To Be Is To Do . . . Be Do Be Do

To be is to do — Socrates
To do is to be — Jean Paul Sartre
Do be do be do — Frank Sinatra

I posted this quote for the sole reason that it always makes me smile. But as I looked at the list of names, and their sequence, I realized that, in a simplistic way, these simple words also reflect our evolution of philosophy and thought. Socrates lived more than 2,400 years ago and his influence on thought is legendary. Jean Paul Sartre was a prominent French philosopher at the peak of the twentieth century. Frank Sinatra was born only ten years after Sartre but has come to embody a later generation.

In one of my marathon runs of post-graduate education I took a several courses in ancient, medieval, and modern Western Philosophy. Socrates and Plato were the superstars of the ancient period while St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas formed the cornerstones of Medieval Philosophy. Then came Immanuel Kant, and John Locke, and David Hume and a flood of other amazing thinkers who ushered in the period of Modern Philosophy. As I studied these philosophers and their periods in history I was struck by their role as the official thinkers for society. It was as if the masses had entrusted the responsibility of defining “what we think” to a small cadre of professional thinkers. They wrote prodigiously and defined their era with their ideas.

The printing press, the vast expansion of formal education, and now the Internet, have democratized thinking — and this is undoubtedly a good thing. We no longer look to the philosophers to decide what we think on any particular topic. We take pride in our ability to think for ourselves.

And yet, where has it gotten us? While we seem no less hungry for intellectual certainty, we seldom ponder the deeper questions of life or wonder what it means to just “be.” Instead we consider American Idol “entertainment” and Fox News “fair and balanced.” We align ourselves Democrat or Republican, Pentecostal or Baptist, left or right, as proxies for our own belief systems, relegating the details to the party platform or the church doctrine. In this way, we have not much evolved from our brethren of ancient and medieval times who looked to the intellectual giants of their day for the definition of current thought.

And yet, the world has become too complex and too broad to be captured by a few thinkers, such as Augustine or John Locke. In this way, Frank has, indeed, captured the prevailing thought.
Q: Where has the evolution of thought taken us?
A: Do be do be do . . .

Thanks Frank!

 

 

 

 


Aristotle on Thought

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

— Aristotle


Education

An education isn’t how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It’s being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don’t.

— Anatole France


Intelligent Mind

An intelligent mind is a mind which is not satisfied with explanations, with conclusions; nor is it a mind that believes, because belief is again another form of conclusion. An intelligent mind is an inquiring mind, a mind that is watching, learning, studying.

— Jiddu Krishnamurti


Don’t make them think

If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; But if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.

– Don Marquis

I lived in Denver in the late ’80s. At one point I met an acquaintance who invited me to attend his monthly book club. I was in a heavy reading phase and was excited about the prospect of connecting with fellow book lovers. I was encouraged to bring a book and plan on sharing a favorite passage.

The book I happened to be reading at the time was The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and the passage I picked to read turned out to be pretty heavy. You see, the entire short story of Ivan Ilyich is about a man who discovers that he is dying. In his final days he has the painful revelation that he has lived his life as a facade, doing everything that his parents, his family, his church, and his community expected of him, at the expense of being true to that still small voice in his soul. Thought provoking to say the least.

I will never know with certainty why I was not invited back to this small group of literature buffs, but I never heard from them again. Telephone calls to my contacts at the group where never returned (this was long before the days of email and Facebook). No doubt, I came across too intense, for I was wrestling at the time with the very ideas that haunted Ivan Ilyich.

Since then I have learned to temper my intensity. I have also learned that pushing people too hard to make them think can have unintended consequences. It’s okay to make people think they are thinking. Just be careful when you really start to make them think.


Paradox

One must not think ill of the paradox, for the paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker without paradox is like the lover without passion: a mediocre fellow.

– Søren Kierkegaard, from Philosophical Fragments

At one point in my life I was formally studying philosophy. Not coincidentally, I was also struggling deeply with various aspects of Christianity and religion. Kierkegaard became a hero. He was a troubled soul who was as prolific at journaling as I was, and who shared many of the same intellectual struggles I was contemplating.

I have always relished the paradox. In business, and in life, I welcome conflicting and often contradictory notions. Wrestling with ideas that don’t seem to fit allows me to see all sides of a problem. Trying to resolve the apparent contradictions stretches my mind and forces me into a sort of “due diligence” on a problem to ensure that I have tried all angles for a solution.

Lest you think that contemplating the paradox is impossible, I leave you with the wise and poetic words of Lewis Carol from Through the Looking Glass:

“Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”