On ‘emotional intelligence’
I said this on Twitter, amid the criticism Xabi Alonso was receiving as Real Madrid manager:
«Gestionar el vestuario» implica decirle a los jugadores que las ruedas del tren son cuadradas (como hizo la señora esa en televisión hace poco). Si no entienden cómo son realmente las ruedas, el problema es el entrenador, que es un mal gestor y no tiene «inteligencia emocional».
[‘Managing the dressing room’ means telling the players that wheels on a train are square (just like that woman on television did the other day). If they don’t understand what train wheels are really like, then the problem lies with the manager: he is poor at man-management, lacking ‘emotional intelligence’.]
While sweeping up the pollen balls at work, I remembered the crazy man who was fishing in the bathtub, described by Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus, and I found a connection with the topic of these companion essays.
I deny that types of intelligence actually exist — although I do concede some provisional, superficial value in the Spanish saying that follows, as a convenient shorthand for certain curious kinds of behaviour:
Listo para los polinomios y tonto para los recados
(Brilliant at polynomials, hopeless at running errands).
I understand what’s meant, I find it funny, and I appreciate it provided it isn’t taken literally; literally speaking, there is only intelligence, in the singular. Someone who is truly intelligent is intelligent at everything (both in ‘theoretical’ and ‘practical’ matters — quotation marks in keeping with Aristotle’s view that theory is itself a form of praxis, indeed its highest form).
The thing is, when it comes to solving a mathematical problem (like a polynomial), THE GOAL (the purpose/intention) is IDENTIFIED and clear to everyone — whereas, for many other human activities, the goal can be a mystery to the one who observes them and tries to interpret them from the outside (so to speak), however sure this observer (lacking the necessary data and the humility required) may be that he has correctly read the other person’s behaviour.
You know the story of the crazy man who was fishing in a bathtub. A doctor with ideas as to psychiatric treatments asked him ‘if they were biting’, to which he received the harsh reply:
‘Of course not, you fool, since this is a bathtub.’