Margaret Mead Extolled the Value of “Spiritual and Mental Ancestors”.
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The Life of the Mind: Hannah Arendt on Thinking vs. Knowing and the Crucial Difference Between Truth and Meaning
“To lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions [would be to] lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
UPDATE: Since the publication of this piece in 2015, I have written about other excellent picture-book biographies of Edwin Hubble, Corita Kent, Keith Haring, Maria Mitchell, Ada Lovelace, Louise Bourgeois, Wangari Maathai, Virginia Woolf, Galileo, Nellie Bly, Paul Erdos, Louis Braille, Mary Lou Williams, John Lewis, Muddy Waters, Paul Gauguin, and Jane Jacobs.
Margaret Mead extolled the value of “spiritual and mental ancestors”
Seneca saw in reading, one of the oldest and most reliable ways to identify and contact these cultural ancestors, a way of being adopted into the “households of the noblest intellects.”
And what better time to meet such admirable models of personhood than in childhood, that fertile seedbed for the flowering of values and identity?
"A century after Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer, asserted that “everything is naturally related and interconnected,”
Tagore considers how this unity of the elements of existence — of observer and observed, of physical and psychic — illuminates the human experience:
The truth, which is Man, has not emerged out of nothing at a certain point of time, even though seemingly it might have been manifested then. But the manifestation of Man has no end in itself — not even now. Neither did it have its beginning in any particular time we ascribe to it. The truth of man is in the heart of eternity, the fact of it being evolved through endless ages. If Man’s manifestation has round it a background of millions of light years still it is his own background. He includes in himself the time, however long, that carries the process of his becoming.
Relationship is the fundamental truth of this world of appearance.
Complement this particular portion of The Religion of Man with Karl Popper on truth vs. certainty, Lewis Thomas on the transmutation of ignorance into truth, Adrienne Rich on what “truth” really means, and Hannah Arendt on the crucial difference between truth and meaning.
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