THE ART OF ENLIVENMENT: Engaging thought and spirit
by Melvin Jarman
THE ART OF ENLIVENMENT: ENGAGING THOUGHT AND SPIRIT by MELVIN JARMAN
Cultivating living thinking as a precursor to developing regenerative organisational culture
Henri Bortoft pointed out that when we look at the natural world around us, we think in terms of names and concepts for what we see. Very rarely do we stop to question how these concepts were formed, to look ‘upstream’ of certain unexamined, deeply held assumptions about the nature of reality, and of experience. At core is the foundational assumption that there is a divide between what is perceived by individual subjects, and what is verifiable in the objective world around us.
The very interesting irony is that this very assumption causes us to anthropomorphise our understanding of reality, to chop it into human-sized bits (size in terms of what we can understand in a given abstract/isolated ‘chunk’).
We approach the world as if our theories of understanding are the nature of reality. All of our categories are separate from each other, and living beings are an aggregate of ‘parts’ that can be manipulated and formed to our designs. We forget that the map (useful as maps are) is not the territory.
Goethe, in the way that he did his science, showed that another way is possible.
Modern science tends to start with theory (seeking understanding), which can only think in terms of static facts, based on yesterday’s insights and an unavoidably partial (reductive) perspective - e.g. a very subjective set of circumstances which are set up by subjective beings - albeit it with objective and rigorous processes in terms of analysis - but built upon unexamined assumptions that the nature of reality can be scientifically understood from (only) this kind of partial perspective - if only we keep going, searching for the unity that binds together the multiplicity of parts.
With this unity in multiplicity, we start with ‘finished products’ - hypotheses and snapshots (experiments), identifying components and building blocks. We know, missing the reality that we know with a certainty based on yesterday's insights - this is so poignantly captured by Eric Hoffer: “In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”
It is no wonder that we (through actions) see the world as something that can be chopped up into pieces and put back together again - What if we could instead become beautifully equipped with the ability to apply all this knowledge in a way that is attuned to life as it is existing, in a way that regenerates us and the world we interact with and call home?
Goethe’s ‘delicate empiricism’ starts with what is when we look intensely at reality, when we stay with beholding, and start to let our theorising evolve from there (observing it as it evolves, and seeking out biases that may be distorting the emergent understanding of objective reality as it is perceived) - a subtle difference, and one that does not deny the many useful and truthful insights gleaned from reductive positions, it rather repositions them into a different context - a context that is dynamic and alive, not static and therefore ‘dead’.
Once we begin to train ourselves to resist the urge to immediately understand, and instead cultivate intense concentration in beholding, we can begin to see that, rather than an aggregate of parts, nature is a wholeness that manifests through what initially appears to us as separate parts.
This is a diversity in unity - nature manifesting herself - and we look to becoming.
Craig Holdredge explains: “This is the dynamical thinking of the participant mode of consciousness, instead of the static thinking of the onlooker consciousness. This way of seeing turns the one and the many inside-out. Instead of many different ones that are the same, we now see one which is becoming itself in many different ways. What we have here is self-difference instead of self-sameness; each is the very same one, but differently, instead of each of the different ones being the same. We now have difference within unity, instead of a unity that excludes difference. Furthermore, it is concrete instead of abstract. So instead of “unity in multiplicity” we have “multiplicity in unity,” which is the unity of the living source.”
Instead of trying to move from the part to an understanding of the whole, we strive to become aware of the whole as she manifests through her diverse tapestry of parts. Reductive perspectives enable us to ‘zoom in’ to parts and take detailed ‘photographs’ of a moment of reality manifesting through a context, but they can never be a route to an understanding of the whole.
It is a radical shift in thinking that cultivates a willingness to focus on what is becoming - what is being suggested by the way things become and morph as they live through time in space.
Stephen Talbot explains: "(Goethean science requires) A willingness to deal with change or movement as such -- to deal with movement in its own terms -- is an essential feature of any qualitative science. And it requires a new kind of thinking. Brady remarks that "the impression of 'gradual modification' cannot depend any more on what each form has in common with its neighbors than upon what it does not share with them. Change demands difference, and continuous change, continuous difference". That is, we can "see" the movement from one form to the next only by virtue of a characteristic "distribution of sameness and difference between them". This dynamic context alone is what brings out the lawful relation between forms."
Applying the insights
If we move this frame over onto organisations, we can develop a living and dynamic view and understanding of an organisation by cultivating this ‘living’ form of thinking.
We can greatly add to what we know if we try to understand the organisation as a dynamic entity that is inherently part of a greater whole, one that could perhaps be better understood by coming to an understanding of its wholeness, in order to gain new understanding of how to work with its parts. This can only be done in the situation and with the people of a given organisation, and at core is this shift in thinking.
I will give as an example I will use my own experiences applying these insights for the last 15 plus years.
In a kitchen I am leading I am intensely aware of the quality of what we are doing, and most of all how we are doing it. For me this is far more important than following specific procedures to the letter - there is without a doubt stringency, but it is guided by what works (both as it is felt in a qualitative sense as well as how it is conceived) and what is important is that products are of the same standard of quality and creativity -so long as it 'works' (tastes great) - rather than the following of a specific formula.
What seems most important (in terms of what seems to work best) is the quality of the working environment and the relationships within it.
If I see cooks singing while they work (as hard as they can - because they want to) and putting love into what they do, I know our product will be good. If we can co-create an applied learning environment, I know that what we do is already bigger than what I can carry, and will be able to carry itself. If we can co-create an environment where there is role-clarity and role-hierarchy, without there being an egocentric hierarchy of people (relying on positional power and games).
In fact it is the games of dominance that directly impinge the ability for a team to shine to their potential, and to be regenerative in terms of cultivating resilience and adaptability. As a colleague and a leader, I have found that I can almost always find the energy to deal with the circumstantial pressures of the work of hospitality - I thrive on it. But if I find myself in a situation of having to play in battles, having to resolve needless 'fights' (however subtly they are played out), I get drained and fed up very quickly.
What is interesting, is that what results from the shift of focus from methodological purity to a sense for awareness of the qualitative effects of (inter)actions, is far from woolly or inconsistent, and scientific knowledge around techniques and processes is completely valued and required - but it just isn’t the guide anymore. Those tools need to be used correctly, meaning the right tool for the job, skillfully wielded, but they are not the most important piece - that is the tool-wielder(s).
Organisation theorists Argyris and Schön conceptualised this difference as single vs double loop-learning. In a single loop process we focus on becoming better at what we do, with double loop thinking we also question whether what we are doing is the right thing.
But to cultivate a regenerative culture, leading theorists suggest that a third layer to this reflexivity is required - 'triple-loop learning' is when we also bring awareness to our underlying beliefs and assumptions around how we make sense of the world, how we regard truth to be truthful, and therefore how we rationalise our decisions and actions.
Relating this back to Goethean thinking, there is also a need for ‘letting go’ of the reductively-formed ‘dead’ thinking' that the vast majority of us come into adulthood with, and this is not always easy. It really is a ‘leap of faith’, but, although it is a leap in terms of giving up the need for certainty, for conclusions, it is not a leap into blind faith - rather it is a radical shift in awareness that is formed through sustained effort to become conscious of our thinking, and how we interact and participate with the world through it; how we qualitatively affect life in our actions; and how this feels in our conscience (which relates straight back to our thinking: of what form it takes (living or dead), and what underlying assumptions we employ with which to make sense of the world).
When I used to try to operate from a machine-like perspective, I ran myself towards burn-out trying to keep all the plates spinning at once, keeping the plans, techniques and strategies in mind - whilst trying to be in the flow of cooking (and managing). Through cultivating living thinking, I find I can much more easily deal with emergent complexity, and can form productive and energising relationships with those that I work with.
What I find now is that I have a much more holistic view - more of a relationship with my work - and I find I have almost limitless energy when I need it (self-regeneration time and work/life balance are also important).
With a focus on tuning in, being present, listening and being adaptive, using the mind to search when needed (not clogging it with pre-understanding and searching for answers and conclusions) - it still amazes me to see the difference in reflectively ‘observing’ myself as compared to the past. This change in my thinking also led to (and also came about from) me studying a Masters in organisation development (with only GCSE’s/NVQ’s - experience/track-record to get me in), becoming a lecturer for 9 years and then a PhD candidate - before understanding that I am best suited to the applied rather than the academic. I wish not to boast, or to claim something sensational (I stand clearly on the shoulders of giants such as Goethe, Rudolf Steiner, Jean Gebser and many many others), but rather to share my own experience and unique perspective of the unity as it manifests through the individual me, and how cultivating living thinking has enabled a self-transformation. If there is anything I wish to 'promote', it is the value of trying out the processes of thinking and perceiving that these authors both describe for us, and show to us through how they wrote their works.
What I have found, through experience and the effects of absorbing and applying the insights of these authors, is that nature is one of the most powerful guides in developing living thinking - as Goethe suggests, this delicate empiricism whereby we use ourselves (reflexivity) and our felt perceptions and intuitive thinking as an instrument of scientific inquiry - and in order to do this scientifically, we need to remove individual bias - we need to clean and polish the lens. What is perhaps already becoming apparent, is that we are a very elaborate instrument, but we are a long way from truly understanding how we work, and how to use our core instrument of inquiry - our thinking. What Goethe, Steiner and Gebser suggest, is that becoming aware of our nature can greatly evolve our thinking, and one of the ways this can be best achieved is through participating with nature in an open, focused and highly reflexive manner.