What if everything a solitary mind can think or accomplish has already been thought and accomplished?

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Most of the meetings I have been in have been an aggregate of solitary minds. It goes one of two ways, depending on whether the group is more intuitive or analytical: Either 1) one or more intuitive individuals conceives a unified vision and attempts to win support from the group for that vision as conceived , against competing visions, or 2) a group analyzes a problem into component parts and makes decisions on each part, disregarding organic unity of vision, in favor of rational unifying devices, typically systematization (for integration) and standardization (for consistency).

Neither autocracies nor committees, however, are capable of giving rise to truly collaborative unified visions — ideas with the inner coherence of individual thought, but exceeding the limitations of an individual mind.

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My faith (a belief I hold solely by personal inclination) is this: All human beings are finite. Every human being stands beyond every other human being in some respect. If we experience as divine that which is beyond our own finitude, then every other human being’s eye radiates a bit of beyond.

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I told my daughters this about seducers: If you think you are organically invulnerable to seduction, you are vulnerable. Only by knowing you are vulnerable to seduction and consequently taking it seriously enough to learn about how it works and how to resist it do you actually become immunized.

Something similar holds for truth. If you think you are organically blessed with knowledge of absolute truth (a.k.a. “Truth”), you will remain ignorant — not only about particular regions of the truth that others know and that you do not, but worse, of the peculiar characteristics of ignorance, which is the most important thing to understand if you are serious about knowledge.