Knowledge and intelligence

In the book of “The Analects” (论语) written by Confucius's pupils after his death, there are some interesting discussions about knowledge and intelligence.

In the chapter of Wei Zheng (为政, the practice of government), it describes the relationship between knowledge and honesty as:

“知之为知之，不知为不知，是知也。“

“You know mean you know, don’t know mean don’ know. This is called understanding.”

Knowledge is objective understanding, i.e. knowledge can be divided and categorised into many different fields. However, intelligence is subjective application of our acquired knowledge. To distinguish knowledge and intelligence, we have to use the guideline of honesty. What we know is limited to what we learn and we should not pretend we know the unknown. Only with honesty, we can move forward to study, to learn and to make decision correctly.

The action to acknowledge that we don’t know or don’t understand the situation is expressed by honesty. However, one will need the gut to admit that we don’t know the unknown.

Man has to refresh, to find out the known and unknown and than progress to practice the correct way (行) of learning. This is called “知行合一zhi xing he yi” knowing (the information/knowledge) and practising (using intelligence to make decision) in one harmony. And this is the gateway to transform knowledge into intelligence.

In the knowledge economy, the danger is information overloaded. There are too many information, and it can true, half true and not true. A decision based on wrong or incomplete information will certainly lead to bad decision. Therefore, we have admitted our ignorance as the first step towards the correct way of studying.

The same chapter (Wei Zheng) further explains that to understand the current/new event, one will have to recall the past knowledge:

“温故而知新， 可以为师“

“Refresh old memory/knowledge so as to understand the new happening. By doing so, one can be a (master) teacher. “

The accumulation and progress of our intelligence is based on our ability to recall, refresh and understand old knowledge. Take the nature for example, it is so complicated and confusing and human beings are so afraid of it. However, through experience, observation, and analysis, we can summary the pattern of changes and come out logical rules and principles to predict the future happening.

This results to “one know what is happening in advance” “先见之明 xian jian zhi ming”. Every generation has its trend. What is fashion now may not be considered as trendy or modern in future. Observation of past happenings will lead to our understanding of the future happenings.

The real innovation, in fact, is originated from our tradition. The further we trace our tradition; the chances of us creating innovation are higher. However, any deep understanding of tradition must have rich inner knowledge of the past; again it will have to involve group and team work to build up the “tradition” knowledge. Innovation, hence, is a combination of individual intelligence.