Two of the important themes of this blog are “character” and “how we think.” If you look at the tabs cloud in the sidebar you’ll see that Character and Thought patterns both have high values. But until this week I hadn’t put these two themes together, as in “the character of thought.” It took something Alan Jacobs wrote in his book, How to Think, for me put these two together.
As Jacobs is thinking about the importance of character to quality of a person’s thought he writes:
… learning to think with the best people, and not to think with the worst, is so important. To dwell habitually with people is inevitably to adopt their way of approaching the world, which is a matter not just of ideas but also of practices.
Alan Jacobs. How to Think (p. 87)
Our practices and our ways of approaching the world, especially when they are habitual, live in the world of character. My approach to the world and my practices are both an outgrowth of my character and a reliable way for others to understand who I really am at heart.
What form is to body, character is to spirit … the form of the spirit, that habit or mould into which the feelings, principles, aims, thoughts and choices have settled.
Horace Bushnell
And as all material objects in their forms, so the soul has her beauty in the character.
Within the whole of my character, my thoughts also have a character. My mind has a way of approaching a subject or an idea or an experience, whatever is there for me to think about. My mind has practices which I repeat over and over again. There is a character to my thought.
Here, in no particular order, are some of the ways the character of my thought tends to lean:
- toward concrete and away from abstract
- toward visual and away from verbal
- toward circular and away from linear
- toward synthesis and away from analysis
- toward listening and away from planning what to say
- toward slow and away from fast (Kahneman’s System 2 more than System 1)
- toward embodiment and away from headiness
- toward a network and away from a center
- toward improv and away from scripts
- toward the detective and away from the prosecutor
- toward the desire to learn and away from the desire to be right
- toward uncovering and away from covering
- toward the depths and away from the surface
- toward nouns and verbs and away from adjectives and adverbs
- toward multiplicity and away from dualism
That list betrays its last tendency (and a few of the others) by placing all these them all on a spectrum instead of a color wheel. There are limits to how I can express these thoughts in words. Hopefully you get the picture. And I hope this is able to give you some sense about the character of my thought.
How would you describe the character of your thought?
What is it about the character of a person’s thought that attracts you?
