[Buddha-l] Enneagram and Buddhism

[Erik Hoogcarspel]

Richard Hayes schreef:
> On Sat, 2009-01-10 at 01:55 +0100, Vicente Gonzalez wrote:
>
>   
>> thanks so much for the link. Some names appearing in that text are
>> quite popular in the Spanish speaking world. Probably the Enneagram
>> it's just a remake of kabbalistic stuff. It is not strange that such
>> thing comes from South America. There is an important amount of
>> new-age ideas arising in that area from 70's.
>>     
>
> There is an informal logical fallacy known as the genetic fallacy. It
> consists in dismissing something because of its origins. The reason it
> is fallacious, of course, is that things tend to evolve after they are
> originated, and evolution sometimes brings improvements.
>   
This argument is fallacious in itself, because if the improvements are 
great we should be positive about the improvements. But no improvement 
makes up for a lousy idea. Example: all the complicated theories that we 
invented in order to make up for the absurdities of the original theory 
of creation of the universe in 6 days did not make it any better.
> The enneagram of personality that Riso and Hudson discuss, especially in
> their book The Wisdom of the Enneagram, 
>   
This proves my case. Anyone who writes a book titled 'the wisdom of this 
and this model' proves himself to be a complete nutter. A drawing or a 
model has no wisdom. Wisdom arises in people who unlike this Riso and 
Hudson have the ability to think.
> Riso and Hudson make the claim that human beings at their very best are
> nurturing, honest, compassionate, curious, trusting, cheerful,
> courageous, peaceful and healing. 
>   
Well that's new!
> It's interesting that when Richard Rohr, a Franciscan, presents the
> enneagram of personality as a tool in Christian contemplative work, he
> claims that Christ did not have a enneagrammatic personality type. 
>   
How interesting, another nutter claims to know something about the 
character of a shady legendary figure and he should be interesting 
because he's a member of the Franciscan order?
>   
>> Probably that people made the same thing, and today the Enneagram is
>> passing into psychotherapy.
>>     
>
> In her book on the Enneagram, Helen Palmer has an appendix with data
> from various empirical studies done by psychologists. She seems to be
> especially interested in finding correlations between enneagram
> tyypology and the Myers-Briggs Type Index and several other
> psychological persoanlity typologies.
>   
If you look for verification there's plenty.
> It may be worth noting that Riso and Hudson and Helen Palmer present the
> enneagram almost entirely as a tool for better self-understanding (of
> the sort that Socrates, the Stoics and the academic skeptics would
> admire). One will find nothing at all in their work that makes the
> enneagram resemble astrology, numerology, necromancy, geomancy or
> oneiromancy or anything having to do with the occult or oracles.
Now you forget that Socrates called all models and biasses doxa 
(opinion) and claimed that he had only one wisdom: being aware of his 
own ignorance. He never used any model. If he would have like numbers he 
certainly would have mentioned them.
Perhaps the writers you mention give some decent advice between the 
lines, but an enneagram is a graph, a figure with nine points. It relies 
on a metaphysics of the number nine. Apart from this metaphysics there's 
no reason why there shouldn't be 143 different character types or 31. If 
you like Socrates or Stoa read them, it doesn't become any better 
because of the number nine.  

-- 


Erik

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