The world is plagued with strategists. A search on LinkedIn will produce millions of strategists, from the brand strategist, digital strategist, content strategist, P.R strategist and of course, the junior creative strategist. Among politicians, anything high-ranking, secret or likely clandestine is strategic. In the business circles, people go to break-away sessions and spend several days, mostly brainstorming or partying, and then return with heeps of flip charts that are later converted to documents called strategy. Another common usage of strategy, particularly among academics, is one which implies the means but which something is done. For instance, an academic may talk about a strategy for choosing research questions, when they are actually implying the means by which or an approach to preparing research questions. Is this still strategy? This warrants analysis. What is meant by strategy? What is the most optimum way of formulating a strategy, and what does a strategist do?
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Noam Chomsky, the most cited living academic and linguist of our time, argued that the idea of a national language only came with the rise of nationalism.¹ In an interview with Al Page from the University of Washington, he cited old French villages that were barely a stone’s throw away from one another, yet hardly spoke a common language. He further pointed out that languages change for many reasons, including the rise of new social classes, conquest, scientific discovery, commerce and other influences. Hence, words do not have an intrinsic meaning, except that which we ascribe to them to convey ideas. That is to say, if we agree that blue is green, then we can treat all blue things as green without affecting the underlying reality — as it were, the Blueness or Greenness.
This argument appears truer for objects but less so for concepts. For the sake of clarity, I will begin by distinguishing the two. In the tradition of Karl Popper, John Stuart Mill and Richard Boyd, I shall refer to objects as entities that exist independently of the mind. These entities exist with or without our thoughts, theories or doctrines. Their independence from the mind, or objectiveness, makes it possible to theorise about them, hence they can easily become objects of scientific enquiry.
Concepts, on the other hand, are mind-dependent entities. Whereas a pig is an object, referring to someone as a pig is a metaphor or a conceptualisation of sorts. Evidently, only a thinking participant can be affected by, and act because of, the metaphor. It appears, therefore, that thinking participants impute meaning to concepts. That is to say, concepts do not have intrinsic meaning. Nevertheless, we act upon them meaningfully, which suggests that the imputation of meaning creates a tertiary reality, like the spinning fan effect, where the faster it spins the more solid the blades appear. Concepts are therefore contingent objects that spin up tertiary realities that we engage with indistinguishably from objects.
However, since concepts are mind-dependent, a shifting of the collective mind (or the zeitgeist) would change the meaning of a concept. For instance, what it means to be a man has changed over the years in line with emerging cultural and intellectual trends. In other words, the concept, as a contingent object, changes shape over time. However, the label we give the concept, such as strategy or manhood or marketing, hardly changes. Hence two generations might talk about manhood or strategy and mean entirely different things. There is a difference between the object (whether it is contingent or not) and the label given to the object, and I will show in what follows the complication that arises from contingent objects.
Consider, for instance, that a phone 30 years ago was entirely different from what we call a phone today. However, the meaning of a phone is not ambiguous because the entity is independent of the mind — one can simply point to an object to give meaning to the label. Similarly, the concept of strategy has changed over the years, but because there is no corresponding object, one has to explain what they mean when referring to strategy. However the explanation is itself mind-dependent, and subject to the influences of its time. Therefore meaning of a concept can shape-shift depending on the explanation.
Consider that around 500 BC, the Athenians elected stratēgos, individuals in charge of planning, motivating and commanding military affairs. They were the modern-day equivalent of army generals or chief executive officers. Then centuries later, the French adapted the word [the label] strategia, which traditionally meant the office of the general, into stratégie, which came to mean “the art of the general”² by modern understanding. Thus, the contemporary use of strategy is derived from French.
It is not self-evident, however, what the art of the general actually means. It is clearer what a general is. The word general is short for captain general.³ A captain is a person who takes charge of something. A general is a person who has a broad range of responsibilities. Therefore a captain general is a person who is in charge of a broad range of responsibilities. In the military, for instance, they might be in charge of the overall war effort, including naval, land, aviation and other areas. In business, a captain general is equivalent to a chief executive officer (CEO), duly in charge of a broad range of affairs. Evidently, there is no ambiguity about the meaning of captain general because the word (or label) is used to describe an object — a person and what they do.
However, “the art of…” (in the expression the art of the general) warrants further investigation, perhaps with a short detour down the annals of history. A commonly held view is that the Enlightenment era (1600–1900) greatly diminished the status of the church because instead of faith, people turned towards reason for understanding the world. Hence, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) famously proclaimed that God is dead and we have killed Him. In his proclamation, Nietzsche was sending a stern warning that with the death of God follows the death of objective morality; in other words, the loss of a central place, as it were, from which people derive their sense of right and wrong. Thus, Nietzsche warned that without God, man will lose a deep sense of worth and meaning, and as a result, some people will make gods of themselves and want to lord it over others. In his analysis, Nietzsche predicted the rise of totalitarianism, which indeed ravaged the world after his death; most notably expressed in Nazism and Stalinism, and others might include Maoism.
Nevertheless, the devaluation of the church did not change people’s yearning for redemption. Hence, artists throughout the Enlightenment era toiled and often reached the pinnacle of their craft, and in the process touched the depths of our souls to somehow console or redeem us from the great void. According to Roger Scruton (1944–2020), art became the rescue vehicle. Inadvertently, art and aesthetics, particularly romantic-era art, became interwoven with references to souls, God, love and other transcendental yearnings. For the most part, today we regard great artists as endowed with supernatural abilities. We conceive of them as having the rare ability to enquire into the great beyond and return to articulate for us, mere mortals, the nature of our souls and the enduring mysteries of life. Thus, in grappling with understanding the art of the general, one can be forgiven for succumbing to the seductive notion that strategy is some kind of alchemy: an occupation, as it were, that is reserved for the chosen few with ineffable talents.
Ironically, the meaning of art was completely different in the 18th century when the French used it. The process of creating art was fully subscribed to the intellectual paradigm of the time — the scientific method. Consider the work of a famous artist who lived at the dawn of the Enlightenment age, like Caravaggio (1571–1610). He is famous for killing a friend in a brawl over an argument about tennis. His life was dramatic, full of controversy, violence, riches and poverty. In many ways, his life was the same as his paintings, many of which were destroyed by churches because they misbehaved in the grand scheme of biblical art. Caravaggio strayed from depicting biblical figures as pure and saintly. Instead, “for models he used crude peasant types and then dramatised them by means of harsh light and violent contrasts.”⁴ His works sent shockwaves throughout the culture of religious art and pioneered the school of realism.
His instrument for creating shocking and hyper-realistic works was lighting; in particular, a technique called chiaroscuro. The technique imitates a strong single light source that casts dark shadows in the background while dramatising often unrefined facial expressions, bloody daggers, heads being cut off and obscure figures in the background. Caravaggio perfected the technique, essentially refining it to a dogma imitated by artists to this day. Filmmakers, photographers and even YouTubers use the technique to add more drama to their work.⁵ Today, Caravaggio is revered as a painter who challenged the status quo and contributed the notion that even saints are merely fallible human beings.
However, the irony is that Caravaggio used an extremely precise, dare I say, scientific approach to creating his paintings. The process included inviting models into a dark room and carving them out with a harsh light. Then he made rough sketches, which he refined over several iterations to bring his final paintings to life. This scientific approach to creating art was not unique to Caravaggio. Artists during his time worked rigorously to develop and perfect their various techniques for producing effects in their work. For instance, consider Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), who dissected corpses to understand anatomy and thereafter produce figure drawings and paintings par excellence. The same applies to other great artists of old. When studying how they worked, we find that there was little mystery in their process. If anything, the mystery is in understanding the source of their motivation and obsession with bending the arc of reality with their work.
Contemporary art movements are the exact opposite of the realism of Caravaggio and his contemporaries. For instance, Mark Rothko’s (1903–1970) art is critically acclaimed throughout the world, with collections held by royal families and national museums. However, compared to a Caravaggio, it is a slab of paint on another slab of paint. It is abstract art, for sure, the process of which is inspired and mysterious rather than procedural and scientific. And so art has two meanings. The contemporary meaning posits the artist as a member of the occult, the mysterious and the divine. The contemporary artist is a shaman, a seer, a person of mystery, and we do not know how they do what they do; they are magicians. They are gifted. But the artist of old was a scientist — an enquirer, a labourer and an inventor. The artist of old is human, all too human, pinned by the weight of the world and doing what they can, if not to escape it, at least to portray another world in which one might find solace, or to rebel against the order. The artist of old is one of us.
In the context of strategy as the art of the general, we can appreciate that there are at least two meanings of the word art. I argued here that when the phrase “the art of the general” was minted by the French, it could easily have meant the science of the general, by today’s standards, given that artists were more like scientists, in line with the intellectual era of their time. Even by a measure of common sense, military affairs could never be left to generals who conjure the spirits to bring about plans to defeat an enemy. Yes, rituals were deeply embedded, but generals were expected to be realists. For instance, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War makes the point of using spies and other techniques to get first-hand information, and using that intelligence to make firm plans. In a sense, the classics advocated a scientific approach to developing strategy.
Let me conclude by saying that strategy as a concept is different from strategy as a label used to describe it. Since strategy is a contingent object, contingent on the thinking participant and therefore on the zeitgeist, one is enjoined to survey its meaning carefully, as it may shift to match the context or the epoch in which it is used. With this in mind, our understanding of strategy derives from French parlance. The French spoke in terms of “the art of”, and in fact, it is from them that we now have Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. However, the original title translates more accurately as Sun Tzu’s Military Methods. As a consequence, strategy gained an ethereal standing: something done by the gifted few. I contend that this is a problematic view of strategy. To the contrary, I hold that strategy is better understood as a kind of scientific endeavour, rather than a creative or “artistic” one in the modern sense. What is considered the art of the general, or The Art of War, would be more fruitfully understood as the methods, practices, techniques or, better yet, the science of the general.
Until Next Week.
Vusi.
P.S. In next week’s post, I will get deeper into the principles of strategy. I will ask about the limits of strategy or, in a practical sense, at one point one should no longer regard an endeavour strategic.
References,
- University of Washington, The Concept of Language (Noam Chomsky). Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdUbIlwHRkY
- Online Etymology Dictionary, “strategy | Origin and meaning of strategy by Online Etymology Dictionary,” Online Etymology Dictionary. Accessed: Jul. 22, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://www.etymonline.com/word/strategy.
- Merrium Webster, “Definition of CAPTAIN GENERAL,” Merriam Webster. Accessed: Jul. 22, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/captain+general.
- https://ericwedwards.wordpress.com/2013/08/02/the-art-of-caravaggio/
- I. Kraguljac, “THE IMPLEMENTATION OF CHIAROSCURO IN,” p. 83.
