What do you call a man who was born with such intelligence and innate intuitive wisdom that he’s never been able to find a teacher who could show him anything that he did not already know?

An arrogant dumbass.

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Do you realize how many people are walking around thinking they’re blessed with this sort of natural insight?

Do any of them grasp how commonplace this conceit is? … and worse how unoriginal and artificial the ideal underlying that conceit is?

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Many people in the world see intelligence as a matter of “who already knows”…

They might let you finish speaking out of politeness, but in their head they’re thinking “yada yada yada” or they’re preparing their condescending retort that shows they already knew what you were going to say.

Can we please start calling these people out? They — most of all have something to learn — starting with their deeply ignorant ideal of intelligence.

After they’ve mastered that fact, we can introduce them to the concept of wisdom, the inverse of knowledge-as-mastery.

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This modern ideal of intelligence is bound up in what the Greeks called episteme and techne — of mastery of fact and method.

The Greeks considered these modes of knowledge to be common — easily mastered by anybody who puts forth the effort.

But what else is there, really, besides these? Subjective opinion and feeling — that is, “wisdom”?

Exactly. There’s more, and it’s up to each of us to find it.

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The most original thing a person can do is to recognize the value of non-originality, of being open and able to learn from another, to learn to value precisely what we are not in the Other, to wish to exceed oneself through participation in the supra-individual. But first, you need to have some idea of what supra-individual is and means and how it is experienced — and that means you’ve got to overcome romanticism.

Once more: Most of us are complacently content with the romanticism we’ve passively and unreflectively absorbed and so we do not question the importance of being independently “enlightened” through our own intuition and intelligence.