It took a moment for me to realize that this wasn't totally obvious, and that one might have to explain this. It is an oft forgotten fact that what one does not know, one has no appreciation of not knowing. While rational thinking is highly requested in students of all ages, it is seldom, if ever, thought. Explaining how to think is often an abstract affair, and educators seem to shy away from the abstract. To make something abstract seems to somehow make it "less real". But I'm afraid it isn't nearly that simple.
The abstract categories are those with the biggest scope. Their properties are elegantly encompassed in the expression "to fathom". When your ideas can reach into the depths of your mind, you have command over it from shoal to shore, from surf to sand. You may learn these by comparing many concrete examples, but it is the abstraction of the shared ideas which make you connect them in a clear manner.
Clear thinking is also a word often used but seldom taught. By it we seem to mean an ability to discriminate between different ideas. This realisation is counterintuitive but powerful: Discrimination is a mode of definition. To say what something is not, is to, in the same stroke, tell what it is. A simple example is the mother asking her son if his sister drew that nice train on the wall. The admission that she didn't implicates that it was he.
Already we are beginning to see the uses of some training in rational thought. The ability to think with speed and clarity. Or in short - to be clever. Students of the social sciences, (also for some reason called the soft- sciences), are often blamed for being inept at mathematics - and thus useless in any "serious" work. It is sadly under-communicated that social scientist are the quickest to adopt, use and teach the more complicated and interesting concepts. This skill is as invisible to the layman as mathematics - but also under the additional concealment of the use of an everyday language. (Those who have suffered the weight of reading an overly pretentious social scientist know what harm the diminished feeling of self-worth in a subject such as anthropology can do.)
Oh well - I can see you yearn for concrete examples. So I will provide you with a list.
- To protect yourself from the effects of political jargon.
- To form informed opinions of subjective matters, such as justice and love.
- To analyse your own fears and sorrows, and thus often dispel them.
- To increase your rate of learning.
- To better understand the fine-arts - increasing your appreciation.
- To write better.
- To find out and sort what matters to you in life, and what matters to society.
Rational thinking is the key to opening up all other intellectual fields - and that is why you should learn it. It is the honing of the sword of truth, the buffing of the spectacles of appreciation and the sowing of the seed of good humour.
A word of warning to the wise. Thinking is not something you just do when you see the problem, it is a habit - which by the learned is called meditation. Good luck to you in your intellectual pursuits.
