“Great minds discuss ideas;
average minds discuss events;
small minds discuss people.”
Some people attribute this quote to Greek philosopher Socrates, some say they are from social activist and former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt while some say that it’s from Marcus Aurelius, the great Roman emperor. Whosoever he may be, the guy must have been a very keen observer of his/her contemporary social interactions.
The origin of this thought, I think, can be traced back to Plato’s theory of Forms or Ideas.
Plato, in essence said that for any conceivable thing or attribute/property “i.e chair, table, tree, mountain, green, blue, long, short, you and me — there is a corresponding Form or Idea,” an ideal, conceptual template of everything or property. So for Plato there were two worlds “a world of Ideas or Forms” and the world of temporal things that we see all around us.
Plato said that true and reliable knowledge rests only with those who can comprehend the true ideal reality behind the world of everyday experience. In order to perceive the world of the Forms or Ideas, individuals must undergo a special, difficult education. This, he said, was also true for Guardians or the philosopher-kings, who were required to perceive the Form of Good(ness) in order to be well-informed rulers.
Later Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), broadly agreeing with Plato, renamed the two worlds of Plato as the world of Universals and Particulars — a world of ideal templates and a world of real, visible, temporal things and properties. In Aristotle’s view, universals exist only where they are instantiated; they exist only in things. Aristotle said that a universal is identical in each of its instances. There is no Platonic Form of redness, standing apart from all red things; instead, each red thing has a copy of the same property, redness.
Subsequent philosophers improved upon this theory and the debate continues ad infinitum.
In India this debate exists in the form of mind-body dichotomy — shareer (body) and atman (soul) or maya and Brahama.
Coming to the point, the “small minds” discuss people and things because for them seeing is believing, the visible is real — and it is the real that is comprehensible. Events, the real happenings are temporal, hence comprehensible but the ideal — the world of concepts — like atma and Brahama are intangible, hence incomprehensible.
German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 – 1831), whose towering stature in Western philosophy is universally recognized, is a glaring example of what I am trying to say. He continues to be the most misunderstood, least intelligible, most unreadable and most incomprehensible thinker in the history of Philosophy. According to Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860) a German philosopher who, for the first time closely studied Indian philosophy, felt that Hegel, in a way, was the one who reached closest to the Indian way of thought and that was the reason why he was incomprehensible to most western readers.
Why things become incomprehensible and incommunicable — and our sentences and statements sound meaningless utterance — is because we fail to convey to others ‘the state of affairs’ as we see them to be.
In early twentieth century, philosophers like Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein and others felt that the language corresponds to the ‘state of affairs’ in the world. The language, they asserted, can only be meaningful if it is used in relation to what we see in the world. They thought that the language is a way of representing facts and, therefore, a proposition is, in fact, a picture of reality. The words in a language correspond to things, properties or relationships that make up the picture of reality.
The language, our ordinary, oft spoken sentences suffice to express the state of affairs in our day to day matters. For example the sentence “the thin, old man rides his rickety bicycle on a muddy way to home” is an easily understandable sentence.
Or for example “Jack and Jill went up the hill” or for that matter the statement “the Earth moves round the Sun” are quite understandable and need no explaining. However, what would you make out when Hegel says: “Reason is substance, as well as infinite power, its own infinite material underlying all the natural and spiritual life; as also the infinite form which sets the material in motion. Reason is the substance from which all things derive their being.”
How would you describe the above sentence? Complex? Complicated? Incomprehensible? Maybe all of the three, yet for some it does make complete sense. The reason why some sentences sound simple and some difficult is because our cognitive faculty is habitually accustomed to comprehend mundane, everyday affairs but it has to strain its faculties to comprehend ideas and thoughts that tend to be vague, ambiguous and ethereal.
This explains why ‘Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.’ And this also explains why Philosophy is, and has been, among the least preferred subject in higher studies the world over.
The Indian Gurukuls — the ashrams where students were taught — have been, since times immemorial, performing this rare task of selecting, training, grooming and finally endowing the Hindu society with the able minds who could lead the society and establish order in it with a sense of dispassionate objectivity.
The tradition, by and large, served well till 60s when political, economic and social aberrations were made to creep in, destabilizing the social system, the repercussions of which have now started showing. Money and materialism has taken the lead and idealism, spiritualism and thought has been pushed into the background. Gresham’s Law has come into play. Bad money is driving out good money from market.
The most ugly aspect of this unfortunate trend is that mediocrity is being projected as the new norm of Indian society.
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