Sunday, May 30, 2010

Still True

Whoever wishes to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details. Knowledge is not intelligence. In searching for the truth be ready for the unexpected. Change alone is unchanging. The same road goes both up and down. The beginning of a circle is also its end. 
Heraklietos Of Ephesos

3 comments:

  1. “ …..to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details.”

    After many thousands of years as human thinkers and explorers it seems that we are only a handful of years far from the knowledge of the world´s most precious detail and secret: how life becomes into existence.

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  2. Knowledge is not intelligence and intelligence is not knowledge. May be we have to break the eternal cycle to understand...

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  3. "The same road goes both up and down. The beginning of a circle is also its end."

    This can be an oblique circle or what Hofstadter calls a "strange circle" as in Escher's famous designs.

    Unintelligent knowledge is useless. You can't imagine 1. how much knowledge of wrong, outdated knowledge in certain cultures is possible if you haven't had confidential dialogue with people from many different cultures. And 2. you can't imagine how much true, functional knowledge can be pointless and irrelevant, being too topical, tecnique oriented and far from anthropological experience or once achieved wisdom.

    One of the greatest resources of Italy as location is the fact, that Italy is in the same moment part of the first world and of the third world, outside of Angle-Germanic views and mentalities and with the mediterranean sea as an area of contacts and common interests with Africa and Asia. Methane for Italy's heatings and ovens is getting imported for decades (already before Berlusconi's agreements with Gheddafi, who at the summit in L'Aquila sat on B's left, while Obama sat on his right), and maybe in future Italy will import water from Albania.

    Heraklietos's words again are about the rareness of awareness. And about perception, Wahr-Nehmung, Erlebnis. He is trying to push us beyond the imprisoning limits of even the best rationality, which alone is less than unsufficient.

    Good idea to quote Heraklietos one day after Ward!!

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