Another phenomenal tip from Ian:
When you’re skillfully coping in flow, without thinking, without rules, your body and its skills are drawing you to get this optimal grip on the situation. And the situation is always completely concrete. It’s something that you’ve never been in before and the other people haven’t been in before and you’ll never be in it again because having been in it this time has changed you.
Aristotle already saw that. It was lost, sort of, until Heidegger found it in Aristotle. Aristotle says if you keep acting and getting experiences and making mistakes and learning, you will finally become phronemos, a person of practical wisdom, and that means you’ll do the appropriate thing at the appropriate time in the appropriate way, to talk like Aristotle. And that’s being a master. That’s the highest thing you can be.
So, does Merleau-Ponty (I’m asking myself) ever talk about mastery like that, or expertise? No; just that every philosoper has his job. Merleau-Ponty’s job is to go beneath Heidegger and ground it in everyday skillful action and everyday perception. Heidegger’s goes to the other end and talks about mastery and how you can become a person of practical wisdom, and even further than that, you can become somebody who changes the world by not just responding in an original way to the situation but responding in a way that changes people’s perceptions of the situation. That’s the best thing you can do, according to Heidegger.
Further links:
- The phronemos - the practitioner of practical wisdom
- Phronesis on Wikipedia
- Akrasia, the opposite: “lacking command (over oneself)”
- Phronetic approach to social sciences with “four value-rational questions for specific instances of social action”
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2 Comments
http://www.pantheon.org/articles/h/hauzul-kausar.html
More from on same thing, being a clue as to how exactly one becomes this kind of master:
“That’s fair. Yes. Any form of skillful coping in which you can become an expert, in which you get into a kind of flow in which you don’t have to think at all, your mind is out of it and the skills in your body are doing it, we’ve done all of that and we’ve done it taking a risk too, that when you do that: you end up lost or you may end up saying things you regret having said, and if you aren’t ready to take that risk you’ll never become an expert in that. So, I could predict that you have taken the risk and done it and felt bad about it, and you’ve done it and felt good about it, and when you’ve got that, you’ve got a kind of mastery.”
I think it is about elevating your motivation (to become skillful) beyond the intertia caused by fear of failure, as well as being able to maintain that motivation in the face of actual failure. Failure only takes away your drive/energy/motivation if you are drawing that motivation from the planned result (i.e.: living in the future), instead of being motivated by the process itself (i.e.: living in the present).