Scientists Seminar 1, Brockwood Park, 13 October 1974

David Bohm: Now, first of all I’d like to welcome everybody on behalf of the Brockwood Park Educational Centre. The purpose of this meeting is primarily to establish an agenda so that everything will go smoothly, but a few other things have to be settled. Perhaps I’ll begin by saying a few words about Brockwood Park. There’s a brief paper in your folder which explains Brockwood Park. Brockwood Park was set up by people who are interested in what Krishnamurti is pointing out. And as he talks—perhaps you all know, I’m not sure, that Krishnamurti talks all over the world; he has a circuit: he goes from England to Switzerland in the summer, then he goes to Italy and to India and to America, and he has been doing this for a great many years. Now, a number of people thought that it would be right to establish a school here in England which would… in which there would be… one would see if one could live according to what Krishnamurti is pointing out, you know, if education should go that way. I think… I’ll only mention now that the main point is perhaps to see whether children can be… young people can be educated so as to be free of conditioning so that the intelligence… they can be intelligent and not caught in all the psychological problems which… and other problems that involve mankind now. A nd I think you’ll find further information, some further information in this paper.

And in addition, we hope that you will get in touch with the people at Brockwood Park if you are interested to learn about it, and the staff here will all be very glad to help, tell you anything you want to know or show you anything. Several members of the staff are here now that you may consult with; ask them or any other member of the staff. And in addition I should say that the staff and students here are very interested in this conference and they have a very vital interest in it and we have here several people who are representing Brockwood, but we hope that some more general contact can be established between the members of this conference and the people at Brockwood Park because Brockwood Park is in fact concerned with the question which the conference is discussing: what is the role of knowledge, what is the place of knowledge in the transformation of man and society?

Now, I think we’ll leave that question go for a little while and perhaps get down to trying to establish an agenda. Now, the first point is that we had in mind a provisional scheme that we would have everybody, or at least as many as wished to, would give short talks addressed to the question. Now, the purpose of these talks is not primarily to transmit information because in this short time you can’t say a great deal but to give some feeling for the way you’re thinking and, you know, the way in which you’re interested in this; and also it gives us a chance to know each other. You see, even if you don’t give a talk, you see, in the mutual discussion everybody will get to know each other, and then having this basis, then perhaps we can go deeper.

Now, the plan then was that we would go… we would have sessions of roughly an hour and a half to an hour and three quarters in the morning and in the afternoon of Monday and Tuesday, and we would have a similar session Wednesday morning. On Wednesday afternoon we plan an outing to Stonehenge. There will be a bus provided. There will be tea on the outing as well and if you wish to have tea, we ask you to cover the cost but otherwise everything else is taken care of.

Now, then after that outing, our plan was that Krishnamurti, who would be present at all these discussions would then present his own point of view and out of that, we expect the whole thing would be opened up to a general discussion of the main question. We expect that there will be a great deal of challenging and counter-challenging. I’m sure that there will be differences of opinion among many of the speakers present and Krishnamurti’s view will also not necessarily agree with all that the speakers say, so we expect to have a, I think what they used to call a full and frank discussion.

Now, we hoped the conference would go on until sometime on Saturday and perhaps Saturday afternoon, and on Sunday we would once again have a meeting similar to the one that was held this morning, in which Krishnamurti would talk to the whole school and all the participants at the conference. Now… and then next Sunday afternoon a concert is planned, similar to the one that was held today by Alan Rowland.

Now, that’s the general timetable. So we have somehow to fit it in, and the first step will be perhaps for me to try to find out who wants to talk and about how long he thinks he will want to talk. Now, when I go around, this will also give people a chance to see, in case you haven’t met everybody, you will have a chance to see who is who. Now, we have put the people in alphabetic order, more or less, and I’ll begin with asking Dr David Butt… (inaudible) Have I missed him?

Questioner: On your right hand.

DB: On your right, yes. I thought that was the other order. Yes. (Laughter)

Q: (Inaudible)

DB: Yes, well, I’m not so sure of that. Now, do you want to give a talk?

David Butt: Well, I have no plan to give a talk at the moment; I would like to enter into the discussion whenever the occasion arises. At all events, not at the early part of the week.

DB: Yes, all right, then we’ll leave you down as a possible…

DBt: Yes.

DB: …but seeing how time goes and so on.

DBt: Yes.

DB: Right. Now, next is Dr Capra.

Fritjof Capra: Yes, I can speak for about half an hour.

DB: Okay, I’ll put you down one half hour. Next, Dr Elizabeth Ferris.

Elizabeth Ferris: No, I have no plans to.

DB: No plans.

EF: No.

DB: And next is Dr Gordon Globus.

Gordon Globus: Only be fifteen minutes.

DB: Fifteen minutes. By the way, you see, if several people give fifteen minute talks, we might try to put them in the same session, so then I would depart from the alphabetic order.

Q: Past experience means that means a half an hour. (Laughter)

DB: Oh. Shall I count it for half an hour? I’ll put down half an hour. Dr Brian Goodwin?

Brian Goodwin: I think I’d better say half an hour as well.

DB: Half hour. And Dr Hiley I think didn’t plan to give a talk; he told me. Dr Julian Melzack?

Julian Melzack: I feel the way Dr Butt does; I mean, I think I wouldn’t mind giving a talk but later on, after I sort of see what’s happening.

DB: Now, those who take that view will be subject to the amount of time that is available. Right?

JM: Sure.

DB: Right? If there is time, then… Okay?

JM: Right.

DB: Okay, I’ll put you a question mark then. Dr Robin Munroe?

Robin Munroe: I’d quite like to talk for fifteen minutes.

DB: Fifteen minutes. That’s a genuine fifteen minutes?

RM: Yes.

DB: Dr David Peat?

David Peat: Well, I’m not sure either yet.

DB: I’ll put you as a question mark. Dr Carl Pribram?

Carl Pribram: I’ll talk as long as you want me to. (Laughter)

DB: Well, half an hour was the… (laughter) We’d be very…

Q: Would you like to have fifteen minutes?

DB: We’d be very glad to have you talk much longer but the amount of time is limited for everybody.

CP: (Inaudible)

DB: Now, Dr David Shainberg?

DS: Thirty minutes.

DB: Right. That’s the same as a half an hour. (Laughter) Dr Sudarshan?

George Sudarshan: I’ll also take about half an hour, maybe a little less.

DB: Right. Now we have here Mr Harsh Tankha.

Harsh Tankha: I think I’ll just listen in.

DB: Right. Dr Montague Ullman?

Montague Ullman: Thirty minutes.

DB: Right. Now, Wilkins would… Professor Wilkins, he’s coming tomorrow and he wants to talk. Dr Joe Zorskie?

Joe Zorskie: I won’t give any talk.

DB: Right. Now, the next one is me, so I’ll talk a half an hour. Now, the remaining people on this list are people who are from Brockwood Park and perhaps we should at this stage introduce them so everybody will know them. There’s Mrs Dorothy Simmons, the principle of Brockwood Park; she’s sitting right here. And I’m sure if you want any help of any kind, she’ll be glad to help you. Now, Mrs Mary Zimbalist is down at the other end, and she is helping Krishnamurti in all his work. Mr George Carnes is down here at the equipment. He’s taking care of the recording, tape recording, and I’ll explain a little about that in a moment. Mr Ted Cartee is assisting him at the moment, back here. He also assists Mrs Simmons. And then it’s my wife, Mrs Saral Bohm who is helping me, and she’ll help to… all these people will help to put you in contact with anyone at Brockwood Park, or whatever’s going on that you would like to know; and help generally to organise the thing and make it go smoothly. Yes, and then there’s… we didn’t put your name down, Mrs Globus, we didn’t expect her but she is now observing the conference. And I think that covers everything… everybody.

Now, I think then that since practically everybody is going to talk a half an hour, let me count up the number who wish… who have definitely committed themselves. There’s one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Now, see, if everybody talks roughly half an hour, this would more or less use up most of the time, though it may turn out that we have a little time left. Right. And anyway that’s the situation as it is. Now, then perhaps we should begin by thinking of starting tomorrow and we may as well start in alphabetic order unless anybody thinks there would be a better order. We should, if all goes well, have time for two talks tomorrow morning. If there’s more time, perhaps then we might try to have another one but I don’t anticipate that. Now, the first two people on the list are Dr Capra and Dr Globus. Would they be ready?

FC: Yes, but maybe we could group the talks according to content, if this is possible at all?

DB: Well, if we could, yes… Now…

FC: So that we could discuss, say, both talks after.

DB: Yes, well, if you’re…

FC: It takes time, I suppose.

DB: Yes. The difficulty is we don’t know the content and, you see, unless we could establish, you know, who was going to talk on what, which I think would get a little bit complicated, you see. I think that the content is going to be in most cases fairly different. Now, for example, there might be some connection, say, between Dr Glubus’s talk and Dr Shainberg or Professor Pribram; you see, do you think that would be a possibility?

Q: What do you want to say, Gordon?

GG: I haven’t decided yet. (Laughter)

DB: You see, that’s the difficulty of arranging… Now, you see, if you want, we could change the order and, say, if you were going to… you see, I can foresee the similarity of content in these three; but then we can only choose two at once and we’d then have to decide which would follow. So would you like… would any of you like to go on together then?

Q: (Inaudible) be fine with me.

DB: Well, which of the… It might be then that we’ll put…

Q: What’s Dr Capra going to talk about?

FC: About modern physics. No, not really but… yes, I’ll mention a lot about modern physics and mysticism and implications.

Q: So you’ll be the same day… (inaudible)

DB: Yes, then in that case we’ll put you a little later… You see, we could say Dr Globus will be first and, yes, Dr Pribram, is that all right, second?

Q: Is that tomorrow?

Q: (Inaudible) …would you rather have that… (inaudible)

DB: Yes. Now, then, in that case, do you think we should go on with the same general topic or perhaps change the topic? There are two other people who might be related, Dr Shainberg and Dr Ullman. I don’t know whether they would be or not.

DS: They’re not…

DB: Not closely related.

DS: Not really, no.

Montague Ullman: How do you know then?

DS: From what you’ve told me.

DB: Well, now, who would be related to the topic? Is anybody… would be related to the topic that Dr Capra has just mentioned?

Q: Well, you would, wouldn’t you?

DB: Well, in some… not really very directly, no. Possibly.

Q: I think your idea that it’s simply a way of sort of presenting one’s general view…

DB: Yes.

Q: …and one’s general orientation, is a good one. And so I’m not sure the topics are really terribly important since all I would plan to do would be to try and give some sense of my general way of looking at the world.

DB: Yes, there is that view to say that perhaps we shouldn’t regard this as a sort of an argument or presentation of information, and therefore the listing of things by topics would be against the spirit of what we want to do. Now, that would suggest that maybe the best approach would be the one original: let’s just go in alphabetic order, you see, since some people don’t even know exactly what they’re going to say and some people will say according… what they say depends on what other people will say and so on. Well, all right, then in that case we’ll just go in alphabetic order and Dr Capra is first and Dr Globus is second and Dr Goodwin is third — that will be in the afternoon — and then Dr Robin Munroe, fourth. Now, you’re listed for fifteen minutes.

Q: So you think there’s no possibility that we can get three half hour talks in… (inaudible)

DB: Well, we can experiment with that tomorrow, but the plan will be to do four tomorrow.

Q: When are we meeting from?

DB: I’ll explain all that in a moment, yes. Now, the plan is to meet at quarter to eleven in the morning and I think—Mary Zimbalist, correct me if I’m wrong—three thirty in the afternoon. Was that the plan?

Mary Zimbalist: Yes.

DB: Yes. Yes. Now, we would get about roughly an hour and a half to an hour and three quarters. You see, one thing, we don’t want to go on too long, and also I think we should take into account that Krishnamurti is, you know, he’s already seventy nine years old; he’s in very good health but he needs to rest and we mustn’t put too much of a strain on him. Now, the… so that is the time.

Now, one or two other points. The Canadian Broadcasting Company is interested… is going to use some of this material. Dr David Peat is representing them, and he also wants to take some interviews. I mean, you will decide, I presume, what interviews you want. And the fee… whoever is interviewed, the Canadian Broadcasting Company will give a fee to. I would like to just have everyone’s assent if possible, that we can use this material for radio broadcasting; I mean, unless there are some objections.

Q: (Inaudible)

DB: Now, the other point is that possibly some of the material would be published in book form later and, you see, it would be a lot of work for the foundation to put the book together and I would like to have everyone’s assent in principle, you see, to… that if any of this material were used, they would sign some letter saying… forgoing royalties, which anyway would be minimal if shared among twenty people (laughs). Now, if everybody agrees to that and then if and when the occasion arises, we will send you the appropriate letters. Now let’s see if there are some other points. Just a few more.

In addition to this outing, there will be a film shown on Brockwood Park. It was made a number of years ago so it’s not quite up to date, and it’s not as good as one would like, but we still think it is informative. And I don’t know what date would you say that… (inaudible)

Dorothy Simmons: Monday or Tuesday.

DB: It could be either Monday night or Tuesday night, is that it? It’s about, how long?

DS: Half an hour.

DB: Half an hour. And perhaps we’ll set that… maybe it would be better to set it Tuesday night because some people may take another night to get over the time difference.

Yes, now the only other points: I think not everybody will be familiar with the meal arrangements. The breakfast starts at ten past eight. You can come as late as half past eight. Lunch at one o’clock and dinner at seven. Brockwood Park starts every morning with a brief fifteen minute period of silence where everybody gathers together in the library here at five minutes to eight. Now, any of the members of the conference are welcome to participate, to come in, but I should say the door is closed at five to eight so, you know, if you arrive after five to eight, the door will be closed. But you’re very welcome to come. Now, have I overlooked anything?

Saral Bohm: I don’t think so… (inaudible)

DB: Now, then the only other point is whether anybody wants… I think we’ve covered all the necessary business. I made a few notes on the question itself, you see, and in view of the shortage of time for talking, I was wondering if we would have a brief discussion on the question, or if people are too tired I won’t bother with it. What’s the opinion?

Q: Let’s go on and talk.

Q: I think we could… (inaudible)

Q: Let’s talk.

DB: Right. We don’t want to go on too long because we want everybody fresh tomorrow, so don’t… let’s not start a long… you know, very argumentative discussion, if possible (laughs).

SB: I think… (inaudible)

DB: Oh yes, I didn’t… I overlooked something. At ten o’clock in the morning we meet for coffee in the sitting room of the cloisters. If you don’t know where it is, somebody will tell you. And do we have… do we meet also in the afternoon?

SB: I think immediately after lunch… (inaudible)

DB: And immediately after lunch we have coffee in the same place.

SB: Those who want.

DB: Those who want, naturally.

Q: When are the morning sessions? I mean, eight o’clock is breakfast.

DB: Yes, at ten past eight.

Q: Ten past eight. Then between then and ten o’clock what do we do?

DB: Anything you like.

Q: I see. And then after coffee we begin serious business.

DB: That’s right. We don’t want to push too hard, you see, we want to give people a little leisure to think and so on. Some conferences, you know, just push one hour after another. Now, yes, are there any… Now I take it that we have all the questions… all the necessary information.

Well, I’ll begin to discuss this question, you see, what place has knowledge in the transformation of man and society? Now, I take it for granted that all those present accept that this question is a very significant and relevant one or otherwise they probably would not have come here, but… Now, the notion that man needs to be transformed is really an ancient one. I mean, for a long time men have thought mankind somehow is, you know, inadequate: there’s war and there’s and deception, you know, enslavement, there’s chaos of all kinds. And if you find… the ultimate root is felt by many to be in man himself, that he himself was somehow inadequate. Many of the ancient religions call for the transformation of man. Most of the religions of India, notably in Buddhism especially, call for a very radical transformation of the entire psyche of man or his whole being. Christianity call for such a transformation. It was said, for example, at that time that the kingdom of heaven on earth would be established on, you know, here, not at… but later, after a long time, when the kingdom of heaven didn’t appear, the idea arose that it was somewhere… it would come later somewhere in the sky after death. But Christianity firmly emphasised the need for the transformation man; they said he was in a state of original sin and he had to be saved, and so on.

Now, in more modern times this religious impetus died out but a very similar theme was carried on in a secular way. In this secular form it was felt that… well, perhaps I should also add that religion contained a certain form of knowledge and that therefore religious knowledge was obviously considered to be a part of the process of transformation of man, the acquiring of the proper religious knowledge. Now, this was turned into the acquirement of secular knowledge in the form of science and technology and various other forms, following the Renaissance. Now, I should say, first of all, that for a few men it was felt that a certain kind of knowledge itself would be a transformation; for example, knowledge of the order and harmony of the world, of existence. Say, a few men like Spinoza may have felt like this and to some extent, Einstein, who has said that, you know, the ordinary life is rather petty and confused and it doesn’t mean much but if men get together to study the universe, the order of the universe scientifically, then they really work together and they have a different spirit and in a way they are transformed.

Now, however, only a few people could participate in this sort of transformation and for most people, scientific knowledge was thought to be important for its application; it would remove poverty and ignorance, and this, combined with technology and political change, would transform society and thus transform man. This was the theme of the more modern secular development. At first it took the form of the Age of Reason, that through reason man would be transformed, but this collapsed at the end of the French Revolution. And in the nineteenth century I think that the idea took the form of steady progress, to accumulate knowledge, that we were steadily getting better and better, and gradually poverty and ignorance would go; at least some people felt so, but this began to lose its impetus in the second half of the twentieth century.

By now, very few people have much faith that knowledge will produce this transformation. In fact, there’s a tremendous number of people who even regard knowledge as dangerous, destructive. We are faced with all sorts of problems which are due to knowledge, one of them being overpopulation due to medical knowledge; there’s pollution due to the misuse of technical knowledge; a general decrease in quality of life as traffic, noise and smoke and whatnot—all sorts of things—violence, you know… And in addition to all this, a deeper question has been raised, especially in the USA. They were raising the question, especially the young people: even if the ideal of no poverty could actually be achieved universally, life would perhaps be felt to be empty by many people, that this was not a sufficiently good ideal to really absorb their energies.

Now, it’s clear that we have tremendous technological problems now; they’ve come out in shortages, especially a shortage of energy, shortages of all other things, and we have the general breakdown of the economy, and many people are predicting a collapse of our civilisation. In fact, they have been predicting it for some time. For example, the oil will run out and unless something else is found, there will be a very serious crisis, almost indescribably serious, and yet people have been blithely using up oil, not even thinking about it until the thing is on the edge. Now, if the Arabs had not somehow been brought to constrict the oil supply, we would have just gone on using oil at a faster and faster rate until suddenly the oil would be found to be inadequate and then we would really in a bad way because the oil would be gone and there would be no time to develop another source. In some sense, what the Arabs did gives us an opportunity to meet the crisis sooner, in an easier way.

But anyway, the deeper question is clearly that man cannot cooperate, you see, and yet technology makes the whole world interdependent. And this has always been the question and it has gotten more and more serious the further knowledge was developed. And this is… therefore the crisis originates squarely in man himself: why can’t he cooperate? To get men to cooperate, a real change in man is needed.

Now, Marx, Engels and Lenin aimed, in fact, at changing man through social revolution. They felt that a new order of society would create a new man. And in fact, during a certain period in Russia, they were talking about the new Soviet man, which, however, evidently turned out to be mostly talk. Now, in China we have Mao Tse Tung and others calling for a similar aim: they want to change man psychologically, they want to get people to cooperate, and in fact it does appear that they are cooperating quite a bit better than before. But then this raises another question, you see: are they free? Or don’t they have to accept Mao’s thoughts and opinions rather mechanically? Now, I think that to do this destroys intelligence, and cooperation without intelligence is actually dangerous, you see. What will happen, for example, when the present generation of leaders dies and we must somehow get new leaders; where will the intelligence come which is needed to do this? So what we need actually is to change man, not only to be cooperative, but he shall be free and intelligent all around. That’s the change that’s needed, because mere cooperation can be very destructive.

Now, anyway, it’s clear that over the ages man has somehow had in the back of his mind that we must achieve this; at least many people have had it, the more forward-looking people. And many different approaches have been made over the ages involving the use of knowledge in many ways; some have used the approach of self-knowledge, some have thought of religious knowledge which would change human behaviour, some people thought of technological knowledge, and some scientists now are thinking of changing man in other ways: for example, some people think of changing the genetic structure and making a better man—they call it human engineering—and some people think of changing man psychologically. For example, one might say that the behaviourists think of reconditioning him to make him a better man. And still others think of making a better man… well, for example, there’s an advertisement in the New Scientist… for the New Scientist, which states that new devices are being developed to allow people, by feedback from their own brainwaves, to produce pleasure and gratification at will, so that they will no longer have to bother with all the tedious ways of getting it nowadays, and this will change man.

So this question evidently is an important one. It concerns a tremendous number of people in different ways. Many of these ways have not worked. Some of the ways I have discussed, you can see are very dangerous. And you see, if an intelligent approach to the transformation of man is not found, it’s very likely that somebody is going to attempt an unintelligent approach. Now, so I think that our topic is very relevant, very significant for the situation today, and therefore I then leave it to each person to give his views on this topic and we’ll bring them out into an open discussion.

I think beyond saying also — a point which I forgot to say — that you might begin your talk by giving some idea of why you are interested in coming here; what in your background made you interested, sort of to weave that in somehow, so that we get an idea. This will give us all an idea about ourselves as well as about the topic.

Now, if anybody wants to raise any questions now, you know, which would perhaps not be likely to get into a very general, you know, a long discussion, perhaps we should raise them.

Q: How are we going to manage our discussions so we know that what we’re talking about… what one person is saying, the other persons understand?

DB: (Laughs) Well, that’s really the topic under discussion, you see. If this were achieved, that would be the transformation of man (laughs).

Q: It might start right here then.

DB: Well that’s the whole point, that perhaps if we start doing things intelligently here, that’s the seed of the transformation of mankind. Wherever anybody starts, that’s the beginning.

Q: I…

Q: Can we — excuse me one second — can we interrupt each other… (inaudible)

DB: Oh yes. (Laughter) Now, I propose that during the talks, questions may be raised of information only and after the talk, general principles. So I will be a chairman. I don’t know who will be the chairman for my time but… If you’ll please try not to raise questions of argumentative or of nature of general principle during the discussion because there’s a limited time. We have to get… see, if there were more time then we could do it differently. Right? Now, did you have a question?

Q: I was just wondering about the use of word *intelligent* in this context. I wonder if… I don’t know if everyone else understands… (inaudible)

DB: Well, what shall I say? Let me just take intelligence to be the opposite of stupid or mechanical, for this context. For what I was just saying, that’s enough, you see. In other words, we could say the situation of mankind is really fantastically stupid; if you see what’s going on, what has been going on for five thousand or ten thousand years has been destruction without end over trivialities. Why are people engaging in this unending destruction? Because they belong to certain groups and they say, ‘We want to gain what the others have; we don’t like the others; we don’t agree with them and therefore we have to destroy everything,’ you see. Now, this is sort of childish, in my view, rather childish and stupid behaviour. Now, I’m not trying to use it in a condemnatory way. The word *stupid*, unfortunately, cannot be used because of its associations, except to produce condemnation, but if we had a word that meant stupid, in the sense of the original meaning of the word ‘to stupefy’; the brain is stupefied by the whole situation so it does not make the right action. You see, if somebody, for example, has taken an excessive amount of alcohol, he cannot actually walk around in the right way, and that’s the sort of thing I have in mind, that we are in a terrible mess because there have been ten thousand years of stupidity, which has been passed on from one generation to another in the way of education and so on.

Q: The Buddhists have quite a clever way of saying this. They don’t talk about good means or bad means but rather they talk about skilful and unskilful means. It takes the moral sting out of it.

DB: Yes, I don’t want the moral sting. You see, another way I could put it is, if you would permit me to use the word *art*. The word *art* in the dictionary, its root is a Latin verb meaning ‘to fit’; like the word *artefact* is to make something to fit, article fits, you see; artisan. So… and originally art didn’t mean only producing aesthetically satisfying objects but doing anything that fits in a fitting way, you see, a harmonising, fitting way. Now, so if we could say that we have a lived in a way which doesn’t have… the art of living has not been developed properly, you see; and in this sense the word *inert* has the root in art, you see. Inert means ‘not fitting’ — its basic meaning.

Q: I’m still not too happy or clear, I suppose, about the way you answered Liz’s question; I mean, juxtaposing intelligent with stupid. I mean, the end result of man’s progression in time may be… I mean, we all may want to deem what the result is at this time, stupid but the way man has reached that speck in the timeline may have been via ways that have been very intelligent. I mean…

DB: Well, do you want me to go into that?

Q: If you could, yes.

DB: Well, there are two kinds of intelligence. You see, there’s really general all-round intelligence and there’s intelligence which is at the service of stupid aims, you see. Now, there are people who are very, very intelligent about technological devices but who serve very destructive aims; who just say, ‘Whatever anybody tells me to do, I’ll do.’ He doesn’t think of the aim or the general way it all fits together. And such people have been around ever since recorded history, you see. So, now I say that sort of intelligence is not intelligent basically. You see, it’s like somebody being extremely clever about something that builds a trap for himself. In other words, he’s intelligent in some narrow field but what I have in mind is an overall intelligence that avoids these traps.

Q: Is it more… I mean, avoid an end product that in some ways inconsistent or incompatible with living generally?

DB: That’s right. Or incompatible with right living, you see; living that’s worth living.

Q: But you see, isn’t there a danger? I mean, you just said in answering Fritjof that you don’t want to foist any moral overtones to what you’re saying. Well, ‘worth living’? We are forced in, even at this point, some sort of normative tone and it seems to me…

DB: No, it isn’t normative, you see…

Q: Worth living — well…

DB: No, because… well, it’s a word but look, if you say that going on in some… say, for thousands of years man lived mostly in slavery. Now, most people were slaves and their life was hardly worth living. The masters were being destroyed just by being masters. Their minds were largely destroyed. They had to distort everything to justify it and so on. Now, if you don’t want to use the word ‘worth living’, I don’t know what word, you see, we should use for a life in which people’s main occupation has been to destruction and killing and enslavement. More has gone into that, more energy has gone into that than to almost anything else. Now, at some stage you could say that this whole thing doesn’t make any sense or it’s not something that any reasonable person would want to go on with.

Q: I also, I think, am agreeing. You’re viewing history from a particular perspective. I don’t think I can quite agree that the predominance of man’s energy has been towards terribly destructive things. I think there are very many beautiful things that man’s energy has gone towards too, and somehow that sounds out of balance to me. I don’t think man has been as stupid as you’re presenting him to be.

DB: Well, the destruction has dominated the beautiful things generally, you see. For example, people have made works of art for those who want to… who have become dominant and want to beautify, you know, their houses or whatever it is. Now, the science, or a great deal of science was developed for war or for profit of certain individuals, very limited purposes. Now, so a lot of beautiful things have been done. Well, let’s just take, say, Einstein’s work which is very beautiful and yet its application is dominated by destruction. And in fact, he himself said that if he had to do it over again, he wouldn’t do it; he would become a plumber or something.

Q: Isn’t it possible to see that the whole of evolution has gone on in this rather ambiguous situation, that everything that has developed has these two-fold aspects? In spite of man’s foolishness, he’s evolved to an enormous extent over the last few thousand years. Is it reaching for to think that there is a way of life which will completely change this situation?

DB: That’s the suggestion, you see. That’s what is meant by the transformation of man. Now, that’s what we’re discussing. Now, we’re not going to… you know, I don’t propose that we settle the question right now.

Q: Could I… that’s another point, that this discussion up to now, and the title, man is in the plural, as mankind and society, and when we’re talking about the possibility of transforming mankind, but there’s another problem, which to me is personally more important, that’s the transformation of myself, the individual. And these two things can’t really be separated.

DB: No, they’re both one and the same question ultimately, you see, because the transformation of mankind will depend on the transformation of people.

Q: Yes, but is there confusion here to start talking about mankind being stupid, without really realising that we’re talking about oneself?

DB: Well, if you go into the history, you see, many people have thought of transforming mankind in different ways, for example, politically, and therefore there have been some groups who said each individual had to transform and others have thought of political solutions in which the society would change and this would transform the people. Now, I wanted to consider all of these together, just to keep them in mind together, as the sort of approach that people have tried.

Q: I still think there was something niggling here. I mean, there’s a point that is prior to the point of, as it were, sitting and interpreting history in a way that you suggest and you suggest. I mean, let me give you an example; it’s back to the way you’ve articulated what you mean by stupid. I mean, say we’re not in this building but in a building, say in New York, one of those very high-rise buildings that don’t have… the windows can’t open, they’re all sealed off and the air comes in, it’s all purified and air-conditioned. And someone not familiar with that sort of way of living would come and say, ‘Geez, what kind of a building is this, I can’t open it? And it’s terrible not to be able to breathe in fresh air.’ And then someone who’s a native New Yorker…

Q: (Inaudible) Q: Well yes, but then someone might say, ‘But…’ He might say… well, he’ll say two things: he’ll say, ‘A: you’re living in Manhattan and therefore it’s not so terrible not to breathe in fresh air, but also, the air here, the air in this room, because of all the filters and machinery that this building has is actually purer than…’ and then he’ll give, you know, purer than upstate New York, and therefore what’s so stupid? Now I don’t know whether that’s what you’re meaning but in other words, just because a situation evolves so that it becomes very unnatural, it doesn’t follow that it’s therefore opposite to intelligent. I mean, nothing really hinges on the word *stupid* but…

DB: Well…

Do you want to say something?

Q: I think what David Bohm is saying in this situation is that if we, you know, if we don’t learn to work together in the whole, then when the power goes off, those filters aren’t going to work, and so then, you know, in the short run there’s some demonstration of intelligence but if we don’t use that to look, you know, in a long time span, it may turn out to be short-run intelligence.

Q: Oh, I think we all agree on that very general kind of proposition or principle, but my question and I think Liz’s, and perhaps yours too, was more about, well, just what David meant by intelligent and intelligence. I mean, there are formal ways of articulating intelligence; I mean, that’s part of what I’ve been doing for the past number of years, but I don’t think you had that sort of thing in mind; maybe you did. It seemed that it was normative and if it is normative, then before we start agreeing or spinning out the sorts of principles that we might want to… that we all might agree that man ought to live by, and also instead… before we start interpreting history in a way that would show that this happened here and that happened there, we have to really, if not denude intelligence of your normative overtones, then make it clear how we’re going to explain those normative overtones because…

DB: Well, yes…

Q: May I say something?

DB: Oh, you want to say something?

Q: (Inaudible) …the feeling — I mean, we’re all going to interpret you now for a moment, if we may, as we saw it, but I didn’t get the feeling of normativeness out of what David said but rather that what you were asking for is some kind of flexibility. That wasn’t the only criterion but at least some flexibility that whenever something becomes stupefied, that is, some kind of solidity takes place, that that in and of itself would produce some rigidities that would then lead to stupid behaviour. And so what I got out of it was some… and David was saying that before, (inaudible) same thing, that as long as we can remain flexible in our intelligence then we’re all right. So it wasn’t just a normative statement but almost a biological statement, a plea for flexibility.

Q: So and you’re saying that… I mean, you’re interpretation is…

Q: Yes, that’s my…

Q: Flexibility was what? A necessary but not a sufficient condition of what David meant by…

Q: That’s what I got out of what he said. I’m not sure that I said… (inaudible)

Q: Could I…

DB: Yes.

Q: I think my own feeling is that it’s a mistake to try to define what we mean by intelligence at this stage; that we can see that the way thought has gone until… well, largely until now and still now, has a lot of faults in it, which will lead us into to great difficulties, and so we see that something else is needed and it’s a matter of experiment and inquiry to see what sort of intelligence there might be which would give an alternative way of doing things. Without defining at this stage what is meant by that.

Q: I don’t think I was… or Liz or I was asking about what intelligence is, because that would be a terribly unfair question to ask Professor Bohm. Really what he meant, in a very general way, not what it is but what he means by the concept *intelligence*.

DB: Well look, if somebody takes it as his objective, let’s say to, I don’t know, to get to London, and he sort of goes in all sorts of directions and bangs his head on the wall four or five times, you know, and trips and he generally staggers around and so on, we would say… I would call that unintelligent behaviour, you see, that he is not adopting the right approach, the fitting approach to attain the objectives which he has. Now, I think that generally speaking, the overall behaviour of mankind has this staggering sort of quality. I mean, there are long stretches of intelligent behaviour and beautiful things done but generally they are dominated by and at the service of other unintelligent things such as nationalism, religious conflict, all sorts of violence and hatred and general factors which prevent clear thinking. And also people do things day by day without thinking of where they’re leading, and finally it leads gradually to catastrophe. That’s the sort of thing that’s happened with our technology: everybody doing his little bit to increase production. It has brought about a situation where we’re faced with all sorts of problems that are getting more and more difficult. You see, people say we must have growth, so they just let’s things grow, you see. Now, that I would call unintelligent behaviour.

Q: Unintelligent?

DB: Yes. I mean, I’m trying to give by example an indication of what I mean by unintelligent. I don’t want to define *intelligent* now but I think that, for example, if you have people as in China who are made to repeat Mao’s thoughts and to become skilful at applying Mao’s thoughts to various situations, although that may have a short-run intelligence, in the long run, it’s not intelligent. I’ll try to give a few other examples. Similar things were done, say, by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages and similar are being done now in many countries; they are not actually developing an intelligent solution to the world’s problems, you see. We find that we have inflation all over the world and yet, not only countries can’t get together, the problem is international, it’s very unintelligent to try to solve it nationally, yet in every country we see politicians trying to solve it nationally. Not only that, they can’t even get together within their own country. For example, the Republicans and the Democrats. The Democrats say, ‘We won’t deal with inflation until the next election because…’ for various reasons. Now, so you can go through the situation point by point, analysing it finer and finer, and you find that there is no… very little intelligence in what is being done. It is not relevant to the situation what is being done.

DS: I wanted to say one thing about the title, not about this particular subject at this point, but I find some objection here in the sense we say what place has knowledge in the transformation of man and society — and in a way we’ve introduced the noun *transformation* and we imply some sort of fixed state in both the way we use *transformation* and in the way we use *man* and *society*. And what we really, I think, are trying to talk about is what place has knowledge in the transforming process of a transforming process. In other words, considering man already as a transforming situation, a process that’s always going in a certain direction, that we want to talk about the place of knowledge in those directional situations; to look at it more as a process rather than… (inaudible)

DB: Well, one could do that, yes. I mean, we only chose the title by some words which we thought people would be likely to understand. Perhaps if we used that, it would have been more accurate but then I’m not sure it would have been more widely understood. See, the only purpose of the title was to bring the question before us. We needn’t stick to it after this.

Q: There’s one thing implicit of your definition which I just thought of in light of the discussion now, and that is if what you mean by intelligence is fitting, artistic fitting and in the best sense… (inaudible)

DB: Including logical, rational fitting.

Q: Right. In the best sense of the word, we still get back to the point, fitting to what?

DB: Well…

Q: And then you get into the problem that was raised earlier: what are the goals, what are the standards that we are setting? Are they normative, are they biological or what are they, to which the behaviour should be fitting?

DB: Well, you see, I wonder if we could defer that question, you see. You see, if you have a work of art, the question of what it fits cannot be defined; the whole thing may fit in harmony. But I think in some general terms we could say that there are very few people who would regard the present situation as fitting anything that they think as worth fitting, you see. So by almost any standards you could take, there’s something that doesn’t fit in what’s going on now. I don’t want to try to define it better than that.

Q: Well it could fit itself, in other words.

DB: But it doesn’t really because whatever objective is defined now, you’ll find that somewhere else, somebody is doing the opposite.

Q: Right.

Q: Maybe this is a way of setting out the difficulty. I mean, the examples you gave, going from here to London, and the other more specific examples where you tried to throw light on what you meant by intelligent in terms of these specific activities, it’s fairly easy and indeed reasonable to give the kinds of answers you were giving, because if I set off in the wrong direction, that wouldn’t be fitting. If I zigzagged, that would not also be fitting. So when we’re dealing with specific bits of behaviour, I think what you said is all right. But then I suppose what we’re here for is to discuss a much more general activity and let’s call it, for want of a better word, living, where the description of that is not at all specific. And that’s why I think some of us have worries about thinking that describing the ends of this process which we could call living needs to be spelled out a bit more before we know what sort of process we have to start undergoing. In other words, if I didn’t know the description of going from here to London, I wouldn’t know whether a zigzag would be relevant or irrelevant. Now, living is like when you, say, do a specific activity but don’t give me the description; I wouldn’t know what to do. Now, living might be more like that than like going to London.

Q: If you’re making a work of art, you wouldn’t want a description of what you were going to make before you made it, would you? If you were going to write a piano sonata, would you ask for a description of a piano sonata before you wrote it?

Q: I agree art is… but I mean, what if… if you asked me to prove a theorem, I’d know. If you asked me to solve a solution in most of the sciences, I’d know. If you presented me with a problem…

Q: Well, I don’t think so. I wouldn’t agree.

Q: Not in the sciences. I wouldn’t think so.

Q: Well, I mean, there are activities which I…

DB: You can’t begin knowing…

Q: I mean, look, we could all set each other activities which in our own labs we could go and do. I mean, you know, in other words, a description is specific in that sense. Now, my only point is that living can’t be given that sort of a specific description.

DB: There’s somebody else wants to say something.

FC: I think we’ll have some time to be more specific about what we mean by knowledge; and I think what Julian and most of the people who recently were talking about, when they say intelligence or when you say intelligence, we were talking about some kind of rational knowledge that mankind has developed in an evolutionary way. Now, this knowledge was necessary to survive and was developed for survival, and characteristically it is based on abstraction and it is based on a linear type of thinking, and it is based on a fragmentary type of thinking. I know that you are very concerned with these questions and maybe the psychologists could give us some… or physiologists could give us some physiological basis by telling us what you can say about the brain, that only a small part of the brain is involved in this kind of knowledge. Now, this kind of knowledge was necessary to develop it to survive, but now we seem to have arrived at the point where we have gone sort of beyond the culmination of it, and what we need now to survive is a very different kind of knowledge, a more holistic kind of knowledge which is not rational, or not only rational but is intuitive and much more akin to mystical knowledge and religious knowledge.

DB: Well, that’s one…

FC: I think we could base the discussion… (inaudible)

DB: I think we’re sort of anticipating some of the things which will come up in the discussion, you see. This is one of the difficulties. Now, perhaps I could try to answer the question by saying this, that I presume that everybody who is alive wants to go on living and wants the next generation to go on living, but we are following a procedure which, while people say they want to go on living, it is directed towards death, you see. Now, it doesn’t seem to make sense. Now, by any standards you could take as to what is intelligence, that people say they want to live and yet what they do is very likely to lead to destruction. It has led to immense destruction already. We have the mechanism for destroying practically everything alive today, is the result of the beautiful work of Einstein, partly, and every creative discovery is turned toward a destructive end. The creative discovery, it’s implicit in it that it should be used for the benefit of mankind. It isn’t being used for the benefit of mankind but we don’t find anybody who says it shouldn’t be used for the benefit of mankind; everybody says… every politician and everybody says, ‘We want mankind to benefit but we also want ourselves to benefit, our little group to benefit; we want….’ and so on. These objectives don’t go together and people have not seen they don’t go together, not because their brains are not capable of it but because their brains are too stupefied by self-interest and by thousands of emotions.

Q: That’s a much better…

Q: But also I think because the…

Q: That’s a much better answer. I mean, formally a much better answer than the one you gave before because…

DB: Well, it was implicit. I mean, I’m sorry if I didn’t make it explicit enough.

Q: No, but I mean, now you could link up what you were talking about *vis-a-vis* activities and say that unintelligent behaviour is any behaviour which if generalised will eventually lead to death.

DB: Well, that’s not necessarily so; it leads to death or suffering or to something to which people will generally admit to be… that they don’t want it.

Q: And which probably, in some other way, could probably be described in an non-normative way, which would also be…

DB: Yes, well…

Q: All right.

DB: Well, good. I mean, I think that we’re not in basic disagreement. You see, one of our problems is going to be language. Everybody uses words in a different way. Now, if I could make a suggestion, that we try to appreciate each other’s ways of using words, what is implicit, you see. And since we’re all from different fields and have different personal histories and so on, we’re all going to be using words in rather different ways. Those who know each other will have already understood each other’s ways of using words; those who don’t, don’t. Well, that’s perhaps one point we should keep in mind, but I hope that I’ve made a sufficiently clear preliminary description of what our objective is.

Q: Can I enter a plea, just a plea for someone to include something in his paper, because I know I have a weakness, that I’m about to describe, and maybe other people have my same weakness. I mean, because I’m basically a philosopher of science and I use logic more than any other way of reasoning, I mean, when you use the word *knowledge*, I tend almost automatically to think in terms of propositional knowledge, that is, statements which are mirrors of propositions which are capable of having a truth value. Now, it seems that… well, Fritjof just implied that there’s another type of knowledge…

DB: That’s right, yes.

Q: …non-propositional knowledge, and I would like… I would love if someone in his paper included a discussion of just what this non-propositional knowledge is.

DB: Well, wouldn’t Fritjof be the one?

FC: Yes, I’ll talk about it.

Q: Is that what you’re going to…

FC: Yes. I won’t talk about it in those terms but it will be related to it.

Q: Good.

FC: I think what you said just before, that people act of greed or personal motives to get some profit for the little group, this is true but also they do things like building Concordes because they can’t think of everything at the same time; it’s not only moral motives or sort of bad motives…

DB: Well, I didn’t…

FC: …it’s also because their thinking is structured in such a way.

DB: Well, you’re quite right. You see…

FC: The rational thinking is such that they think only how to get from London to New York in the shortest time.

DB: You’re quite right. I mean…

FC: And they don’t think about all the other ramifications.

DB: Yes. There are many reasons for all this, you see. I was only trying to give a sufficient reason to answer the particular point, you see. Now, as we go along we’ll raise all these other things; I didn’t want to go into too much detail right now.

Q: I wonder if this is one of these other things which we’re going to raise going along on, but it seemed to me that some of the processes which it’s easy for us to look back on now and say are unintelligent in the way that you’ve described it, may not have been unintelligent in that time because given all the options, that particular process may have been the best option for the least suffering at that time. For instance, now in China, I mean, that may have been… may and may still be the best option for the number of people in China to have the least suffering.

DB: I agree that that may be so in that context.

Q: But it seems now that maybe the problem is that there isn’t enough flexibility to see that we’re in a dynamically changing situation, environment, the whole time, so people don’t change from a situation that was at one time a very intelligent option.

DB: Yes. Well that’s another way of looking at it, that people have made steps which were intelligent for that situation and then they remain mechanically attached to that way of doing it, and that means that it was no longer appropriate and it was no longer intelligent — it began to lead to death and suffering and so on. And that’s one of the questions that comes up, that we need… man has to… Now, the point I tried to make is that man has been this way for thousands of years, just doing the sort of thing we’ve been talking about — right? — and therefore the transformation of man would include in part a new man who would not be attached to his ideas; his mind would change far more dynamically and meet the new situation, and therefore it would be no longer necessary to say this is the best that can be achieved for the time, you see. Let us put it that Mao did the best he could for the time because he had to work with people whose minds were very rigid, could only go a certain distance, and that was the most he could do with such people; but if people have a far more flexible, fluid, transforming mind, then much more can be done.

Q: Might the discussions be sufficiently wide even to entertain the question whether your basic proposition was in fact right? I mean, is mankind stupid?

DB: I don’t say he’s intrinsically…

Q: No, or unintelligent? In the sense that fitting things to existing things is part of wisdom and one possible way of viewing transformation of man is not to alter, go around and change the conditions but to deal with the conditions in a manner in which you could deal with it. That is, you float with… when you are surfing, you move with the waves, you don’t go against it. When you want to cut the road, you cut it along the contour rather than go… So that the transformation could be internal, the revolution would be internal and the perspective, the parallax motion rather than actually going from one place to another place. Now, is this a possible view that we… I mean…

DB: Oh yes.

Q: Or would this take us too far away from the intent of the discussion?

DB: No, no, it’s certainly part of a possible deal, you see, that man has to fit himself to the real situation, but the problem is, what is the real situation? Is man intelligent enough to see what the real situation is to which he must fit? If man is not intelligent enough, he is too stupefied — I don’t mean to say that he is intrinsically unintelligent but some things have stupefied him, and I’m not putting any moral sense in it, if I can help it — and therefore his brain isn’t quite working with the freedom that it might and therefore he does not actually see the reality to which he must fit, and therefore he makes a movement that doesn’t fit. This is the problem.

Q: I don’t want to anticipate what you might say in your specific talk, but what keeps coming up here is this problem of goals and objectives and meaning, and you have put forward what seems to be a very limited context for understanding this and that is the context of living or survival…

DB: Oh, I didn’t mean to limit it to that; it was merely for the sake of answering this particular point.

Q: Yes. Just as a rather general question, would it be the case that you would feel it necessary to unfold some kind of direction? Transformation implies goal and direction and objective…

Q: No.

Q: No.

Q: Direction is not goal.

Q: Different.

Q: Transformation involves movement or process, as you put it. And the real question is, do we need to know where we’re going in order to behave intelligently and is perhaps… (inaudible)

Q: No.

DB: Well that’s a question that we might leave for the discussion. You see, we could take several views on that which I don’t know that we could… you know, would be worth going into tonight because it would get us… you know, we’d have to spend the whole night.

Q: That’s sort of what I meant by fittingness; is not to something external maybe but the fittingness has to deal with the fittingness to itself. That may be what you meant by transforming the inside of the person rath er than some external constraint being changed or a goal being set up or anything of this kind but simply that whatever is done is done gracefully. The term grace…

Q: But I think he completely means something else, and I think I may agree. I mean, say we come in a room, a strange room, we’ve never been there before, and we see somebody doing something. That’s all we could say the moment we walk in: he’s doing something. And we’re puzzled, we don’t know what he’s doing. We could watch him for a long time and the pattern, using your words, begins to, quote, “fit”, quote. In other words, we see some recurring patterns. Using your kind of criteria, we could perhaps begin to describe what he’s doing. But surely if we want a full description of what he’s doing, we have to know, as it were, what the end state is. Now, is that what you had in mind? In other words, if we knew what he was trying to achieve, we would then be able to order and make intelligible, explain his behaviour that much better.

FC: And sometimes he might not try anything to achieve. A plant, for instance, doesn’t try to achieve anything.

Q: A plant?

FC: A plant.

Q: Well, that’s a…

Q: Could I give an example of the action you’re talking about? If you were to train to be an actor, in, for example, a method, you may be asked to open a door or to write a letter and everybody would watch you. There wouldn’t… not necessarily be any goal in what you were doing but I think it would be pretty easy to say that what you were doing was fitting or it wasn’t fitting, that you weren’t really opening a door or you were opening a door…

Q: I’m not saying it’s sufficient but, I mean, the fact…

Q: But the action within itself can… doesn’t need a goal or a justification.

Q: No, but the action was opening a door or opening the letter. In other words, there may be a bizarre way, which given a certain context, one would do or not do, but at least the description of your activity would include in some way or other a description of the end product, i.e. opening the door.

Q: What is the end product in what the beautiful music we heard this afternoon?

Q: Well, I wasn’t here. (Laughter) The playing or… well, it’s quite simple. Okay, he was playing, I think, because I sat to someone next to me…

Q: A Beethoven sonata and so on.

Q: Right, he was playing Beethoven.

Q: So his intelligent behaviour was playing that symphony, but what about Beethoven’s original statement?

DB: Yes. Yes, if you want to go into all that, you see, the question is whether a creative action is possible which is predetermined beforehand as to its goal. Now, I would suggest it’s not, that there is a certain category of action that can be determined. But the transformation of man might be creative act, that is, not entirely predetermined or knowable beforehand. But I would have preferred to, you know, leave that come out more gradually.

Q: But surely it’s worth noting that there’s a tension here and now I think it’s a little clearer in my head. I mean, I agree, if one starts talking about artistic activities or activities which are in some way rather non-propositional, you’re talking about something which is a) harder to talk about and b) of a quite different order, of the sort of thing that this gentleman beside me was meaning. Because I mean, the sorts of activities which at least you, David, began to describe; now, those activities which are eventually leading to destruction were propositional; they weren’t akin to composing a sonata.

DB: No. No, I think that it’s not that clear cut, you see; that life itself, people have aims which are ultimately not expressible, and they are carrying out these activities for the ultimate aim which can’t be expressed, you see. Now, you can’t get a clear and sharp division of that kind. But what I wanted to say was, you see, at least if I give my view, that the creative activity, the creative action is, in my view, more fundamental than these other propositional activities, that the propositional activities serve the creative action and not the other way around. And if they don’t serve the creative action, then they have no meaning and eventually they’ll fall to pieces.

Q: But look, how could one’s… Look, here, now, these are your words: ‘Aims which are not expressible’ — and you said these are some way more fundamental than… (inaudible)

DB: Well, they are not really aims even, you see. I mean, you see, I think that we’re going…

Q: But if they’re not — sorry, let me just finish the point.

DB: Yes.

Q: If they’re not expressible, how can we even apply the criterion of intelligence?

DB: Well, I think it’s possible, you see. We’re not actually in communication, you see, because if I could put it that I think what we’re anticipating things that should come up later. You see, I think the attempt to define these things too quickly is going to mostly produce a clash, you see, because each of us is using words differently. Now, some of us want to use words not precisely defined and let them get defined gradually; you want to begin with the precise definition, as far as I can tell.

Q: No, not… No, I don’t… I just want to get some, as it were, anchor point from which I could start… you know, let go and start swimming.

DB: Well, I think it would be better if you would just let go, you see, because… (Laughter) No, you won’t drown, you see. The point is since anyway you’re going to let go, there won’t be an anchor point, you see.

Q: Or a reference point, if you want.

Q: Well, you might let go of propositional calculus as the criterion of intelligibility, for example, which would be…

Q: Oh, I ‘m willing… Yes, yes. Oh yes.

Q: I have been away from academia for nine months being on sabbatical and I’m beginning to remember what it’s like. (Laughter) And I’m beginning to feel distressed because somehow what’s really important, and I think what we probably all agree is really important, isn’t really being talked about. I don’t have any good suggestion as to how we can get to it but I think a number of us, including myself, kind of jumped on you in the typical academic way and began going after you, with your simple title already in trouble, when you gave the title, which is, you know, what often happens. And somehow I think if we could put things in more human terms, more relevant to ourselves as people, we might make better progress than discussing in formal terms as we’ve been doing.

DB: Yes, well, look, could I suggest something like this, that we’re all a whole bunch of very different people with different backgrounds; now, I thought that these talks would enable us all to say something, and the main point is not exactly what we say but rather if people would listen to each other and try to pick up the gist or the essence of it and discuss that, you see, not trying to define exactly because everybody’s got a different way of using language and in different fields there are different ways and so on. Now, see, I think it would be good to begin by just saying we’re listening to the other person; there’s a great deal implicit in what he says; he may not say it exactly right, you know, he may not use the language as well as he should and so on; in fact a great deal of our language anyway is inadequate, and so somehow we’ll try to say what we can, and if everybody would listen, and you see, that’s why I say you should also try, as we were suggesting, to tell why you’re doing it, you know, what’s in the back of your mind and so on, and give some sort of background, and maybe after we give all these talks, you know, and then we can, having a somewhat better idea… everybody will have some idea of what’s in the mind of other people and we can then begin to open out. But I think that if we try to get into this sort of discussion at the beginning, we won’t get very far because you will find that there are twenty people here using language different ways and everybody is going to put terms which are not going to be clear to everybody else.

Now, there is a difference between the technical approach and the artistic approach to the world. The artistic approach begins with a sort of a general… if an artist is learning to draw something, he makes a very general view first and then he gradually articulates it in another picture and another one; he doesn’t try to begin with a precise picture, you see. Now, I think this is what we need here because, you see, life as a whole is too broad for a technical approach. You see, the technical approach is possible for limited problems. And if we could try… you see, in some way I think that it’s an experiment; all these different people, all of us are going to have somehow to communicate. We are faced now with the same problem which is the problem of the world; it’s because of the… the same sort of difficulties that we have are behind the troubles of the whole world. Now, therefore we have to look at this thing more deeply and say we ourselves are involved in the troubles of the world because we are involved in the inability to communicate. And in fact, we are the inheritors of all those troubles because each one of us has been conditioned in a different way by this confused background of the world, you see, so each one of us talks differently and then we can’t somehow manage to communicate. That’s already the beginning of the problem.

Well, perhaps if I could leave it at that because I think the hour is getting late and we’ll start tomorrow morning then at quarter to eleven. But remember we meet at ten o’clock in the sitting room of the cloisters.

Q: I would like to utilise my position, h aving the last name with Z.

DB: Yes.

Q: Maybe I’d to talk for fifteen minutes, or at least keep that open, if there’s time.

DB: We’ll keep it open anyway, yes. Well, you’re on here as a question mark.

Now, could I remind you again to take the same seats again because the microphones have been arranged in a certain way and it will mix things up if you don’t.

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