Heraclitus was famous for his provocative sayings. For example: "you can't step in the same river twice"; "dogs bark at what they don't understand"; "expect the unexpected, or you won't find it, because it leaves no trail". Today, more than 2500 years after they were written, his ideas about life, nature and the cosmos remain as startlingly original as ever. Roger von Oech uses 30 of Heraclitus's epigrams as a springboard to innovation. Treating each saying as a creativity exercise, he supplies mental puzzles, amusing ...
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Heraclitus was famous for his provocative sayings. For example: "you can't step in the same river twice"; "dogs bark at what they don't understand"; "expect the unexpected, or you won't find it, because it leaves no trail". Today, more than 2500 years after they were written, his ideas about life, nature and the cosmos remain as startlingly original as ever. Roger von Oech uses 30 of Heraclitus's epigrams as a springboard to innovation. Treating each saying as a creativity exercise, he supplies mental puzzles, amusing anecdotes and intriguing questions designed to topple old habits of thought and fire the imagination.
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Someone who knows me well recommended Roger Von Oech's book "Expect the Unexpected" to me because she knew of my interest in Heraclitus (c. 500, B.C.), an ancient Greek Pre-Socratic philosopher. Heraclitus was a master of oracular, enigmatic sayings. He was known in antiquity as the "riddling" or as the "dark" philosopher. There are no surviving complete texts of Heraclitus. We know of him through brief quotations from other Greek philosophers and writers and from their descriptions and comments on his life and thought. Heraclitus is probably best-known for his doctrine that everything is in flux, in constant change. "Everything changes", he said [panta rhei in Greek) and "you cannot step into the same river twice for other waters keep flowing on and on". Heraclitus was a great influence on other philosophers and writers from Plato and Aristotle to Alfred North Whitehead and Martin Heidegger. I have been fascinated by him since youth.
On the surface, Roger Von Oech seems an unlikely person to write about Heraclitus. Von Oech is the founder and president of a firm known as Creative Think, headquartered in California, which is a consulting firm that gives presentations and seminars to large businesses and other organizations on creativity and increasing productivity. A glance at Creative Think's website shows that Von Oech has written several books and invented a number of gimmicky-looking gadgets with the goal of helping people expand their thinking horizons. He is obviously and engaging and successful entrepreneur. This made me suspicious of the book. What could Creative Think have to do with Heraclitus?
From the book, I learned that Von Oech holds a PhD in the history of ideas and that he has been studying Heraclitus since 1971, while engaged in graduate work in Germany. And his book shows that Von Oech has given Heraclitus a great deal of thought. I was impressed with his respect for and understanding of this difficult thinker. I was even more impressed, upon reflection, with Von Oech's ability and interpret Heraclitus's texts in an engaging, lively way to audiences and people that otherwise would have had no use for him. It takes some bravura to write a self-help book such as this with Heraclitus as the mentor. Von Oech has done it well.
This short book begins with a brief overview of Heraclitus followed by a list of what Von Oech terms "the Creative Insights of Heraclitus", consisting of 30 of his characteristic sayings. Von Oech advises that his book can be read straight through, or that the reader can meditate on each individual saying over time, taking the sayings at random or in some form of order. (The time necessary to think through Heraclitus can be measured in years.) Von Oech then explores each of the 30 sayings individually in brief chapters. It is wonderful that he gives the Heraclitus texts in ancient Greek as well as in English for the reader to see, even readers who know no Greek. He offers a commentary on each text, together with questions, printed in red, for the reader to consider in responding to the text. In a short concluding chapter, Von Oech summarizes the lessons he has taken from Heraclitus.
In his interpretations, Von Oech uses many riddles, puzzles, and stories to help readers see things in a new way. What he says is short, but much of it is useful, and Von Oech ties his message in to the sayings of the Riddling Philosopher. Besides jokes and riddles, Von Oech illustrates his interpretations of Heraclitus from figures as diverse as Thomas Edison and Christopher Columbus to Herman Hesse and the Buddha. He stresses ambiguity, the ever-presence of change, thought, open-mindedness, and the elimination of arrogance. The difficulty of the sayings of Heraclitus mirrors the need of thinking closely to discover meaning.
I have some residual qualms about this book. Von Oech uses Heraclitus largely as a way to help managers and employees become more efficient and creative in performing their chosen tasks. His firm, Creative Think, is workplace oriented. Heraclitus's teachings are broader than this, in that they seem to be directed to challenging the fundamental and unexamined assumptions that people make about things such as the workplace, its values, and the importance of material success. Von Oech for the most part accepts these assumptions and uses Heraclitus within them. (He does make some exceptions. For example he tells the story of a coach of a rowing team who taught his crew to meditate to increase their coordination with each other. The team members did so, but they also lost their competitive streak as a result of their meditation experience.) Von Oech does not expressly ask his readers, as Heraclitus did, to reconsider their lives and goals. Thus he deemphasizes an important theme in Heraclitus.
Von Oech still has written a fine book. It fulfills his goal of awakening his readers to the thought of Heraclitus and of encouraging his readers to think about this great philosopher for themselves. There is a great deal of wisdom in what Von Oech says. In this book as in, I suspect, his lectures and seminars, Von Oech meets his task of improving workplace creativity but he opens the door to wider questions as well. One of the sayings of Heraclitus included in this book is "Lovers of wisdom must open their minds to very many things." So it is. I began with a skepticism of Von Oech and his enterprise, but found myself learning from him.
