Thinking...and thinking about thinking

Seeing Rodin's The Thinker outside The Kunsthalle in Bielefeld, on a recent visit to Germany, I couldn't help thinking about thinking.

Viewing the sculpture, I imagined that it might be difficult to think creatively in that posture. Yet Rodin was clearly an authority on creative thinking, as was his subject here, the poet Dante. We can take it for granted that, they know a lot more about it than I do.

The Dante figure known both as The Thinker and The Poet was originally intended to form a central part of Rodin's Gates of Hell, in which case constrained thinking, and depressive rumination, which is my problem with the pose, might seem entirely appropriate for the context, if not necessarily for thinking in general.

Yet, thinking in general is what the sculpture has come to represent. so, what does it communicate about thinking that continues to resonate with 21st century viewers?

Well, look at those muscles! Don’t they assert the unity of thinking and doing, that thinking is work, that work is thinking and that mind and body are one system? If so, this is particularly resonant for us, within the grip of a technological rationality, which separates thinking from doing and attempts to mediate them through controlling.

I find myself questioning this separation, also in its organizational form: strategic thinkers at the top of a hierarchy with operational doers at the bottom and tactical managers in between. Rodin’s sculpture expresses a greater wisdom.

Is it the separation of thinking and doing that leads to the unintended consequences of so many contemporary projects, whether oceans with more plastic than fish, or customers receiving worse service as a result of an "improved” customer service proposition?

I think that Rodin’s Thinker argues for a re-connection of thinking and doing, as if learning really is embodied and that “knowledge is only a rumour until it lives in the muscle”.

Nevertheless, the image may well have its limitations. Could it be thought of as suggesting that thinking is male or that it is heroically individualistic? Ways of thinking about thinking that are in need of being re-thought.

What interests me most about thinking about thinking is that 1) it is possible to do it at all and 2) thinking awareness can be helpful in challenging our own unproductive thoughts and feelings.

I am surely not alone in sometimes, for example, getting angry about my own getting angry, and isn't that a similar pattern to thinking about thinking? Or maybe I become sad about getting angry, and then feel increasingly unhappy about that.

Awareness of the levels of thinking involved could make the difference between thoughts and feelings running away with me and me breaking free from them. Thankfully, another possibility is to stay calm and composed about my own getting angry and silently say to myself "it's OK to feel angry about this", which seems like a more helpful strategy than the previous two.

It appears to me that awareness of levels of thinking is necessary to create a "stop moment" in relation to escalating patterns of depressive, paranoid or vengeful thoughts and feelings.

It is possible to think differently, and this itself creates a different way of thinking and feeling.