The Eighth Kind of Intelligence

Two and half decades ago Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner defined intelligence as “the ability to solve problems or to create products that are valued within one or more cultural settings.” As the main outcome of his investigations on the subject, Gardner published in 1983 his then well-recognized theory of multiple intelligences, which posited the existence of seven different types of this unambiguously human characteristic. While having some commonalities among them, each kind of intelligence manifests in different ways; a person can excel in one or more forms, be inferior or faulty in another one, and a good average in the remaining. According to their mode of expression, Gardner denominated the seven intelligences as (1) linguistic, (2) logical-mathematical, (3) musical, (4) bodily-kinesthetic, (5) spatial, (6) interpersonal (the understanding of other people) and (7) intrapersonal (the understanding of oneself).
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Several years later Gardner considered that in his original proposal the talents of many bright men, such as botanist Carl von Linnaeus, biologist Charles Darwin, paleontologist Stephen J. Gould and entomologist Edward Wilson, did not readily fit in any of the seven definitions; the common thread of their accomplishments was their contributions to the understanding of living organisms. In 1998, after a careful revision of his theory, the psychologist added to his list an eighth kind of intelligence that he denominated naturalist and defined as “the capacity to recognize and classify the components of the environment.” In my interpretation, the wisdom of Siddhattha Gotama, the Buddha, is a clear expression of this naturalist intelligence.
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The theory of multiple intelligences has been the subject of much controversy; many scholars currently consider it of questionable value. As a minimum, I consider the theory thought-provoking and interesting. I admire Gardner’s boldness to categorize such an abstract trait as intelligence. Despite its opponents, I like the categorization, among other reasons, because it allows room to recognize as outstanding intelligences the bodily coordination, the musical skills and the spatial abilities of many dancers, singers and sportsmen whose life styles, measured against generally accepted behavioral standards, lead most everybody to judge them as foolish if not idiotic.
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Let us now return to the naturalist intelligence of Siddhattha Gotama. The Teachings of the Buddha are the fruit of his continuous observations of the physical environment and the modus operandi if his mind. By doing so, he reaches brilliant conclusions which natural and social sciences would confirm as valid many centuries later. The Teachings of the Siddhattha Gotama document premises, such as the impermanence and instability of everything in the universe, the role of attachments and aversions in our behavior, the “illusory” nature of our self-sense, the nonexistence of metaphysical beings associated to live beings, the indivisible unit of mind and body, and the human nature of morality, which today are of wide acceptance in the scientific media. Furthermore, by acknowledging the reality of suffering—the stressful nature of existence—the Buddha anticipates by longer than two millennia Henry David Thoreau’s famous saying when the North American philosopher states that “the mass of human beings lead lives of quiet desperation.”
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What is most remarkable in the Teachings is the fact that its proponent does not have on hand any laboratory, library or research methodology; the first attempts to systematize a scientific method did not see light until the eighteenth century. As the naturalists studied by Howard Gardner, Siddhattha Gotama detects patterns of organization and behavior in the communities of live organisms; for the Buddha the community is the very same human society he dwells in and the observed organisms are his own condition and his own contemporaries.
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The theory of multiple intelligences might eventually vanish from the academic world; it is also quite unlikely, considering how abstract and perplexing are our mental functions, that no classification of human talents will ever reach universal acceptance. But, as defined by Gardner, the naturalist intelligence of the Buddha will be more and more recognized and appreciated by cognitive sciences. The Eastern word that identifies the Teachings of the Buddha (dhamma in Pali language, dharma in Sanskrit) is the most important concept of Buddhism. It is not then surprising at all that in the western translations of such word the expressions “natural law” and “natural order” come up as its most accepted synonyms.

Gustavo Estrada
Author of Hacia el Buda desde el occidente