So the excerpt quoted below which comes from McGilchrist’s The Matter With Things follows on from the one I quoted on @Mervin_Bitikofer’s MacDonald thread here
In politics, coming up with a list of clearly defined ends and then looking for the technical means of realising them most efficiently ignores the complexity, the many-strandedness, the non-absolute nature, of all ideals, of all knowledge, of all experience. The best of what we glean from experience is not technical in nature; and the kinds of knowledge it affords can be articulated only with great difficulty and subtlety, and are the first kinds to be ignored in articulation. They are acquired, honoured and transmitted only through our participation in a community extending over time in which we are immersed, and from which we take our very identity as individuals, our distinctness, even our capacity for intelligent opposition to received wisdom – what is called a tradition.
Beyond all such considerations, many rational and desirable goals are simply incompatible with the state of mind required to pursue them: they must come, if they come at all, as the by-products of a life well lived. Among these are humility, courage, love, admiration, faith and understanding. As the philosopher Jon Elster points out, in his brilliant book Sour Grapes (subtitled Studies in the Subversion of Rationality), trying to bring about such states directly is a moral fallacy. The corresponding intellectual fallacy is the attribution of such states, when they occur, to intentional action.
It’s not just that linear thinking may be unproductive, even self-defeating, when applied to the setting and pursuit of goals. It’s that, more generally, linear thinking may not get us past first base: instant apprehension of a Gestalt is our only chance to understand certain things. ‘Some things are such that if you do not understand them immediately, you never will’, wrote Mme de Sévigné. This insight, too, is something you must already have – if not, I cannot help you. An understanding can never be given to another; it has to be awoken within them, and so must be there, in latent form, already. Reasoning about it, evaluating it, and then deciding to acquire it will lead you nowhere. This thought lies behind many insights of the Oriental wisdom tradition.
I keep trying to tie this up but it disappears in my hands like smoke. What I note is the role having a graduated process can play in a wisdom tradition. Somehow earlier stages in the process plant the seeds which enable people’s intuition as already inside them higher insights at a later stage. This helps n me make peace with my disappointment in not finding the fuller fruit of the tradition more plentifully apparent. But I would still like those in lower, transitory stages cognizant of the gap still to cover. The impulse toward triumphalism and exultation of what is less accomplished still nettle me.