EXTRA-LOGICAL AND VISUAL THINKING AS AN OPTION

(A Project)

1. Optimism is a condition which permits man to reconcile his inner world with reality by means of removing the sense of his mortality. To an extent, civilization is a way of ensuring an optimism which allows mankind to exist. Today's civilization which suffers from crisis of optimism, is a result of hypertrophy of rationalistic culture, the culture of merely logically organized thinking.

2. There is a growing need to seek new impulses capable of ensuring the further functioning of those balancing psychological systems which:

a) on the level of personality, reconcile our consciousness with the tragedy of our finitude;

b) on the plane of social life, restrain the fatal consequences of the paradox that although man aspires towards immortality (or perhaps because he does so) he perfects and multiplies the means of his self-destruction.

3. These new creative impulses should be sought beyond the boundaries of the logical organization of consciousness — in such communicative forms of psychic activity in which the real nature of thought reveals itself more adequately. The real nature of thinking is, however, non-logical (or extra-logical) and continuous.

4. The patterns of such thinking could be found in the realm of artistic creativity, altered states of consciousness, iconic culture of silence, non-logical comprehension in the sciences, extra-linguistic communication in Zen, etc. However, I will concentrate my attention on the rapidly developing culture of spatio-temporal continuums, i.e. the culture of synesthetic, expanded cinema which is made possible by technological advances.

5. The analysis of this culture, and its possible implementations, is at once based upon and supports the principle that human thinking is a) continuous and b) visual.

a) I will argue that reflexive (logical) thinking is just a form of control of the conscious stream of thinking. Logic (especially in its linguistic manifestations) is not the only adequate form of mind's representation. To this extent, any knowledge (inasmuch as it expresses itself in logical terms) is not fully adequate or direct. The direct (extra-logical) means of access to continuous streams (altered states of consciousness) should not be considered an extraordinary phenomenon; we have recourse to it constantly when interpreting infinite possibilities of phrase-or-word-meaning.

b) I will also argue that direct («pure») thinking means entry into a continuous stream of pictorial (= concrete-sensual) images. Today's thinking tends toward visualization, which could be regarded as a process of a levelling-out of the historically developed disproportion in the modern civilization of logical culture.

6. The cultivation of visual (extra-logical) thinking (in which continuity of consciousness is more adequately represented) could be directed to overcome the destructive tradition of dismemberment of the Universe through various dichotomies: thought vs. feeling, spirit vs. matter, content vs. form, etc.

The suggested culture of visual, extra-logical, thinking is not an unattainable return to a pre-logical one. Nor it is the rejection of logical culture. Rather, it means going beyond the boundaries of the latter.

7. I will argue that besides indivisible presentation of all the human psychic forces in it, the life-asserting message of extra-logical thinking gains its character from its perpetually creative and dynamic nature. Its «knowledge» is not a symbolic and frozen designation of reality, as it is within the boundaries of traditional, logical, thinking, but rather a living contact with the world.

8. Here, apparently, we can find one of the means by which today's apathetic Homo Sapiens might move himself toward the more vital Homo Aestheticus, if an aesthetic act is understood as it should be — «the highest act of thinking, encompassing all constituents of thought» (G. Hegel).