Plato was speaking in his own context when he said there were three ways of knowing. The first two - through the physical senses and through reason - are familiar to each of us. The third way, divine madness, refers to a spiritual or divine way of knowing that seemed to rise uncontrollably in an individual. Today we find this idea discomforting. Divinity is something few people talk about at business lunches or on the commuter train or in the check-out line at the local supermarket. Divine madness (or Essence or God) is nonetheless an inner creative quality to which we would do well to surrender if we want to be creatively efficient in business.
Managerial psychologist Harold J. Leavitt has studied this kind of knowing. He talks about pathfinding. He describes three ways of defining your own lifeās voice, or mission. You can be proactive - aggressively seek, air and pursue your problems and goals. You can be reactive - passively adjust to whatever life thrusts upon you. Or you can be enactive - work on a specific problem until you find the right path or solution, trusting that problem and solution constitute a personal dialogue, an exercise in communication between your inner and outer selves.
Leavitt talks about this by referring to a book, Creative Vision, by psychologist J. W. Getzels and Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi:
ā¦ The creative ones are apt to be changed, seventeen times in the process. If you ask the student if heās through, heās never through, and heāll say, āYeah, well, itās better than it was before, but Iām not sure that Iām finished.ā Thereās a hell of a lot of shifting, changing, erasing, painting over, modifying, approaching some degree of satisfaction.
And this kind of muddling-through process - not knowing at the beginning what youāre going to be doing, not being able to say what you are doing, trying a variety of things and finding that some are closer to what you want than others - this is kind of what Iām trying to get at with enactive. That doesnāt mean itās a random process. The fact that these kids are changing things, and modifying things, and doing things differently than they did five minutes before does not mean itās random, or that they donāt know what the hell they are doing. Itās got to be, I think, that they are carrying around some kind of standards, but they canāt really verbalize them or even visualize them clearly enough to say what things ought to be.