Mastering Mind

Four Forms of Human Thinking

The human thinking force operates in different levels of syntactical, semantical, pragmatic, and psychological complexity.

On the one hand, there is mechanical thinking, a mental action that produces rigid processes, a sort of mineral mind that performs operations based on distinct, discrete entities, like the integer numbers, with clear-cut, simple mental identities and is closed to the environment. Mechanical thinking operates in systems of symbolic abstractions.

An example would be the so-called logical Modus Ponens, at the very heart of all logic and mathematics:

In system S, A implies B.

A obtains in the system.

Therefore, B obtains in the system.

Mechanical thinking occurs is an Überlebenswelt (what is over the Lifeworld) of formalized syntax, semantics and pragmatics, and psychological processes do not belong to the system.

We also have vital processes of thought, with much more fluid identities of its elements. These include the processes know as allegories, metaphors, and morphisms in general. This level requires a semantical complexity unknown to the mineral thinking of formal logical calculus, or of our simplest syllogisms. Vital thinking proceeds by association and morphisms of objects and subject according to the proximity in space-time and memory. Its morphisms work by a constant act of suspending and abstracting identities: the whole is taken for the part and the part for the whole. Vital thinking is closer to what we call magical thinking, but goes far beyond that. The likeness of forms, or even of attributes produce exchanges of identities, physical proximity, and distances are extrapolated to other types of relationships.

Consider for a moment Gongora’s famous metaphor: “(…) juntaba el cristal líquido al humano por el arcaduz bello de una mano(...)”, that we could translate as "(...) the liquid crystal joined the human crystal by the beautiful pipe of a hand (…)". The sentence is describing the action of a girl drinking water. The liquid crystal, water, joins the human water, saliva, when the girl drinks water taken with her hands. Such a thought adds different semantic layers and transfigures the scene, the very common scene of someone drinking. The mechanical action has been vitalized. When we read Gongora, actions are projected into another space, a very human space, even in its extreme transformation, showing to us a legacy of images and worlds of meaning that open up for us a new emotional dimension. It is creative thinking, though it tends to become mechanical and lexicalized, its fluidity tends to become mineral thinking, as we see in proverbs and poetic figures of speech (allegory, metaphor, metonymy, etc.)

Vital thinking occurs in a Lebenswelt (Life World) system that it is open to an Unterlebenswelt (Under the Life World). It is open, and the psychological subject -individual and collective- is at the center of the processes.

There is also a third kind of thinking force operating in us that surpasses in complexity the vital and the mineral-like forms of thinking, for it includes them and recapitulates them in a higher setting, and ads something new. We live in complex social structures, built upon complex narratives of identity that include complex and sophisticated emotions. Those structures of thought, let’s call them purely mental, require the previous ones, but it operate with them in terms of harmonic forms, constructing mediating processes, inter-human, human-environment, human-cosmos. It is a self-conscious force of thinking that at its highest peak operates with identities and differences in an aesthetic fashion. Purely mental thinking is a force of integration and balance. It is the thinking that we see in the most inspired forms of art and music, but also in the most inspired forms of philosophy and mathematics. It is a thinking that strives for freedom, that has freedom as its driving force.

Finally, there is a fourth kind of thinking force -yet rather uncommon though it has been going on for quite a while. At its simplest expression, it operates based on what we could call “intuition”. The term is not so good for it is semantically ambiguous. It is not intuition as a kind of fuzzy and imprecise feeling, but rather the knowledge of something through a direct grasp of it, as if it was already familiar and has a meaning, though hardly translatable to a Lebenswelt language. It is knowing by continuity of being. I understand life because I am life, I understand what time is because I can apperceive myself. Such an understanding is not purely based on the information of my senses, nor is the result of my inferences, neither in the intellectual social structures that provide me with a narration of identity. I understand myself by being myself. As a condition for intuition, there are two forces that are needed for its opening up: freedom and love. Freedom is the conviction of a deeper psychological identity than the identities of my social personae. An identity of active will. Such an identity is the foundation of any mask identity and not a particular development of them. As a feeling, freedom is experienced as psychological expansion and unrestrained will. Love is a psychological undefinable. It can only be grasped through supramental thinking, though we can project it upon psychological mental thinking through the idea of freedom. You cannot have a psychological image of love unless you have at the same time a supramental idea of freedom. In this sense, when you love you are thinking through a supramental process that blurs common sense notions of identity.

Freedom and love are thought to be moral constructions, but even if we can find involuted forms of these human forces in previous stages of Life-Intelligence, they become driving forces of a clear and powerful form of thinking, that we may call “supramental”. Thinking itself then transforms into a new sense-organ. What our senses are for our dealing with physical forms and matter, supramental thinking is for our dealing with new dimensions in our being, the dimensions of archetypal thinking, which includes new basic units and processes of units for the thinking flow. But we will not discuss any further supramental thinking in this course.