On the activity of understanding

What is important to me is to understand. For me, writing is a matter of seeking this understanding, part of the process of understanding… Certain things get formulated. If I had a good enough memory to really retain everything that I think, I doubt very much that I would have written anything – I know my own laziness. What is important to me is the thought process itself. As long  as I have succeeded in thinking something through, I am personally quite satisfied. If I then succeed in expressing my thought process adequately in writing, that satisfies me also…

You ask about the effects of my work on others. If I may wax ironical, that is a masculine question. Men always want to be terribly influential, but I see that as somewhat external. Do I imagine myself being influential? No. I want to understand. And if others understand – in the same sense that I have understood – that gives me a sense of satisfaction, like feeling at home.

Hannah Arendt, “What Remains? Language remains”, in Essays in Understanding, Harcourt Brace & Company, New York, 1993, p.3

This is an archetypal enneagram Five statement! They do not write, paint or found a new branch in psychology (like C.G. Jung, a notoriously Five personality too) to share knowledge  or vision out of philanthropy (in the literal sense, that of “love of humanity”) , like Twos do; nor do they express their thoughts and visions  to be original, special and appreciated, like Fours. Fives are interested in processes, articulations, relationships between things as such, they like connecting facts and weaving them into dynamic systems; they only use different means of expression insofar as they are of an added value to this process.

This explains why Fives do not aim to convince and do not mind disagreement – as long as they are satisfied with their thought process, fuelled by insatiable curiosity and often impressive erudition, as long as the picture they are busy at completing is complete in their mind, opinions of other people matter very little. This is not because Fives are such snobs (which occasionally they are, to be sure), nor because they find other peoples’ opinions insignificant – they are just too absorbed and exhausted by their thinking to worry about those opinions.

 



Thinking vs Rationality

"Oh nooooo! That's too intellectual!"

(from an offline discussion) 

Just a moment! People very often mix up thinking and rationality, reason and logic. That's why intellectuals are seen nowadays as cold-blooded creepy creatures playing with ideas in a rational and/or abstract way. The very word "intellectual" has become a kind of insult, and poor kids who happen to like thinking more than say, basket, are clearly heading for trouble... But thinking is much more than mere rationality, and is not at all necessarily abstract. 

The idea that reason equals rationality is a very Enlightenment one, and I think it is a tremendous impoverishment, a haemorrhage of meaning out of the word. Thinking is an attempt to engage with reality in a meaningful way. It is a method we (especially those for whom thinking is their main function - sorry I am into Jung again these days :) use to approach life. Thinking does "happen" in our brains, and it does use rationality, logic and abstraction as its instruments -- not always, nor universally: despite our Western education based mainly on rational reasoning, much of our thinking is  still intuitive, imaginative, even sensory, and Eastern cultures developed thinking based on entirely different assumptions than ours... But wherever efficient and authentic thinking takes place, it involves the entire person, body and soul, mind and heart, the whole human being standing in the midst of his or her experience to find out its meaning. 

On the function of weakness

I do not believe that It is humanly possible to differentiate all four functions (thinking, feeling, sensation, intuition - M.) alike, otherwise we would be perfect like God, and that surely will not happen. There will always be a flaw in the crystal. We can never reach the perfection. Moreover, if we could differentiate the four functions equally we should only make them into consciously disposable functions. Then we would lose the most precious connection with the unconscious through the inferior function, which is invariably the weakest; only through our feebleness and incapacity are we linked up with the unconscious, with the lower world of the instincts, and with our fellow beings. Our virtues only enable us to be independent. There we do not need anybody, there we are kings; but in our inferiority we are linked up with mankind as well as with the world of our instincts. It would not even be an advantage, to have all the functions perfect, because such a condition would amount to complete aloofness. I have no perfection craze. My principle is: for heaven's sake do not be perfect, but by all means try to be complete.

C.G. Jung, Analytical psychology, its theory and practice. Routlege and Keagan, London, 1989, pp. 109-110.

This is the idea we find in many spiritual writers, from St Paul to Calvin and Paul Tillich… I think Jung’s “complete aloofness” is  what Christian tradition calls Pride: a state of total self-sufficiency; and it also could be called “Hell”, because such total autonomy cuts the individual from the community (commun des mortels) and alters and distorts  his or her perception of reality. To be fully human,  we need our weaknesses just as we need our strengths; we ought to value them and be grateful for them too.

Cutting through... perplexity...

Mum's comment (perplexed) : Oh look! Does it mean, a male dog cannot be walked here, but a female one is welcome? 

(That was a sign just in front of our hotel in Vienna. More perplexing signs will follow... :) 

Lady with the iPad

Incredible - the Austrians knew it all before Steve Jobs!

On humility

The word "humility" comes from the Latin word "humus",  which means fertile ground. To me, humility is not what we often make of it: the sheepish way of trying to imagine that we are the worst of all and trying to convince others that our artificial ways of behaving show that we are aware of that. Humility is the situation of the earth. 

The earth is always there, always taken for granted, never remembered, always trodden on by everyone, somewhere we cast and pour all our refuse, all we don't need. It's there, silent and accepting everything and in a miraculous way making out of all the refuse new richness in spite of corruption, transforming corruption itself into a power of life and a new possibility of creativeness, open to the sunshine, open to the rain, ready to receive any seed we sow and capable of bringing thirtyfold, sixtyfold, a hundredfold out of every seed.  

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, School for Prayer. Daybreak, London, 1989, p 11.

Leaving the results to God

What I aim at is to live within a situation and to be totally engrossed in it, and yet free from involvement. The basic thing is that I never ask myself what the result of any action will be -- that is God's concern. The only question I keep asking myself in life is: what should I do at this particular moment? What should I say? All you can do is to be at every single moment as true as you can with all the power of your being -- and then leave God to use you, even despite yourself.

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, School for Prayer. Daybreak, London, 1989, p xvi.