The Art of Thinking

The Need of Humanised Thinking

Thinking is an art, not a science. One of the greatest contrast between Indian and American scholarship is fact that in America there is so much specialized knowledge and so little humanised knowledge; while in India there is so much concern with the problems of living, while there is not so specialized sciences.

In its every sense, scientific thinking is strictly logical, objective, highly specialized and atomic in its method and vision.  The contrast is in two types of scholarship, Oriental and Occidental, ultimately goes back to the opposition between logic and common sense. Logic, deprived of common sense becomes inhuman and common sense deprived of logic is irreparable of penetrating into natures mysteries.

If one goes through the Indian literature and philosophy one finds there are no sciences, no extreme theories, no dogmas and really no great divergent schools of philosophy.  Common sense and the reasonable spirit have crushed out all theories and all dogmas.

India; therefore becomes a land where no one is trying very hard to think and everyone is trying very hard to live.  It becomes a land where philosophy itself is a pretty simple and common sense affair that can be as conveniently put in two lines of verse as in a heavy volume.  It becomes a land where is no system of philosophy, no logic, no metaphysics, no academic jargon, where there is less academic dogmatism, less intellectual or practical fanaticism and fewer abstract terms and long words.  No sort of mechanistic rationalism is ever possible add there is strong hatred of the idea of logical necessity.  It becomes also a land where there are no lawyers in business life and there are no logicians in philosophy.

The intellect is always held in abeyance by the spirit of reasonableness and still more by the writer’s artistic sensibility.  Actually intellect is distrusted. Logic has its own charm.  I feel the detective stories are most important product of the logical mind, a form of literature which failed entirely to develop in India.  However, sheer pre occupation with logical thinking has its drawbacks. We have come to a stage of human culture in which we have compartments of knowledge but not knowledge itself, specialization but no integration, specialists but no philosophers of human wisdom.

Once a rich man was able to secure the royal cook, who had escaped from the royal kitchen. Proud of her, he issued invitation for his friends to come and taste a dinner by the Imperial cook.  He asked the maid to prepare a royal dinner.  The maid replied, she can’t prepare a dinner.

                    What did you do, then ? asked the rich man. 

                    “Oh I helped make the patties for the dinner”, she replied.

                    “Well then, go ahead and make some nice patties for my guests”.

                    To   his  consternation  the    maid  announced : Oh, no, I  can’t  make  patties.   I                         specialized in chopping up the onions for the stuffing the patties of the Imperial                             dinner.”

Similar condition exists today in the field of human knowledge and academic scholarship.  We have a biologist who knows a bit about life and human nature, a psychiatrist who knows another bit of it, a geologist who knows mankind’s early history, an anthropologists who knows the mind of the savage man; an historian who, if he happens to be a genial mind can teach us something of wisdom and human folly as reflected in human kinds past history; a psychologist who often can help us to understand our behavior, but who as often as not tell us a piece of academic imbecility.

But along with the process of specialization, there has not been the urgently needed process of integration, the effort to integrate all these aspects of knowledge and make them serve the supreme end, which is the wisdom of life.  Human wisdom cannot be merely the adding up the specialized knowledge or obtained by a study of statistical averages, it can be achieved only by insight, by the general prevalence of more common sense, more wit and more plain but subtle intuition.

There is clearly a distinction between logical thinking and reasonable thinking which may be also expressed as the difference between academic thinking and poetic thinking.

The Return of Common Sense

The sage does not talk, the talented ones talk and the stupid ones argue.  Sages talk about life, as he is directly aware of it, the talented ones talks about the Sage’s words and the stupid ones argue about the words of the talented ones.

Man’s love for words is his first step towards ignorance and his love for definitions, the second. The more he analyses, the more he has need to define and more he defines, the more he aims at an impossible logical perfection, for the effort of aiming at logical perfection is only the sign of ignorance.

Philosopher is a man who holds his sensibilities at the highest point of focus and watches the flux of life; ready to be forever surprised by newer and stranger paradoxes, inconsistencies and inexplicable exceptions to the rule.

Truth may not depart from human nature, if what is regarded as truth departs from human nature, it may not be regarded as truth.  It is not the truth that can make men great, but men that can make truth great.

No the world is not a syllogism or an argument, it is a being, the universe does not talk, it lives, it does not argue, it merely gets there.  Reason is but an item in the mystery and behind the proudest consciousness that ever reigned, reason and wonder blushed face to face.

Be Reasonable.

No one is perfect; he can only aim at being a likeable, reasonable being.  Reasonable nations live in peace and reasonable husband and wives live in happiness.  In the selection of husband for my daughter I will have only one standard, is he a reasonable person? I cannot imagine a perfect husbands and wives who never quarrel, we can only conceive of reasonable husbands and wives who quarrel reasonably and the patch up reasonably.  Only in a world of reasonable beings can we have peace and happiness.

A cultured man is one who understands thoroughly the human heart and the laws of things by living in harmony with the natural ways of the human heart and of nature.

No type of mind is so like the extreme right as the extreme left.