A Two-Legged Stance

The unique perspective which All-In offers to its clientele can best be grasped by attending to literary studies. The All-In slogan “See the forest and the trees” rehearses a fundamental principle of an academic discipline called Hermeneutics. This is a highfalutin term for the art, the discipline or the science of textual interpretation. Obviously, therefore, Hermeneutics is the fundamental work of literary critics. The utility of this strange term, in this context, is because of the language it spawns concerning the so-called “Hermeneutical Circle”. Again, this can be very simply summarized as a back and forth motion between the overall subject of a great literary work, and the masses of details which would inform epic novels like Gulliver’s Travels, The Great Gatsby, The Lord of the Rings, and Catch-22. In order mentally to organize the massive number of particulars in any superior novel, the reader has to have an overall sense of what the work is about, however preliminary. Now the reader has a way of approaching the vast forest of detail which sustains the unity of these epic writings. But then, as you become more familiar with the mass of detail, of course, your perception of the work as a whole is altered, which, in turn, again, alters your grasp of all the detail. This polarity, this back and forth motion between the overall view and the embrace of the infinite particulars which reciprocally inform each other, means that your comprehension of the work enlarges both with respect to its fundamental themes and its more particular incidents, vignettes and characters. This back and forth form of reasoning is what the philosophical tradition terms “dialectic”.

There has already been a reference to the Italian political thinker named Machiavelli in the literature produced by All-In. This is appropriate, because in his most famous work, The Prince (1513), Machiavelli explains to the Florentine head of state, that even though he, Machiavelli, is only a low-level functionary, he does, indeed, have the genuine capacity to advise princes as rulers. Machiavelli’s reasoning, I believe, is sound. As he explains (in his Dedication) to the dominant member of the de’ Medici family of his day: if you want to produce a painting of a mountain, you need to adopt the perspective provided by standing in a valley. And, if you want to comprehend a valley, artistically, it is best to seek the elevation of a mountain. Machiavelli may be standing at the bottom of the valley, politically speaking, but that is all the more reason that, from this vantage point, he is able to advise princes; and conversely, as Machiavelli says: “to know the nature of the [common] people well: one must be a prince” (tr. By Peter Bondanella).

My understanding of the All-In approach is the endeavor always to have these two points of view simultaneously: one in the valley looking up towards the peak, and the other from the summit looking down into the valley below. Both perspectives are vital. In the same way as we need to grasp the whole to understand the details, we also need to immerse ourselves in the details, so as not completely to misrepresent the whole. The loss of either side of this “delicate balance” means that one’s clientele are left with an incomplete picture, where strategic opportunities cannot be grasped, and the stubborn impediments of the nitty-gritty are never properly tackled.

Music is another instructive aspect of our culture which is pertinent to this double-sided way of interpreting the things which we most fundamentally wish to investigate. In 1980 Christopher Page founded an English vocal ensemble called Gothic Voices. The Medieval period of European history moved from plain chant (Gregorian chant) to polyphony, the latter term forming the basis of the most common distinctions of all vocal music, viz. soprano, alto, tenor, and bass. In his husbanding of the type of later Medieval (Gothic) sound that Christopher Page was trying to imitate and recapture, he made a most remarkable discovery: if Page happened to be concentrating on what he calls the line of each voice, he sensed that the polyphony emerged more effectively; if, on the other hand, he happened to be concentrating on the homogeneity of the sound, Page found that the individual voices were becoming more prominent. In his own words, Christopher Page explained [Gramophone Magazine, October 1989]: “It’s been my experience that, in fact … the more homogenous the sound, the more you hear the harmony … [and then having established the harmony] paradoxically, the more … pronounced [the awareness of] the difference between the parts.”

These three examples are profound reminders from the tradition of the vitally two-legged stance that All-In is offering whenever its team undertakes to analyze any corporate planning or opportunities. You have to have a sense of the whole before you can begin to align the parts; but you are also required to have a true knowledge of the endless details, if you are to provide anything of value in assessing the whole. There is only one thing of value in effective consultancy, and that is a commitment to see the forest and the trees, both together and individually, all at once. To enable a forest to flourish, you also have to know how to secure the welfare of each and every individual tree.

Dr Thomas Curran is Associate Professor of Humanities at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. At King’s, he serves as Chair of Faculty, Clerk of Convocation, and Associate Director (Students) of the Foundation Year Programme (FYP).

His chief research interest has always been early 19th-century German philosophy, with a particular emphasis on Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of religion at the University of Berlin. More recently, his emphasis has shifted to questions of “intertextuality” in Dante’s Divine Comedy — that is, how Dante uses (and transforms) his great precursors (Aristotle, Vergil, St Thomas Aquinas) both to shape his epic poem and to give it a distinctive structure.

Tom is always interested in exploring how modern popular culture and practices can be informed (and reformulated) by reference to the great philosophical and literary tradition that we have inherited from the ancient Greeks.

Image: Caspar David Friedrich: Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818

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