Replying to LO28825 --
Dear Organlearners,
Andrew Campbell < ACampnona@aol.com > writes.
>I have no idea where I could find it again, but somewhere
>I read an essay by Maturana that spoke of the possibility
>of whole lineages of homo-sapiens that had died out, lines
>of development among hominids, cultures if you will, many
>sophisticated, peaceful, maybe agrarian that flourished in
>some arcadian state wherein women led societies and the
>children were truly kept alive forever.
Greetings dear Andrew,
Archeology (study of prehistoric humanoids) and Paleontology (study of
archaic fossils of all life forms) is most interesting to me. The taxonomy
of humanoids is roughly as follows, going down in the list mean going back
in time
LIVING
Genus Species Subspecies
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Homo sapiens (five "races")
EXTINCT
Homo sapiens rhodesiensis, soloensis, wadjakensis
Homo erectus capensis, heidelbergensis,
modjokertensis, pekinensis
Australopithecus afarensis
africanus
bosei
paleojavanicus
prometheus
robustus
In other words, all the species, except one, of the family Hominoidae
(having two genera) belonging to the order Primata, are now extinct. This
is most unusual among all the orders of the class Mammalia. It is
responsible for he (in)famous cry: "Show me the missing link!".
I think we ought to look beyond the cry for a missing link. It tells us
that compared with other mammals, the extinction of all species but Homo
sapiens makes its existence most precarious. It may have 8 billion
specimens, thus outnumbering many other mammal species, but its continued
existence under a global catastrophe is highly improbable, despite all its
technology it boasts about.
I personally think that the only reason why Homo sapiense survived and not
any of the other species, is its profound ability to learn, alone and
together. It was definitely not its ability to make tools since all the
other species of the genus Homo also had the ability to make tools. Thus
the myth that humankind will save itself with its technology is sheer
insanity to me. I think that it will save itself from extinction only by
authentic learning. And you are right -- the authentic learning of its
young and not its adults is the key to it all.
>I imagine that if At ran an art department he would
>design it pretty much thusly...but that is for At to say;-)
Eventhough wishful thinking, i wish i could have had Da Vinci and Goethe
with me. They abhorred the severance between art and science and so do i.
Today i know why. Both art and science, although seeming to be dialectical
opposites, need human creativity to excell. Furthermore, i would encourage
everyone to explore all the subjects of art as well as all the subjects of
science and to refrain from specialisation as far as possible. I will also
teach them how to make use of existing sources of information in many
different scenarios rather than becoming another junky information
producer. Humankind has produced enough information to serve it the next
thousand years. Within a hundred years the survival of die-off will
require making use of it rather than producing more of it.
>Thus, he [Klee] thinks, must the world appear to those
>who do not stand apart from it and contemplate it from
>outside; to those who see it from the inside, with its infinite
>prospects, its diverging paths which cross, wheel round,
>then open slowly along the apparently capricious curves
>of life's parabola; a world ever eccentric and peripheral,
>'irregular', yet nevertheless secretly obedient to certain
>laws, and ever striving to develop in order to find its path
>and break through to reality.
I think similarly.
>Reality is a never-ending metamorphosis; this is a
>thought that Paul Klee had inherited from
>Hieronymus Bosch, and shared with Kafka.
Perhaps the lineage go much further back. Goethe had the same thought.
That is why he explored this very metamorphosis in the objects of the many
sciences he worked in. Goethe got that thought as a revelation when he
visited Italy as a young man and came into contact with the works of Da
Vinci. Da Vinci had the same thought too!
>The main thread which unravels itself throughout the
>whole of Klees theory is the search for quality; it is in
>this search for quality, namely the search for ones own
>absolute authenticity, that mankind as Kierkegaard
>would say desires desperately to find in order to justify
>itself, and perhaps, to save itself.
I think that this autenticity will develop once the harmony between IL
(Individual Learning) and OL (Organisational Learning) has been
established. I have tried to depict this harmony with figure 4 -- see <
http://www.learning-org.com/graphics/LO28819_learnman.gif > The clue is to
see that "information and its management" of OL stand upon "events" to be
sensed, experienced, etc. of IL. In other words, the "events" of IL
*understand* the information of OL. That is why, after all we use the
sentence "I understand you".
>It may be said that Klee's art and theory represent an
>attempt to reconstruct the world according to values of
>quality; and since these values are not given and are
>embedded in layers of false experience, it becomes
>necessary to distil these values by a transformation, a
>reduction to quality of the quantities. In other words, it
>becomes necessary to reduce progressively the
>conglomeration of quantitative phenomena which fill the
>universe and human existence, to the point of that irreducible
>and immutable minimum, which in fact represents quality,
>and to which is to be found in all things that are real,
>although revealed only in meditation and in the production
>of works of art.
Klee was deeply sensitive to the interplay between spareness
("quantity-limit") and otherness ("quality-variety"), two of the 7Es
(seven essentialities of creativity). I think we ought to bear in mind
also the other five 7Es. Furthermore, they do not only apply to art. They
also apply to science since both art and science depend on creativity.
>Klee expressed himself as desiring in his work to
>'promote' an inner movement, to encourage the
>creative disposition (in others). "We should simply
>follow our bent."
It was similar with Goethe -- to exemplify in his literary work the
dynamical interaction between the "world-inside-me" and the
"world-outside-me", thus revealing the two worlds to each other.
>For Klee it was singularly important not to begin with
>clever quasi-scientific hypotheses, examples, no matter
>how small were superior for the creative man. "If I can
>recognise a clear structure (pattern) it gives me more
>than any high flown theoretical graphs; the typical will
>come automatically from series of (experiences) examples."
So did Einstein too!
And more than two millenia before him Socrates knew that his midwivery --
assisting the noble thought to get born -- was the pillar upon which OL
rests.
I wonder whether there would ever had been an Einstein would there not had
been a Socrates.
Dear Andrew, thank you for these inspirational comments on Klee.
With care and best wishes
--At de Lange <amdelange@postino.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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