Grudin , Time and the Art of Living, p.110,
Houghton Mifflin, 1982.
It seems possible that life—which we
might loosely define as an organism that can reproduce, and respond to and
extract sustenance from its environment—may be nothing but molecules and
their relationships. Indeed, this seems extremely likely. It need not be
disappointing; quite the contrary, it would be remarkable. That a conspiracy of
molecules might have created King Lear is a possibility that makes the
world seem an enchanted place.
I do not think it likely, however, that the
human mind (let alone the wonders it concocts) will ever be explained
in molecular terms, any more than Lear is explained by the alphabet.
Most scientists do not believe so either. Phenomena are hierarchical: all
things cannot be understood by considering only what transpires on a single
rung. No matter how well I understand the way a transistor works, I will not be
able to deduce from this knowledge why my computer crashes. If I sow seeds that
fail to grow, I will do better to begin by thinking about the nutrient content,
humidity, and temperature of my soil that by performing a genetic analysis of
the seeds. Much of the skill in doing science resides in knowing where in the
hierarchy you are looking—and, as a consequence, what is relevant and
what is not.
Philip Ball, Stories of
the Invisible; A Guided Tour of Molecules, pp. 41 - 42, Oxford Press,
2001.
...For unfortunately, it is all too common
among intellectuals to want to impress others and, as Schopenhauer put it, not
to teach but to captivate. They appear as leaders or prophets—partly
because it is expected of them to appear as prophets, as proclaimers of the
dark secrets of life and the world, of man, history, and existence....
What externally distinguishes the
Enlightenment approach and the approach of self-declared prophets? It is
language. The Enlightenment thinker speaks as simply as possible. He wants to
be understood. In this respect Bertrand Russell is our unsurpassed master among
philosophers. Even when you cannot agree with him, you have to admire him. He always
speaks so clearly, simply, directly.
Why does simplicity of language matter so
much to Enlightenment thinkers? Because the true Enlightenment thinker, the
true rationalist, never wants to talk anyone into anything. No, he does not
even want to convince: all the time he is aware that he may be wrong. Above
all, he values the intellectual independence of others too highly to want to
convince them of important matters. He would much rather invite contradiction,
preferably in the form of rational disciplined criticism. He seeks not to
convince but to arouse—to challenge others to form free opinions. Free
opinion formation is precious to him: not only because this brings us all
closer to the truth, but also because he respects free opinion formation as
such. He respects it even when he considers the opinion so formed to be
fundamentally wrong.
Karl Popper, All Life is
Problem Solving, pp. 85 - 86, Routledge Books, 1999.
"In a sense, Freud demonstrated
that there is an artist in everyone. A dream is, after all, a little work of
art, and there are new dreams every night. In order to interpret his patients'
dreams, Freud often had to work his way through a dense language of symbols—rather
in the way we interpret a picture or literary text."
"And we dream every single
night?"
"Recent research shows that we
dream for about twenty percent of our sleeping hours, that is, between one and
two hours each night. If we are disturbed during our dream phases we become
nervous and irritable. This means nothing less than that everybody has an
innate need to give artistic expression to his or her existential situation.
After all, it is ourselves that our dreams are about. We are the directors, we set
up the scenario and play all the roles. A person who says he doesn't understand
art doesn't know himself very well."
Jostein Gaardner , Sophie's
World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy, p. 442, Berkeley Books, 1994.
Every teacher, whether he knows it or not,
teaches three things at once: the subject under investigation, the art of
investigation and the art of teaching. The two latter teachings, which concern
method rather than matter, are more subtle, more lasting, and more important.
We teach them by patient and unadvertised repetition, showing through time how
the same method works in a variety of cases. Only through this combination of
coherence and variety can the student grasp the nature of method —
abstract it and see it as something distinct from the specific subject matter
and the specific character of the teacher. More advanced students should be
shown how a variety of methods can be applied to the same subject. Both these
levels of teaching are like perambulations, walking around an object in an
effort to comprehend its dimensions and form. In the first case, we walk around
method itself; in the second, we walk around a subject. In a third and still
higher form of learning, we seek a master method, discovering through
repetition and abstraction what all valid methods have in common.
Robert Grudin , Time and the
Art of Living, p.
110, Houghton Mifflin, 1982.
One cannot deny that our
management still focuses too much on the external factors of work, like the
worker's time and place, instead of inciting the creativity on which the
company's success depends in the information economy. Most managers have not
understood the deep consequences of the question, Is our purpose at work to
"do time" or to do something? In the early seventies, Les Earnest of
the artificial-intelligence laboratory at Stanford University gave a good
prècis of the hackers' answer to this question: "We try to judge people
not on how much time they waste but on what they accomplish over fairly long
periods of time, like half a year to a year."
This answer can be understood both purely pragmatically or ethically. The
pragmatic message is that the information economy's most important source of
productivity is creativity, and it is not possible to create interesting things
in a constant hurry or in a regulated manner from nine to five. So even for
purely economic reasons, it is important to allow for playfulness and
individual styles of creativity since, in the information economy, the culture
of supervision turns easily against its desired objectives. Of course, an
important added condition is that in the realization of the task-oriented
project culture—that they are not the deadlines of the survival
life—so that there is a genuine opportunity for creative rhythm.
But, of course, the ethical dimension involved here is even more
important than these pragmatic considerations: we are talking about a worthy
life. The culture of worktime supervision is a culture that regards grown-up
persons as too immature to be in charge of their lives. It assumes that there
are only a few people in any given enterprise or government agency who are
sufficiently mature to take responsibility for themselves and that the majority
of adults are unable to do so without continuous guidance provided by the small
authority group. In such a culture, most human beings find themselves condemned
to obedience.
Pekka Himanen,
The
Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age,
pp. 38 - 39, Random House, 2001
No tears in the writer, no
tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.
For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't
know I knew. I am in a place, in a situation, as if I had materialized from
cloud or risen out of the ground. There is a glad recognition of the long lost
and the rest follows. Step by step the wonder of unexpected supply keeps
growing. The impressions most useful to my purpose seem always those I was
unaware of and so made no note of at the time when taken, and the conclusion is
come to that like giants we are always hurling experience ahead of us to pave
the future with against the day when we may want to strike a line of purpose
across it for somewhere...
Robert Frost,
from The Figure a Poem Makes (1939),
Selected
Poems of Robert Frost. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1963.
The word improvisation derives from the Latin im + provisus, meaning 'not provided' or 'not foreseen.' In some sense, all artistic
creation depends on the ability to improvise, to extemporize an unscripted
drama, to blow a note not heard before, to fill the blank canvas of the moment.
But in the making of jazz music, improvisation is a definitive hallmark, a sine
qua non: a something without which, not. Jazz is substantially a performer's art where any
charts or notations are provisional guideposts, notes indicating a work's
general direction but never its final lines or last word. It is a music in the
oral tradition, one in which a composer/arranger's latest changes may be
shouted out during on-stage performance and where the performer may introduce a
shift in direction while playing, in the unforeseen moment of jazz creation.
Jazz's improvised character is balanced with the fact that it is never a
free-for-all; it has both an improvised freshness as well as a
composer/arranger's sense of completeness and finish. Duke Ellington told his
band to play the notes as written but also 'to keep some dirt in there,
somewhere.' In other words, even when Ellington's band played pieces with no
solo spaces indicated, he wanted his players to keep the made-up-on-the-spot
dimension, something the score expected but did not ask for explicitly,
something of the performers' improvised own, some 'dirt.'
taken from Improvisation by Robert O'Meally, from Seeing
Jazz: Artists and Writers on Jazz,
copyright 1997, Smithsonian
Institution.
My point is simple: we are prepared to see,
and we see easily, things for which our language and culture hand us ready-made
labels. When those labels are lacking, even though the phenomena may be all
around us, we may quite easily fail to see them at all. The perceptual attractors
[metaphors] that we each possess (some coming from without, some coming from
within, some on the scale of mere words, some on a much grander scale) are the
filters through which we scan and sort reality, and thereby they determine what
we perceive on high and low levels.
Douglas Hofstadter,
"Analogy as the Core of Cognition,"
The
Best American Science Writing 2000, James Gleick, editor. pp. 139,
The Ecco Press, 2000.
There are two ways to make systems
fault-tolerant: One is to make them small, so that correction is local and
quick; the other is to make them slow, so that correction has time to permeate
the system. When you proceed too rapidly with something mistakes cascade,
whereas when you proceed slowly mistakes instruct. Gradual, incremental
projects engage the full power of learning and discovery, and they are able to
back out of problems. Gradually emergent processes get steadily better of over
time, while quickly imposed processes often get worse over time.
The astonishing sophistication of ancient poems such as The Iliad, The Odyssey, and Beowulf long has
baffled scholars. How could Homer be such a genius? Recent study of illiterate
bards in our own day shows that they are always partially improvising for every
performance, which solves the problem. The genius of "Homer" was the
accumulated ideas of generations of bardic improvisation. The Iliad is so effective because it is so highly evolved.
Likewise, science truly took off in the seventeenth century when the Royal
Society introduced the idea of scientific "letter" (now
"paper"), which encouraged a torrent of small, incremental additions
to scientific knowledge.
Except for open-ended endeavors like science, the tremendously powerful
lever of time has seldom been employed. The
pyramids of Egypt and Central America took only fifty years to build. Some of
the great cathedrals of Europe indeed were built over centuries, but that was
due to funding problems rather than patience. Humanity's heroic goals generally
have been sought through quick, spectacular action ("We will land a man on
the moon in this decade") instead of a sustained accumulation of smaller,
distributed efforts that might have an overwhelming effect over time....
Stewart Brand, The Clock of
the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, pp. 1:56 - 1:57, Basic Books,
1999.
The ability to support
unresolved paradoxes and to allow many different styles and interior dialogues
to flourish is the mark of a truly creative scientist, artist, writer, or
musician. While he may have been politically conservative, Shakespeare
presented in his plays an entire universe of widely differing personae, each
with his or her unique voice. For Bohm the individual is enfolded within the
social and the social within the individual. People with sufficient creative
energy can, by working on their own, dissolve
fixed thought and provide the fertile ground to sustain a multiplicity of
voices. Yet most of us normally use our energy to sustain a false sense of ourselves,
which means we tend to operate from fixed and nonnegotiable but unexamined
positions. Here lies the power of dialogue: to make manifest such assumptions
and positions, bringing them out into the open.
F. David Peat, Infinite
Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm, A Perseus Book, 1997.
Continents drifting across the oceans have
trends. Bullets have directions. Cannonballs have trajectories. The future
doesn't. The future is the intersection of choice and interruptions. The
Web—what a surprise!—is more like the future than a cannonball. It
will be what we make of it.
This leads to a funny conclusion. Ironic,
actually. We ask questions about the future of the Web because we think there's
a present direction that can be traced into the future. But in fact, the
questions we ask aren't going to predict the future. They will create the
future.
Not
to get all heavy and ontological, but since questions are a type of
conversation, it looks a bit like conversations give the world its shape,
doesn't it? Questions do the spade work. They prepare the ground for answers.
Be careful what you ask or you just might become it.
Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls,
and David Weinberger, The Cluetrain Manifesto : The End of Business as Usual, pp. 166, Perseus Books, 2000.
Though it flourishes there, playful work was
not born in modern California. It does not depend on electronics, or sunshine,
or even prosperity. It is as old as civilization. Five thousand years ago,
unimaginably poor Stone Age women living in Swiss swamps were weaving
intricate, multicolored patterns into their textiles and using fruit pits to
create beaded cloth; archaeologists have found remnants of this ingenious,
impractical production preserved in the alkaline mud. Even in the most
difficult of subsistence economies, mere utility—in this case, plain, undecorated
cloth—does not satisfy human imaginations. We need to learn, to challenge
ourselves, to invent new patterns. The fun of creating and using beautiful
textiles goes back to some of humanity's oldest (and most taken-for-granted)
technologies: the needle, the spindle, and the loom.
. . . The late metallurgist and historian of
science Cyril Stanley Smith argued that
historically the first discovery of
useful materials, machines, or processes has almost always been in the
decorative arts, and was not done for a perceived practical purpose. Necessity
is not the mother of invention—only of improvement. A man desperately in
search of a weapon or food is in no mood for discovery; he can only exploit
what is already known to exist. Discovery requires aesthetically-motivated
curiosity, not logic, for new things can acquire validity only by interaction
in an environment that has yet to be. Their origin is unpredictable.
By examining art objects, Smith found the
origins of metallurgy: casting molds to make statuettes, welding to join parts
of sculptures, alloys to create interesting color patterns. Play is the
impractical drive from which such practical discoveries are born.
"Paradoxically man's capacity for aesthetic enjoyment may have been his
most practical characteristic," writes Smith, "for it is at the root
of his discovery of the world about him, and makes him want to live."
It is a delightful paradox: Play is what we
do for its own sake, yet it is a spur to our most creative, most significant
work.
Virginia Postrel , The
Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and
Progress, pp. 182 - 183, The Free Press, 1998.
The one universal law upon which Froebel based
all of his educational principles was unity or inner connection. The interconnectedness of all things was the
governing force in Froebel's philosophy and pedagogy and the broad foundation
for all of his developmental concepts. Perfecting a feeling between the child
and God (not the God of organized Christianity but the pantheistic font of life
and growth of Romantic philosophy) so that humanity might gain consciousness of
its own sublime power and fully realize its own spiritual potential was the key
goal of education. . . . More than any teacher before him, he recognized the
unity of an individual’s physical, intellectual, and spiritual powers . . .
If unity was Rebel’s fundamental law, self-activity, the essential principle of Emil, was his basic educational process. Self-activity
(or free activity, self-occupation, or self-employment), the spontaneous
impulse of the child to explore and act motivated simply by intellectual
curiosity, was actively discouraged in the early-nineteenth-century schoolroom.
Where traditional teaching demanded only response, Friable sought individual
action. Where tradition erected a barrier between the teacher and the taught,
self-activity made them co-workers. In the kindergarten, the impulse to action,
and therefore to learning, originated with the child itself, and expression
became self-expression instead of recitation. The role of the teacher was thus
transformed from lecturer to guide, as she now directed the child's natural
movement toward play with one another and with the freely expansive, but
carefully defined, gifts.
Play was fundamental to the
success of kindergarten. Friable discerned that harnessing the natural activity
of children, often referred to in kindergarten as children's "work,"
was the key to educating the young . . .. Friable recognized the significance
of play in childhood years before his involvement with kindergarten, and he
devoted one of the introductory essays in The Education of Man to its importance: "Play is the purest, the
most spiritual, product of man at this stage, and is at once the refrigeration
and imitation of the total human life, —of the inner, secret, natural
life in man and in all things. It produces, therefore, joy, freedom,
satisfaction; repose within and without, peace with the world. The springs of
all good rest within it and go out from it."
All of the kindergarten activities, the singing, dancing, gardening,
storytelling, gifts, and occupations were play; it was the engine that
propelled the system. . . .
Norman Bozeman, Inventing
Kindergarten, pp. 32 - 33, Harry N. ARAMs, Inc, 1997.
"Complex systems--such as a wildfire, a
storm pattern, or a waterfall--are not 'run' by anyone in particular, but are
instead controlled by countless individual interactions that occur inside the
system. Every day, for instance, customers in hundreds of countries make
decisions to buy or not to buy, and those decisions in turn affect the price of
beans and stocks. In the same way, countless interactions in a natural
system--eating or being eaten, for instance--weave together to define the
community. Just as the invisible hand of the marketplace determines whether a
company lives or dies, so natural selection works from within to shape the
nature of life.
"Over billions of years, natural
selection has come up with winning strategies adopted by all complex, mature
ecosystems. The strategies in the following list are tried-and-true approaches
to the mystery of surviving in place. Think of them as the ten commandments of
the redwood clan. Organisms in a mature ecosystem:
Janine M. Banyu’s
Bio mimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature
p. 253, William Morrow and Company, Inc.
"When someone tells you where he
'lives,' he is always talking about his house or the neighbourhood his house is
in. It sounds harmless enough. But think what it really means. Why should the
people of our culture choose to use the word 'live,' which, on the face of it
applies to every moment of our waking lives, and apply it only to a special
portion of our lives--the part associated with our families and houses. The
implication is straightforward. The people of our culture believe that they are
less alive when they are working than when they are at home; and we make this
distinction subtly clear, by choosing to keep the word 'live' only for those
places in our lives where we are not working. Anyone who uses the phrase 'where
do you live' in its everyday sense, accepts as his own the widespread cultural
awareness of the fact that no one really 'lives' at his place of work--there is
no song or music there, no love, no food--that he is not alive while working,
not living, only toiling away, and being dead.
"As soon as we understand this situation
it leads at once to outrage. Why should we accept a world in which eight hours
of the day are 'dead'; why shall we not create a world in which our work is as
much part of life, as much alive, as anything we do at home with our family and
with our friends?"
Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and
Murray Silverstein
A Pattern language: Towns, Buildings, Construction
p. 223, Touchstone, 1997
"When you're betting for tiles in an
archery contest, you shoot with skill. When you're betting for fancy belt buckles,
you worry about your aim. And when you're betting for real gold, you're a
nervous wreck. Your skill is the same in all three cases--but because one prize
means more to you than another, you let outside considerations weigh on your
mind. He who looks too hard at the outside gets clumsy on the inside.
". . .Woodworker Ch'ing carved a piece
of wood and made a bell stand, and when it was finished, everyone who saw it
marveled, for it seemed to be the work of gods or spirits. When the marquis of
Lu saw it, he asked, 'What art is it you have?'
"Chi'ing replied, 'I am only a
craftsman--how could I have any art? There is one thing, however. When I am
going to make a bell stand, I never let it wear out my energy. I always fast in
order to still my mind. When I have fasted for three days, I no longer have any
thought of congratulations or rewards, of titles or stipends. When I have
fasted for five days, I no longer have any thought of praise or blame, of skill
or clumsiness. And when I have fasted for seven days, I am so still that I
forget I have four limbs and a form and body. By that time, the ruler and his
court no longer exist for me. My skill is concentrated and all outside
distractions fade away. After that, I go into the mountain forest and examine
the Heavenly nature of the trees. If I find one of superlative form, and I can
see a bell stand there, I put my hand to the job of carving; if not, I let it
go. This way I am simply matching up "Heaven" with
"Heaven." That's probably the reason that people wonder if the
results were not made by spirits.'"
Chuang Tzu (Burton Watson, translator)
Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings
pp. 122, 127, Columbia University Press, 1996
"When we look at the most beautiful
towns and cities of the past, we are always impressed by a feeling that they
are somehow organic.
"This feeling of 'organicness,' is not
a vague feeling of relationship with biological forms. It is not an analogy. It
is instead, an accurate vision of a specific structural quality which these old
towns had . . . and have. Namely: Each of these towns grew as a whole, under
its own laws of wholeness . . . and we can feel this wholeness, not only at the
largest scale, but in every detail: in the restaurants, in the sidewalks, in
the houses, shops, markets, roads, parks, gardens and walls. Even in the
balconies and ornaments.
"This quality does not exist in towns
being built today. And indeed, this quality could not exist, at
present, because there isn't any discipline which actively sets out to create
it. Neither architecture, nor urban design, nor city planning take the creation
of this kind of wholeness as their task. So of course it doesn't exist. It does
not exist, because it is not being attempted.
"There is no discipline which could
create it, because there isn't, really, any discipline which has yet tried to
do it."
Christopher Alexander, Hajo Neis, Artemis
Anninou, Ingrid King
A New Theory of Urban Design
pp. 2-3, Oxford University Press, 1987