Who are the first lawbreakers of monotony and oblivion?
The prima facie criminals we must find in our and all generations’ hopes – the youth (our heroes, because they dare to take on the inner being a true humanitas demands to create the true communitas, and a “sensus communis”, a sense of community that acts as if something is bigger and truer than ourselves). A beautiful picture of this comes from a couple (too many incl. Myself) surprising places. In “The Philosophy of Information” Luciano Floridi approaches this through Max Planck – The Max Planck effect:
“An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with youth (Planck, Physicist (1950), p.97)” *3)
Here is my faint hope that we, ossified/petrified (static dynamics), manage a dynamic that is not conditioned by our own “extinction” or annihilation – for such revolutions also have a very high price.
A little quirky, I could then return to the original starting point and ask “How do we change the change” (in: Change influences change) – when we already know (realise) it all in advance (close the knowing-doing gap ***)), but perhaps more context-relevant (for the forgotten (oblivion) can potentially be remembered again, if we make an effort):
“How do we break out of monotony and oblivion, change it, and stop making life more efficient (and start living it instead)?”
We may also find hope (comfort) in K.E. Løgstrup “Ethical demand” *4) for a responsibility for the other (the others). Organizations can hardly function, develop and change without (each other)? In particular, one might turn Løgstrup a little on his head (focusing on the will and drive alone) when he talks about us humans’ urge to change others:
“An opposite form of perverted communication consists in our wanting to change other people. We have definite opinion about how to do things and how others ought to be. These opinions are lacking in understanding, because the more definitive the opinions are, the more necessary it becomes that we not be distracted by too much understanding of those who are to be changed. Understanding must be temporally suspended. The mania for perfection turns everything that is said and done into something provisional and preparatory. Understanding must be postponed until perfection has been attained” *4
The hope (I hope) is above all linked to the positive side of our creative ability, to be able to want the change (which goes far beyond “wanting to change others”), which unfortunately for many years has had itself in the foreground as strategic (teleological), while the a-strategic side is the true (prototypical) human creative ability – the one that makes life effectful, along with others, if we do not forget we are human before anything else.
Epilogue
This is actually additionally a homage to two things also. To free trade and the ethical demand – because they are both expressions of our social instinct “haec communitas”, expressing key concepts of freedom, of the good, the true, the just and the beautiful. Of how we help each other, when we finally realise, we cannot exist by ourselves.
Ref.:
- *1) Ole Fogh Kirkeby: Organisationsfilosofi – en studie i liminalitet (Organisational philosophy – a study in liminality). Samfundslitteratur, 2001. [My translations].
- *2) Alain Badiou: Ethics – An Essay on the understanding of evil, Verso, 2001 (1993).
- *3) Luciano Floridi: The Philosophy of Information, Oxford University press, 2011
- *4) K.E. Løgstrup: Den etiske fordring, Gyldendal 1956, p.36. English: The Ethical Demand, p.25. University of Notre Dame Press, 1997.
- **) Giles Deleuze & Felix Guattari: What is Philosophy, (org. 1991) Columbia University Press 1994. “The question what is philosophy? Can perhaps be posed only late in life, with the arrival of old age and the time for speaking concretely. In fact, the bibliography on the nature of philosophy is very limited. It is a question posed in a moment of quiet restlessness, at midnight, when there is no longer anything to ask. It was asked before; it was always being asked, but too indirectly or obliquely; the question was too artificial, too abstract”…..”Simply, the time has come for us to ask what philosophy is. We had never stopped asking this question previously, and we already had the answer, which has not changed: philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts“. (Introduction: The Question then…, p1-2).
- ***) Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton: The Knowing-Doing gap – How smart companies turn knowledge into action, Harvard Business School Press, 2000. “This is an ever-relevant book, an ancient theme stretching humanities existence, “How do I know I know and as important, how do I know I don’t know” – to paraphrase Plato. Maybe a book that should be released yearly to keep attention to these fundamental challenges in our mental lives”. Deeper investigations can also be found in Hans-Georg Gadamer: Truth and method, (philosophical hermeneutics) 1960.
- x) R. Edward Freeman: Strategic Management, Cambridge University Press, 1984.
- Raj Sisodia & John Mackey: Conscious Capitalism – Liberating the heroic spirit of business, Harvard Business Review Press, 2014.
- Klaus Schwab: Stakeholder Capitalism – A global economy that works for progress, people and planet, Wiley, 2021.
- Volatility – LinkedIn group
- “Volatility”, because we want to maintain the volatile element in life, and the fact that even when we are in the mind/thought, it changes form, and thus also the insight into its immutable changeability.
The connotation from Latin “transitus”, to allow passage through and cross watersheds, perhaps not just through, but also over, below and around – to embrace the fact of life that it passes and happens and is never quite the same as it was – a moment ago, it is always transient. It is a mode more than a proclamation, for it requires acceptance of the state of things – as changeable, the dynamic stasis of life. In that realization, it is also a friendly invitation to ourselves and others, to step into the volatility and wade with us from familiar landscapes to unknown watersheds – hopefully.
