Ponder it for a while. Perhaps in trying to figure it out, you are doing what The Thinker is doing.
Presumably he is having thoughts. Perhaps talking to himself. Maybe, but is that all that he is doing? A greenback dollar is a piece of paper but also more than that. What exactly is he thinking about? What is he trying to achieve?
Suppose a teacher has set you a math problem. You are trying to figure out the answer - an answer that is already known by the teacher. But is The Thinker a student? If not, then who would know the answer to his problem?
Maybe the problem has no known answer, or is not well-defined or has never been posed before. If so, then The Thinker is more like an explorer. Perhaps he doesn't know what the hoped-for destination looks like. But maybe he's had some experience in this kind of territory in the past. He makes many wrong turns but also sees some promising avenues.
Either way, he has not yet reached his destination. The discovery of any new place first requires a journey.
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A reflection on Gilbert Ryle's The Thinking of Thoughts: What Is 'Le Penseur' Doing? and Thinking and Self-Teaching.
Kierkegaard had an interesting view on learning as a journey, "One cannot seek for what he knows, and it seems equally impossible for him to seek for what he does not know. For what a man knows he cannot seek, since he knows it; and what he does not know he cannot seek, since he does not even know for what to seek". (which I suspect is resolved in a way similar to Zeno's paradox).
ReplyDeleteSocrates also had something similar, noting how a child could be shown to have an understanding of a certain proof (if I remember correctly) simply by the teacher asking questions. This was meant to show, it seems, that the soul already knows everything through contact with the ideal Forms.
It is strange that a new idea can appear within our mind, merely by thinking. Not just a new but reasonable idea, such as from abductive reasoning, but an idea that seems to be a leap away from existing set of ideas we carry. I remember a story about an adult deaf person who had previously only known language as something to be mimicked, suddenly coming to the realization that words were *things*... and by the time he could talk about the experience was unable to return to think about the state of mind he was in before the sudden realization.
As it happens, in his 'The Thinking of Thoughts' essay, Ryle suggests that Socrates is just postponing the knowledge question, not answering it. That is, did the soul think through the answer or did it recall the truth from something else? And so on in infinite regress.
DeleteThe thinker is a great icon... to me it implies that it is quite a serious and intense process, but some of the best thoughts come when not 'thinking' about a problem or an idea... it may arrive via serendipity or an abstraction while playing sport etc..
ReplyDeleteIt also reminds me of one of mum's sayings - sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits :-)