on intellectual pessimism or ”realism” and dis-empowerment:
When one considers one’s potential to contribute something intellectually original and worthwhile, one may consider great minds and thinkers and one’s potential to in some way surpass them.
There are 2 distinct ways of seeing the process of theoretical advances and achievements and of explaining why great & respected minds have not reached complete or error-free theory or knowledge, and these 2 options have different implications for how one ends up estimating one’s potential:
I: The contributions of a great thinker in a given field are the product of that person’s intelligence and effort applied to that field. They have done all they could, and any remaining error or incompleteness [in the theory or field the thinker has worked on] is due to the thinker having reached the limits of their ability and capacity – In other words, [metaphorically] the thinker has trodden a path that goes up the mountain of knowledge or truth, where success is determined by how hard and well the path is trodden.
II: The great thinker may indeed be remarkably intelligent*, but the importance of their intelligence and determination is overestimated and is really just a rough prerequisite for their success – the primary cause of the fruitfulness of their intellectual path is a particularly good fit between the unique structure of their mind** on the one hand and the set of dominant and available*** [methodological and theoretical] paradigms on the other hand. And the reason for any remaining error or incompleteness is primarily not exhaustion of intelligence or strength, but instead that we have not yet found the ultimate pairing of a mind/thinker to a paradigm-set. Broken down differently, this means that we haven’t yet found the ultimate methodological or theoretical paradigms to work under or that we haven’t yet had a thinker with the most fitting possible uniquely structured mind for the practical scientific-historical conditions. And indeed we are [extremely] far off from all of these. And to adjust the metaphor from I: the path the great thinker has trodden is not a pre-existing, objective path, but an entirely unique path that is laid down in an inter-play of the walker and the environment as the thinker treads the winding and idiosyncratic path of their life and career. And there are very different and more fruitful possible paths – and these may become visible to a future thinker only after the first thinker has trodden their path…
implications of I: One only realistically has potential to surpass great minds and contribute something truly original and significant if one is even more intelligent and persevering than the greatest minds of history – thus quite a bleak out-look.
implications of II: All you need is a subtly – but qualitatively – different set of paradigms or a slightly different unique mind – or even just a different intellectual path or different historical conditions – and then all kinds of unexpected advances or intellectual fruits are suddenly possible – thus a much brighter out-look!
My hope is that this perspective can lead to some more personal optimism – and in particular do so without needing to address the also complex topic of the standard presupposed conceptions of intelligence and genius that are part of the process of resigning oneself to mediocrity of potential – seeing one’s place in following established paradigms and traditions and in working within these to support greater people or minds, and to being ‘realistic’ about one’s prospects.
*I leave this possibility or assumption open (the standard assumption that some people are particularly intelligent) for the sake of the argument of this entry: Whilst I personally don’t agree with the standard conception of intelligence and varyingly intelligent minds – a topic that I’m sure I will write other entries on, and in which I share some existing criticisms of the theoretical/ideological foundations or assumptions of the conceptions of IQ and intelligence – the argument of this entry is [meant to be] independent of such criticisms of the conception of intelligence itself. (Only deeper analysis will bring this argument together with analysis of intelligence conceptions.)
**This structure also has a historical aspect, a process or development over time: The thinker’s life & career path constitutes a continuous series of conscious and unconscious changes in their mind’s structure – on many levels, on the theory-content levels and meta-levels of internal, in-grained method of thought, aka philosophy. And a lot of this may be political or dependent on politics, both concerning actions the thinker takes in their career and reactions a tradition/culture has toward the thinker.
***[The identity of] this set of paradigms – those paradigms that are in place at any particular moment when the thinker interacts with an intellectual culture/tradition and those paradigms that are potential candidates to switch to or use – this set is of course dependent on the course of history[, specifically of science]. And this dependence is of-course part of a causal inter-dependence between the individual thinker and the cultural history, i.e. participants can have an effect on history while history determines the available options or directions of individual action/effect.