When a person stays above a conflict in can mean any number of things. It can mean that someone is an outsider and can safely ignore it. Or it can mean that though he is involved he does not have anything important to lose. Or that he is unable to understand or influence the outcome of the conflict, and is resigned to living with the outcome, whatever it is. Or that he can see that the conflict is inconsequential, and that its outcome will affect nothing (which is often a pose of those who actually do not understand a conflict). Or that he already knows the outcome, and knows the conflict is irrelevant. Or that the outcome will ultimately be decided by himself, because he hold the power to impose his will.

Yet, none of these are really “above”. They’re either removed from the conflict, or passively involved in it, or actively involved but in a position to prevail.

To be above a conflict, a person must see the limited validity of all sides of a conflict, which means to understand the full rightness of each position and the sense in which each position is not right enough. In other words, being “above the fray” is a function of dialectical thought. However, because people who have never thought dialectically and lack awareness of the possibility of dialectical resolution as well as the experience of this dialectical depth and height (which is simply a position one takes along the dimension of depth that permits an exteriorized, synoptic survey-view of things understood from the inside), the expression is leveled down along with other similar formulas such as “overcoming” (which becomes a synonym for defeating) and “getting over” things (which means simply getting accustomed to or distracted from a problem), or having “deep knowledge” (which means simply very thorough and detailed factual and practical knowledge in some area).

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To test someone’s depth, don’t look for quantity of information, but capacity for grasping a situation in terms of multiple perspectives and possibilities.

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A physicist can have vast knowledge of his subject, and incredible mastery of the concepts and methods, yet have no depth of knowledge at all. A freshmen physics student who is unable to perform in the lab or answer many basic physics questions might have very sparse and flawed knowledge of physics, yet possess deeper understanding of science than many professional scientists, by virtue of his liberation from naive realism.

When an object encounters against an impenetrable barrier, it tends to compress into it, and then expand against it. It is possible that the very best scientific laborers are the most shallow, but thorough and disciplined thinkers. It might be that the best revolutionary scientists are the ones who were the greatest dupes and suffered the most dramatic disillusionment in respect to naive realism.