Trained Thinking

[alanajoli]

One of the things I've been doing while I haven't been on livejournal is planning a new mythic home game. Several of the players I was interested in bringing into the game are fans of Norse myth, which is one of my weak spots in my myth studies, so this is a good excuse for me to expand my horizons. As we're doing the set up, a lot of my ideas about myth studies appear in the e-mails or in conversation, and something interesting is happening: I'm remembering that most people, even those well versed in mythology, don't have the same background in mythic analysis that I do, and that some of the concepts that I take for granted these days about sacred time/space (Eliade) and the evolution of consciousness (Barfield), are, in fact, foreign ideas. That people have pretty much always thought the way we think now is a basic assumption that I've had trained out of me. I'd just completely forgotten that it is a basic assumption, probably for most of the academic world.

But just like I've been trained to think of the history of thought in a non-standard way, I suspect there are a lot of ways in which we're trained to think in modern academic systems that aren't necessarily the way we'd think without the training. I was considering the Socratic dialogues I read in college this morning, and I remembered that within them, logic was used to show that knowledge existed outside of man, independently, and could be accessed, with the proper lead in, by even the simplest child. But later use of logic and reason, most specifically in the scientific method, doesn't have the same assumption of form, from what I understand. Applying the scientific method is a comparatively new way of thinking about the world -- the people who first applied it (arguably Muslim scholars in the 11th century, but it didn't get picked up in a broad sense until much later, possibly post Newton in the 1600s) knew it was a new way of thinking at the time. They were changing the way people think.

I recently had a conversation with a prof about how associative thinking is a style of thought that also has to be trained -- not everyone can do it naturally. Being able to look for similarities and group them together -- even if they have absolutely nothing to do with each other (though they might!) -- isn't something that all people do automatically. Robert Graves certainly did it on his own, and The White Goddess is a great example of associative thinking, as well as what happens when a poet eats a lot of mushrooms and thinks about myth on a Mediterranean Island.

This makes me wonder quite a bit about the ways people thought before academic training was as widespread as it is now: the way you'd be trained to think would likely be various rules of how to get on with the spirits around you -- leaving milk out for the brownies, etc., etc. The Puritans were terrified of the woods when they arrived in the Americas, if Hawthorne's writings about the subject have any merit. Why? Because it was unknown? Because it was wild? Because it was the domain of people other than themselves? Did they lack the training to think about it, because it was something they hadn't encountered before? Or had they, in fact, been trained to think about it as something to fear?

It also makes me wish I'd been keeping up with my Breakfast with Barfield project, which has, sadly, fallen by the wayside. I'm reading quite a lot of books for the Mythopoeic Society Awards lists, and much of my reading time has been with those titles rather than my normal TBR pile. (Luckily, the two have intersected quite a bit.) Hopefully, I'll have the chance to discuss more of these concepts with both the folks from different academic backgrounds, as well as the students who will have just covered evolution of consciousness before we go to England in May. I'll actually be visiting Mark Vecchio's Mythic Imagination course next week, so it'll be nice to have the refresher!

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

So often though, in schools, you get the false Socratic method, where teachers ask painfully leading questions to try to nudge children in the direction the teachers want them to go. They don't have the patience (or to be fair, they're not given time and permission to have the patience) to let the children truly explore. They're in a hurry to have the students uncover the right answer.

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that the dialogue that I remember wasn't kind of leading as well. ;) In fact, often when I've used the Socratic method in the past, I've had a little manipulative intent behind my questions. This is, perhaps, utterly defeating the point of the thing.

[breathingbooks.livejournal.com]

That's what I remember from some classes. I like playing with given ideas best, but some profs wouldn't give me full ones to dismantle and rebuild and they wanted to nudge me into speaking certain ideas out loud under the annoying pretense I wasn't just Giving the Teacher the Answer (it didn't work; indeed, I took wicked pleasure in seeing how long it took them to snap and just say the thought themselves).

I had some who were good at it though, and one in particular who encouraged us to spin deeper into whatever tangent interested us at the moment. The key word being "us" though, and except for questions like "Can we have an extension on the paper?" I don't think any class is ever interested in the same questions. The Socratic method seems a rather one-on-one thing, and even then if the person leading it has a rather subjective destination in mind...

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

LOL!! I love the idea of goading them until they come out with the right answer!

(Sorry my response is so slow--I wasn't getting notifications of replies until just now, due to my stupid e-mail...)

[dcopulsky.livejournal.com]

I am in that class this time!

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

Hurrah! I shall see you then!

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Fascinating--and sometimes too, the rubrics of what's considered scholarship are different. Nowadays, in the United States and Europe, people value making new contributions, uncovering new things, and spreading knowledge. But in the past in Europe and other places, knowledge was often hoarded (the way, say, trade secrets are kept today), and it was about preserving and transmitting that knowledge, unchanged, to the designated elect.

Your musings on why the Puritans reacted as they did to the New World forests are interesting. I guess some reactions people have may be instinctual, but most of our reactions are mediated by culture and are learned, and then on top of that you can put academic training.

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

Nowadays, in the United States and Europe, people value making new contributions, uncovering new things, and spreading knowledge. But in the past in Europe and other places, knowledge was often hoarded (the way, say, trade secrets are kept today), and it was about preserving and transmitting that knowledge, unchanged, to the designated elect.

I've been thinking of trained thinking in terms of class as well -- growing up in a place that has long prioritized educating everyone (in order to make democracy work) makes it difficult to get a grasp on what it would mean to have a very small, elite, educated class, which would have been the case for much of history. (Some people would suggest we still have such a thing, of course, but I think you see where I'm headed. The difference between having the majority of the people in your country attend some type of school and having the majority trained in a single trade implies drastically different ways of thinking, and a huge difference in the transmission of information.)

[lyster.livejournal.com]

On the subject of the New World & older ways of looking at the forest, a friend of mine who's very into sociology and the environment pointed out to me that if you look at 19th century naturalist writing you see descriptions of beautiful rolling valleys and smokestacks, both marked as positive, because the smokestacks are man making his presence felt on a vast an unfeeling wilderness &c.

I should really check out Barfield at some point, given what you've written about him. Most of my thinking on these subjects comes from Xunzi (an old Confucian philosopher, ~4C BCE) and a bunch of German theologans writing in the first part of the last century - Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann, and Rudolf Otto, among others. You should really check out Otto's Idea of the Holy, which discusses sacred time and space on the road to talking about the phenoomenology of Holiness; the first four pages of Bultmann's essay "The New Testament and Mythology," meanwhile, break open the question of shifting world view in the context of the Christian theological and mythological universe. Very, very cool.

Also I've got a theory about milk and brownies, which mostly amounts to: cats are household gods. I'll write this up on my own blog rather than keep eating up your comments section, though.

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

if you look at 19th century naturalist writing you see descriptions of beautiful rolling valleys and smokestacks, both marked as positive, because the smokestacks are man making his presence felt on a vast an unfeeling wilderness &c.

Oooh, yes, that makes perfect sense given the world frame. The shared worldview (what Barfield would call collective representations) behind the smokestack bellowing smog are so much different from that era to this one!

I will definitely have to pick up Idea of the Holy. It sounds right up my alley. Adding to memories so I don't forget!

[dqg-neal.livejournal.com]

I'm not familiar with Barfield at all. Some day I'll have to get a reading list from you.

What is the Mythopoeic Society like? I've heard about it but I didn't know anyone that was a member.

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

It's lovely! :)

The long answer is that I've mostly been involved in the discussion on the mailing lists, which I very much enjoy; reading the fiction/poetry journal they put out once a year; and reading the book reviews in the (semi)monthly newsletter. I attended MythCon last year, which was my first academic conference, and it was really overwhelming--so many really brilliant people all there to talk about myth and fantasy and tropes in novels -- particularly focused on Lewis and Tolkien. I didn't realize quote how Lewis & Tolkien centered the group was when I joined, but I've learned quite a bit about both authors.

They're generally quite negative about the movie adaptations of the works of either writer -- at least the vocal members -- which I understand but find a little too one-sided at times. ;) Otherwise, however, I've found them very open to exploring ideas and sharing their knowledge.

And, of course, now I've volunteered to read a lot of fantasy books for the awards process, so I'm involved on that level, too.

Re: owen barfield's recent novels

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

I haven't, and alas, I've yet to read them! I'm buried under the MythSoc piles at the moment, as well as my regular review books, so it may be a time before I get to them. When I get a chance to read them, I *definitely* will mention them here.

[breathingbooks.livejournal.com]

This is fascinating. If you ever have time to give intro-level book recs, I'd be most interested.