Human intelligence

I have to thank for this article to my friend Pavel Hait on whose blog I have   unwittingly found the inspiration to write about “human intelligence.”

Few hours back, when reading Pavel’s article, I could not have stop to think whether ‘this’ what he is writing about is really what the intelligence consists of. The question is – can we consider the manual worker or some skilled artisan to be geniuses in their respective profession just we often do in the case of the mathematician or the director of a company?

My friend answered that this is indeed possible by distinguishing various types of intelligence like logical, spatial, kinesthetic, interpersonal… and so on. The logical conclusion of such distinction has to be that the artisan can be genius, even if different than for example the artist.

However, the thing that is not taken into consideration is the actual amount of work or thinking that the artisan compared to some ‘boss’ has to do.

Oswald Spengler and ‘Faustian culture’

When the first volume of Spengler’s Decline of the West appeared in Germany shortly after the First World War, it was an unexpected success. At this time, Spengler’s idea that the Western civilization is slowly but inevitably entering into its last phase of ‘life’ was in the eyes of the German public confirmed by hardships of the post-war years. Moreover, it provided very much desired answers that rationalised the German post-war suffering into a context of the decline of the Western civilization itself.