Thoughts on How To—And How NOT To—Solve Problems

            Problem solving requires analysis, study, understanding, and most important of all, ideas. There must also be a willingness to consider, develop, and actually try the new ideas that come up in any attempt to solve problems.

             Sometimes developing the right ideas requires coming up with entirely new concepts, or new ways at looking at old ones. Here’s what American philosopher Jacob Needleman said about them in 1982:

“Concepts are, so to speak, problem-solving devices, the internal equivalent of technologies; they are the technologies of the mind-machine. Concepts, theories, hypotheses, distinctions, comparisons—all these may be taken ultimately as instruments for organizing perceptions into logically consistent patterns called explanations. But they do not and cannot awaken in man a new quality of feeling or perceiving, a new organ or faculty of awareness. Concepts are no more nor less than tools by which man combines or analyzes that which he already knows through perceptions. If man’s perceptions are limited mainly to the external senses, concepts can do no more than organize the material collected by the senses. Concepts can never reach beyond the level of perception at which man lives. Ideas, on the other hand, evoke, support, and require a higher level of awareness itself.”

            But as German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche pointed out in the 19^th century, some people should be kept away from problems, and from those who are actually trying to solve them:

“There are horrible people who, instead of solving a problem, tangle it up and make it harder to solve for anyone who wants to deal with it. Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all.”