Dear organlearners,
Tom Christoffel <tjcdsgns@shentel.net> writes:
> As for the emergence of creativity - I think the transendentalists of the
> mid-1800's were dealing with the issues if not the word. Life was speeding
> up. Emerson mocked a man who went to take a nap advising that he be
> awakened if any important news came in.
>
> Walt Whitman's poetry dealt with human emergence. "Leaves of Grass" can be
> found online in the collection at:
> http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/whitman/
Tom, thanks for the tip on Walt Whitman's poetry.
Tom, I agree and I do not agree with you. It is all because I have
said to little.
Socrates (through the pen of his student Plato) already spoke about
emergences and considered them very important. Luckily for us that
Plato faithfully documented it because Plato himself was much less
concerned about emergences. His own student Aristoteles had very
little to say on this topic. (See the line of immergences over a
couple of generations).
I can even go back to the book Job, the oldest book in the Bible. It
stems form the days of Abraham. (Yes, it is much older than the first
five books of Moses). Its lesson on creativity, especially on
motivation, are most rewarding for me. The Gilgamesh Epos of Ugarit
is even an older fragment with equally important expressions on
the "act of creation".
Most of us have much TACIT knowledge on creativity and bifurcations
(emergences and immergences). But few of us manage to express
(articulate) this tacit knowledge into one of the faculties (art,
language, science, business, etc.) of formal (objective,
communicatable) knowledge. Why? Because this transformation from the
"tacit" to the "expressed" is such a grand emergent phenomenon.
The expression of creativity as a science (setting up a formal
system of thinking with a recognisable terminology) is a post WWII
phenomenon. This was not something which the transcendentalists (like
their father Immanuel Kant) did. But they certainly paved important
ground.
The name of this topic is "What need does speed satisfy?"
Tom, what would you think will happen when management begin to press
for much faster transformations from the "tacit" to the "expressed"
levels of knowledge? Do you think they will be able to handle it?
(Here in South Africa the newest slogan for road safety now is
SPEED KILLS.)
If we study the history of this transformation through the ages, it
is clear that it is a very slow (timely) process. And this is not
strange, because the more complex any creation, the longer its
creation time. The transformation from the "tacit" to the "expressed"
is, in my opnion, very complex. This is a very important angle to
bear in mind when setting up a LO.
Best wishes
--At de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre for Education University of Pretoria Pretoria, South Africa email: amdelange@gold.up.ac.za
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>