Firing On All Cylinders?

For more than three hundred years Western thought has been dominated by the images of industrialism and scientific method.  It’s time to change metaphors.  We need to move beyond linear, mechanistic metaphors to more organic metaphors of human growth and development. (1) 

Because we have learned to understand the world in a linear, fragmented way we are inclined to break up our ‘dimensions’ and try to operate them independently of each other.  There is mounting scientific evidence that this is an actual impossibility.

Frequently, people who suffer damage to the ’emotion centres’ of the brain make very poor rational decisions. It seems that in order to make decisions based on logic and reason it’s necessary to include input from a process which would appear to be the direct opposite of this process – namely feelings.

This is evidence that even at an individual level we are systems of oneness – cohesive units in which every part and process has a contribution to make to the whole. Whenever this isn’t possible, an imbalance is necessarily created.

The question then, isn’t ‘if’ the functioning of the whole will be affected by leaving out one of our faculties but rather ‘how’ it will be affected.

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(1) Ken Robinson, The Element, p. 257

2 Comments

  1. I was taught in a Symbolic Logic course back in college, by a Professor of Philosophy, that intuition is as necessary in logic as rational or mathematical thinking.

  2. Exactly – as Albert Einstein said – “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.

    We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

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