“Watch it now! Watch it!”
He would say it with obvious enthusiasm and kid-like glee.
It was infectious. You could not not be enthralled and intrigued by the man. Well, Actually, no. It was strange, I couldn’t figure out when I was young WHY NOT EVERYBODY was not totally gaga about him and his science. Why is it so?
This is the title of her autobiography.
As she says:
What are you saying? Who am I?
Well I’m me — I’m what is called the power behind the throne. I’m your — your character. Isn’t that what they call it?
Yes, Kate. That’s what we call it. Character. You were certainly an interesting Character.
Character: a configuration of habits.
Oh, but Kate, we have another word that you never knew much about. The word is Temperament.
Temperament + Character = Personality
What you didn’t know was your Temperament. But I doubt if you would care. You had an interesting and full life anyway. However, you might have understood yourself and others a little more.
That was the question he posed to himself.
No, he wasn’t asking the simple, vague, ill-posed, question: what those fuzzy, sloppy thinking Philosophers often try to talk about in volumes of words.
He was, in his mind, asking a precise question. A scientific question. For to answer this question, he had to ask the immediately deductible question: What is life, Not? Both questions are difficult to answer — precisely.
But he wanted to answer, What is life?, precisely, and he did give an answer: in his last book before he died.
But, there were critics of his work, although the vast majority are ignorant of his work.
An unnamed critic remarked: “The trouble with you, Rosen, is you’re always trying to answer questions that nobody wants to ASK!”
… Artisans are definitively practical, that is adaptive, resilient, flexible, hence unconventional and unorthodox, both in the sense of being spontaneously so inclined, and in the sense of acting in ways that only they can appreciate if not understand, given their insistent and persistent adaptive agenda. They do this by adapting their ways of using words and tools to the necessities of the moment that come about when some tactical maneuver goes awry. [Personology page 191]
Each year an individual is awarded from each of the Four Temperaments: Artisan, Guardian, Idealist, and Rational.
The awards are given to individuals who are “famous” (if possible) and have significantly impacted the world, to illustrate and highlight the Four Temperaments. Keirsey Temperament Theory maintains all four Temperaments play important roles in society and we need all kinds of people use their talents.
The selection is difficult, for sometimes Temperament is hidden because we are looking at these individuals from a far. We don’t know the individuals personally, and only through the media are we familiar with these people. The Keirsey Temperament Forum serves as a nominating committee. I am the judge and jury.
Gaia is a tough bitch.
Hot Cold Passion: a passion for science.
She was a Scientist, first.
And she was a Character — a very interesting, and complex character.
Having entered the science community as a woman, when men still dominated science, and being charmed by a huge scientific ego, Carl, she luckily had to explore the backwaters of evolutionary biology at the time, bacteria, not getting much support from him or her male contemporaries. Of course, like all good science, that estuary of knowledge contained biological riches totally ignored by well established conventional scientific community. Like Darwin before, she was sui generis: a driven, feisty, no holds barred, idea brawler — an intellectual maverick — by necessity and choice. Initially ignored, she generated a fair amount of hostility from the conventional scientific community when they were challenged.
And intellectual mavericks, with persistence, are the only type to challenge the major ideas of conventional science, and win — somewhat.
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view – until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” spoken by Atticus Finch, in To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee.
How do you “truly” climb into another’s skin and walk around? It is a hard thing to do, well. For that person may be a different kind of person from you, from a different time, and from a different place.
My avocation since I was a child was as a Viking bystander. My vocation lately has been as a Viking reader of books and people.
One can try to “climb into another’s skin” through watching a movie or play, or reading a book. This is something we can do as humans. We can visit different lands and different tribes – the modern words for “lands” and “tribes” is countries and cultures. We can also visit different “ages” – through movies and living in cultures that are “slower” than your “culture” – although there are limitations and there is a possibility to not really get the “gestalt” of that age and place.
Mostly, we don’t understand “truly” – the Temperament, the Tribe, the Age that is not like us
But we can try.
Here are some autobiographies of the various Temperaments, many from a different time and different place. Climb into the person’s skin, and walk around in it – at least for awhile.
Rationals
Ben Franklin (Inventor)
Mark Twain (Inventor)
Margaret Thatcher (Fieldmarshal)
Ulysses S. Grant (Mastermind)
Charles Darwin (Architect)
Linus Torvalds (Architect)
Idealists
Jane Goodall (Counselor)
Mohandas Gandhi (Counselor)
Jane Fonda (Teacher)
Albert Schweitzer (Healer)
Karen Armstrong (Healer)
Joan Baez (Champion)
Artisans
Katherine Hepburn (Crafter)
Lance Armstrong (Crafter)
Donald Trump (Promoter)
Neil Simon (Composer)
Jim Cramer (Performer)
Bill Clinton (Performer)
Guardians
Barbara Walters (Provider)
Sam Walton (Provider)
Andrea Mitchell (Inspector)
Mike Wallace (Supervisor)
George H. W. Bush (Protector)