Thank you, Ian, for the Arab proverb, of which I cite the two parts
concerning consciousness to remind of a third way to look at them, the
Sokrates way.
>Con Incom "He who knows not and knows that he knows not is
>ignorant... teach him"
..snip..
>Con Com "He who knows and knows that he knows is a wise man ...
>follow him"
The oracle of Delphi told Sokrates, that he is the wisest man on earth.
Sokrates didn't believe that. He thought of himself as a "Con Incom" - the
most popular saying of Sokrates is "I know, that I know nothing". He
thought, it would be easy to prove that the oracle was wrong: just find a
"Con Com", and this person is wiser than him.
So Sokrates started his way as a philosopher by questioning the Con Com of
various people in town. But in each case, it turned out, that the Con Com
was only pretended, even worse, this pretention was Incon, i.e. people
truly believed in their competence. In fact, they were Incon Incom.
The conclusion of Sokrates was the following: People who are Con Com would
be wiser than him. But by questioning the competence, they turned out to
be Incon Incom in fact. Thus Sokrates concluded, that he was wiser than
them for being at least Con Incom - the oracle was right.
Unfortunately, people didn't like Sokrates conclusion. They accused him to
disturb the public order and to have bad influence on the youth.
This case study on Sokrates connects quite good with other threads here:
It is a case study on faith and trust, to trust only in god and to
question everything based on this trust. But also a case study in the
necessity to protect oneself against destructive side effects of this
questioning. In case of Sokrates it was a protective reaction of the
people, that distroyed an unprotected Sokrates. It was the same with Jesus
and most other great leaders. I am wondering what the difference to Buddha
was, who was not killed by the people he taught.
Liebe Gruesse
Winfried Dressler
--"Winfried Dressler" <winfried.dressler@voith.de>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>