Abstract
This chapter treats the problem of the multiform nature of human intelligence. On one the hand, this connects everything to everything, as occurs in the hermetic tradition, and, on the other hand, these connections are checked very attentively according to statistical and formal logic rules, as scientific reasoning tries to do.
This makes human thought very prone to errors, given this proclivity to the connection and association of ideas, but also, under particular conditions, makes it capable of analyzing and correcting them. It would be impossible to find new solutions if human thought did not possess this proclivity to associate, but it would also be impossible not to be seduced by plausible theories if the second capacity were not present. This chapter presents an overview of these different human capacities, even connecting them to brain functions, and shows how narratives are at the meeting point of different types of thought. The narrative understanding of the other, in fact, is the crossing point of a different multiplicity of interpretative processes.
“Sing in me, Muse! And through me tell the story of that man skilled in all ways of contending, the wanderer, harried for years on end after he’d plundered the stronghold of the proud heights of Troy”
(Homer, Odyssey, I, 1–3)
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Smorti, A. (2020). Man of Multiform Ingenuity. In: Telling to Understand. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43161-7_9
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