Dear Organlearners,
Andrew Campona < ACampnona@aol.com > writes:
>"The highest pitch of every passion is always to will its
>own downfall; and so it is also the supreme passion of the
>Reason to seek a collision, though this collision must in
>one way or another prove its undoing. The supreme paradox
>of all thought is the attempt to discover something that
>thought cannot think." Søren Kierkegaard
Greetings Andrew,
Thank you very much for citing Kierkegaard. His thoughts are valuable in
helping us to think in ways that we have not thought before.
I think that he is speaking here of what I call in my theory of "deep
creativity" as the "creative collapse". We had one remarkable
manifestation of it on this list during the dialogue on the Digestor. I
have coached Winfried Dressler how vital it is to let go of "your crystal"
and through all the misunder= standings he did just that. I would love to
hear what he now has to say on this little gem of Kierkegaard.
St Paul of the NT thought a lot about this "creative collapse" too. He is
the most studied in theology of all NT writers. Yet remarkably few
commentators have treid to break their heads on this topic.
>John has asked At, among other things to,
(snip)
>I will risk appearing the fool because the rewards will be great
>for me if I too can understand what John means to understand,
>but first I have to ask something, so John, Please explain to me
>'without any messing about with meanings' demonstrate your
>metaphysic of the terms 'spiritual,' 'beliefs' and 'faiths'.
>
>My foolish mind has always found them the same -apart that is,
>from the spelling ;-)
Andrew, I have tried to answer John in such a manner that I also
indirectly have answered your questions.
Let me summarise my "torrent of words" to John as follows. A paradigm
shift is a kind of creative collapse. The complex structure of the old
paradigm cannot be sustained by its processes anymore. Hence that
structure becomes plasmodial. As such it means that all concepts familiar
to the old paradigm have to be reformed for the new paradigm. They cannot
simply be carried over by assuming that they need no modification.
The concept particularly important to the paradigm shift of simplicity to
complexity, is the evolution of knowledge of the individual. In the
paradigm simplicity there will always be an individual capable of knowing
anything specific -- there is no limit to what an individual can know. In
the paradigm complexity there are many things which no individual can
learn. -- there is a limit (spareness) to individual learning. Many
things can be known only by learning organisations. One such a thing is a
natural language.
I have stressed to John that some empirical demonstrations will make sense
to learning individuals, but not all such demonstrations at a given point
in time. The rest will make sense only to learning organisations. Giving
enough change in time along its arrow (centuries and even millenia) the
learning individual may catch up with the learning organisation in making
sense of something. But by that time the learning organisation is already
making sense of new things which the learning individuals still have to
catch up many centuries afterwards.
I think that somewhere in the future our dialogue on this list have to
focus on Hegel's "dassein" and "mitsein", but in the sense of
"dassein+daswerden" and "mitsein+mitwerden". This will be very important
to managers who have to deal with multicultural organisations.
Best wishes
--At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>