Chapter 49 Potential and Gravity

Potential does not exist in the human body, but exists between people or between people and the environment. When the philosopher Freeman was studying at Harvard University, his classmates were all talented for a while.Everyone's IQ is very high, digital IQ seems to be a concrete guarantee of their potential, and the psychology of the students is somewhat innately conceited. But this kind of conceit was quickly thwarted in the first year of freshman, because they discovered that the poet Eliot wrote the great poem "Prufrock Love Song" when he was seventeen, and Mozart even wrote it at the age of ten. At the age of seven, he completed many masterpieces of symphonies.Eliot and Mozart's IQ is not necessarily higher than them, but they are full of brains at the age of seventeen, but they still achieve nothing!

One of Freeman's classmates, who thought he had a talent for writing, confessed to Freeman one day that he might not be a great novelist anymore.Because when he tried to start from the Russian writer Dostoevsky's novel "The Brothers Karamazov", he felt that he was too far behind and could not write well.The man stopped writing novels after having doubts about his own writing potential.For the next fifteen years, his main job was to write advertising articles for magazines such as "Life" and "Time". This is a misunderstanding of potential.Ordinary people often regard potential as an internal concrete thing, like a resource in your pocket, which you can take out and use whenever you like.In fact, potential does not exist in the human body, but exists between people or between individuals and the environment. Just as gravity is a relationship between things and things, potential is a relationship between people and people or between people and things. relation.We are not using our potential, but someone or something outside is calling out our potential.

Buber, the favorite master of Freeman, often said: I hope people will ask me more questions, because when someone asks a question, something that does not exist between me and him appears between me and him, and between this kind of person and Only in the new relationship between people can the so-called wisdom potential of Buber be stimulated.It is a living example that brains need meetings.