At the risk of getting our
business thread banned from the main board... (maybe just the digressed part)
IMHO, these perceptual abilities
are critically important for wisdom, which historically is a word and concept originally applied to a "grasp of
wholes" in Greek philosophy (where the term arose as we know it). You also had to lead a certain kind of whole life
(integrity, etc) to attain wisdom. For Plato (Republic) you had to a certain extent be born with the capability for
it.
Synaesthesia is a kind of holism, where sensory input is perceived not as discrete kinds of information, but
is always and from the beginning integrated and united as a whole. I think this "talent" also manifests itself in
terms of integrated modes of thought and perception (e.g., thought + intuition + emotion), and even right-left brain
integration. Some people just find it easy to think holistically, in my opinion, whereas others find it as foreign
as ancient Greek (black and white thinking is a common thought malady to observe in this case); in part, due to
cultural conditioning stunting their growth in that way.
I think all these abilities tend to go together for some
people (artists tend to have a knack for all of it, IMO).
Our cultural history devalued holism, to a large
extent because religion and its authority placed itself in charge of that department (yes, this is true, from the
Middle Ages onward. If you think too holistically, you start to tread on territory religion "has all the answers
already for"; like how to live a certain kind of whole life; so wisdom in common society was threatening to the
power structures. Nowadays politics also tries to take control of all the "big thoughts", or corporate bosses
valuing mindless employees, , etc) , and culture thoroughly eliminated holism from philosophy (now about disjointed
logic problems rather than big questions, etc) and the schools.
The industrial revolution introduced
specialization, science taught us to think of independent and disjointed facts, ecomomics teaches us to think of
short term wealth and ignore the big picture, etc., etc., etc. It's almost a kind of "fall of man" to me, on the
level of thought and perception. Wisdom has been incredibly devalued (e.g., how we treat our elderly; the role of
fathers as teachers in the family has disappeared, the devaluation of "feminine" modes of thinking, forgetting that
we're citizens of a whole planet, rich "vs". poor, man "vs" nature; seeing ourselves as individuals and missing our
connectedness and interdependency, reliance on sound bytes, disjointed shreds of info, etc, etc.).
It is
unbelievable the portion of the world's problems that can be explained pretty comprehensively according to this
"father of concepts", regarding the lack of wisdom and holism. It's hard to even hint at the breadth and depth of
examples from every mode of living, because the lack of wisdom/holism is everywhere, so institutionalized, and so
"normal". That is why I feel comfortable with a grandiose term like a "fall of man".
I could go on
forever, as I've contemplated writing a book on this topic for years, and even filled a few notebooks up
with preliminary work. Maybe this gives you a taste of it. Probably the better the book would be, the more it would
be dissed and ignored, precisely because our culture has detested wisdom; but you never know. It represents in some
sense the culmination of my studies of philosophy and related fields over the years.
But most people are so
deprived of wisdom, culturally, they can't even begin to grasp the concept, even though it's quite natural to
humans. Something needs to wake us up, and that doesn't seem to be happening too soon. Mother nature ("who" might
"wish" we didn't see ourselves so unholistically as separate from her and at war with her) will take care of
that for us eventually, but it might be too late.
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