The third facet of thinking.

 I saw a video on YT that featured a short AI generated summary narrative of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance. It gave me insights that I did not appreciate at the time I read it classical thinking is the motorcycle (a logical organised machine) and romantic thinking (the art of riding and being at one with the machine). It was obvious as the story progressed  that separation of the two ways of thinking was a more recent phenomena and bad thing.


At a point well into the book Robert introduced a third theme of ‘quality’ this played with my brain and, like space-time,  I could sometime see it but not quite grasp it. I actually finished the book with a bit of confusion that I have pondered since. The AI put it in away that made sense by mentioning spirituality as it described quality. 


As I reflect on my life so far, I set out, as a classical thinker. There was a period of time when classical immature attitude had me look down on my student colleagues doing other subjects like history and philosophy thinking the world was built on engineering. I had an appreciation of books, art and music but always felt I had no ability to be a romantic thinker or doer. But the world of romantic thinking developed as I begun to take an interest in literature and history. This developed where I begun to embrace and enjoy it and incidentally putting the book into practice as I currently master riding my motorcycle.


The AI put it in away that made sense. A sense that I have been looking for and the if ‘quality’ is substituted for ‘spirituality’ then does this mean the triangle of thought is complete?

Comments

  1. Clay Lowe11 February 2025 at 08:58

    Do you think people are hardwired toward one or the other? i.e., classical thinker vs. romantic thinker? I know we have the capacity to do both as human beings, but I imagine, just like personality preferences, one has a preference for one over the other and therefore leans more towards their preferred style of thinking. I've always been a romantic thinker. I struggled to get through West Point, which has a bias toward classical thinking.

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