I met a teacher who repeated at the slightest opportunity that “it was intelligent to be in the crowd.” It was rubbish, but that contributed too. According to this maxim, being in good relationship with the world, having empathy with it, having a healthy relationship is a sign of intelligence. There are others. Historically and retroactively, intelligence has been attributed to the mastery of formal capacities such as memory, computation, information control (modern times); discursive knowledge (enlightening); Prudence (Baroque culture); representational power and ingenuity (various renaissance); Argumentative and logical (back to what was called the Middle Ages); Political skill and practical protection of one’s own interests (Rome).
That is, each culture calls intelligence what it is interested in. But on the whole, it is observed that intelligence in all its meanings and moments represents goodness. Each individual or group that has skills appropriate to their time is considered to have received something good. Therefore, intelligence achieves goodness. And this will be its main quality in principle. He who does not accept kindness is not intelligent.
The But what is good for oneself, what is good for others, or what is good according to the ideals of the world in which one lives? It is immediately appreciated that goodness, even if we knew in depth what we are talking about, is insufficient to fully describe the conquest of breadth that we associate with intelligence.
Let us say that what we consider good must first be good for the individual. How do we know it’s really good for him? Obviously, we need to say something else.
What follows from goodness, or what goodness implies, is some form of happiness. An individual should be happy with the good he has achieved. Naturally, he had to know how to do it first. This wisdom to accept what is good, accompanied by happiness, is the best possible definition of intelligence. And it is definitely related to knowledge. It has its roots in the classical Greek world, in the Platonic theory of knowledge, and in the common sense of any citizen of any age.
A person who is not happy cannot be intelligent except in terms of simple social integration, within the prevailing criteria, always his own. Recognition, prestige, wealth may surround a certain talent, but that does not make it considered intellectual. Intuitively, our judgment of personality traits also takes into account the degree of happiness.
Now we have to look at the concept of goodness and happiness on which this argument is based, which, as already said, is classical.
First of all, what is good for one must be good for others. From a political point of view, that is, from the point of view of coexistence in a community or polis, what is good for one citizen must be good for all, and vice versa. Otherwise, you should forget kindness (and coexistence). The point is that the knowledge of this good is not given spontaneously, as, for example, we are given evil. What is wrong, we immediately know, as Kant suggested, because a simple commutative principle will suffice to understand it: would you like to be done to you?
The good must be conquered, and for this educational institutions (such as the Greek “paideia”) are necessary to consider society in the context of a willing and organized society. And it’s not guaranteed. The only thing that is guaranteed, or that individuals can guarantee themselves, is its implementation. Intelligence consisted in not ceasing to seek that which is known to be unattainable, but which is necessary for the good life of all. In this aspect, love and knowledge belong to that class of things which are only partially or temporarily attained, but which never cease to be sought, and which are regarded as good. Almost all cultures call this search similarly: the path. From East to West, from Tao to Pythagoreanism, from Confucius to Plato, the endless path is the only one that leads the wise to truth.
Psychologically, what is good for a person is not so easy to find. Not the easiest. We spend our lives in trial and error, and it takes time, if ever, to find something that provides some performance and prevents harm. Choices of work, love, desires: it is difficult to find those places that we can finally say are our authentic places.
As for happiness, it should be distinguished from ecstasy and joy, and conceived as a way of coping with life’s pains, as well as successes and conquests. Adjust them without destroying the person. The Greek word for happiness is eudaimonia, which translates to having a good daimon. The word “daemon”, which would enter the literature as a precursor to demon, actually means divine or relative to the divine. Socrates used it to refer to the divine within each of us and described it as the inner voice that stands between us and actions that harm us. “Daimon” is negative, it protects us from danger, just as the Semitic name for Satan refers to the inner adversary of God himself.
If we look closely, it is a restrictive word that suggests possible danger and the inherent difficulty of life itself. You are not happy outside of life, attached to fame or simply experiencing success, but inside, that is, you are experiencing pain, loneliness, separation and loss in many forms. A happy person is one who reasonably accepts life as it is. In other words, the intelligence that is reflected is the unconditional acceptance of existence. And this can happen only because life is understood, penetrated, absorbed. Or as we can infer from the very term we use, from the Latin roots, probably derived from “legere” – to choose, to read – because we can read life. For this reason, an intelligent person can comfort, help, suffer, and know that these are fundamental lessons that he can take from the world and that he simply needs to live.
A smart person chose good and is happy. In this regard, there is no greater contradiction than talking about “artificial intelligence”. But that’s how the world goes, as Mephistopheles said.
Source: El Diario
