A B C D E F G H I J L M N O P R S T U V W

Trainer

If you replace in the quote below “philosopher” with “NLP trainer” you get a lot of insight in the two different NLP trainers that are around. One who only cares about holding on to a vast body of knowledge and another who creates new things within NLP.

When I was younger I worried about what a philosopher really was: for I believed I saw contradictory features in the famous philosophers. Finally I realized that there are two different kinds of philosopher: those who have to hold fast some large body of valuations, that is, of previous assignments and creations of value (logical or moral ones), and then those who are themselves the legislators of valuations. The former try to gain power over the present or past world by summarizing and abbreviating it with signs. These inquirers are charged with making all events and all evaluations up to now easy to survey, easy to think through, to grasp, to manage, with subduing the past, abbreviating everything that is long, even time itself a great and wondrous task. However, the real philosophers command and legislate, they say: this is how it shall be! and it is they who determine the Where to and the What for of man, making use of the spadework done by the philosophical laborers, those subduers of the past. This second kind of philosopher rarely turns out well; and indeed their situation and danger is tremendous. How often have they intentionally blindfolded themselves to stop having to see the narrow margin that separates them from the abyss, the headlong fall: for instance Plato when he persuaded himself that the good, as he wanted it, was not the good of Plato but the good in itself, the eternal treasure that just happened to have been found on his path by some man called Plato! In much coarser forms this same will to blindness rules among the founders of religion: their ‘thou shalt’ must on no account sound to their ears like an ‘I want’ – only as the command of a God do they dare to discharge their task, only as ‘divine inspiration’ is their legislation on values a bearable burden which does not crush their conscience. – Once those two means of consolation, Plato’s and Mohammed’s, have fallen away and no thinker can any longer relieve his conscience with the hypothesis of a ‘God’ or ‘eternal values’, the claim of the legislator of new values arises with a new and unprecedented terror. Now those chosen ones, on whom the presentiment of such a duty begins to dawn, will try and see whether they can’t slip out of that duty, as if out of their greatest danger, ‘just in time’, through some trick or other: for example by telling themselves that the task is already solved, or is insoluble, or that they don’t have the shoulders to carry such burdens, or that they are already weighed down with other, more immediate tasks, or even that this new, distant duty is a seduction and a temptation, a diversion from all duties, a sickness, a kind of madness. One or the other of them may in fact succeed in evading it: the trace of such evaders and their bad conscience runs through the whole of history. Mostly, however, such men of fate have been reached by that redeeming hour, that autumn hour of ripeness, where they had to do what they did not even ‘want’ to do – and the deed they had most feared fell easily and undesired from the tree, as a deed without choice, almost as a gift.

Notebook 38, June – July 1885 paragraph 13