I attended my philosophy class last night.  I like the teacher. She thinks so completely differently from me and I really like that.

I was trying to explain it to my daughter-in-law today who has some familiarity with my mind, such as it is.  The teacher, she is so orderly, she seems to think like a diagram, precise, delineated concepts connected to each other with definitive lines. When she listens to a student voice an objection, you can almost see the text bubbles forming, the lines connecting the student’s thoughts into a logical sequence. Me, I’m more like water coming down the side of a mountain. My daughter-in-law, who is an orderly thinker herself, with a rather large helping of waterfall, seemed to understand what I was trying to say. If nothing else, she smiled, so it was at least an amusing image.

I’ve had this teacher for two classes now, and mostly we have ended up at the same place, at least on the topics attended to in the classes, which is interesting and (to tell the truth) just a touch comforting.  But the way she thinks! It must be like living in a world a clear bell tones and always the possibility of a solution. I am absolutely fascinated.

Something she said at the first class is still shifting around in my head about this difference.  She said (to the class) that she was trained as an analytic philosopher and tends to think in concepts.   She pointed to me (having had several out-of-class discussions with me about Phenomenology and the subjective approach) and said Mary approaches the question of the mind (the topic of the class) from the point of view of the experience of having a mind.

Her point was that both approaches are essential since no one can understand the mind without first having the experience of having a mind. And yet, to really understand the experience of having a mind, one must be able to get some distance from the experience, since what we experience may not, in fact, be the truth of how that experience is generated (for example the sense of the unified self, and the sense of the unity of perceptual experience – you know the red bouncing ball that we experience as a red-bouncing-ball, when really what the brain does is experience red and bouncing and ball and then weaves it all together so we experience it in our awareness as if it were one combined thing). This distance we need, that is what concepts are for. That we need to understand both the experience of having a mind and create and ever refine the conceptual distance from said experience is critical to understand and has enormous implications.

Boy, am I going to have fun this term.