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Trained Thinking
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!
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!