There are two kinds of thinking, and in order to see them we need to look at what happens during a thought.
A thought is the active juxtaposing of two or more ‘mental contents’; a mental content is simply something in the mind that becomes an object for a thought process. The mind of anyone over the age of 4 possesses countless contents of all kinds, and when some of these become participatory in an active process of comparison and contrast we call that thinking. Probably a lot of these juxtaposing processes are going on all the time all over the mind, but we are usually only aware of one “super-thesis” of juxtaposing activity that we associate with our self or “I”, which we experience as our inner voice.
The super-thesis is the primary or most concentrated active process of justaposing mental contents, and acts like a hurricane that spins feeding off of heat energy from the “ocean” of all those lesser content juxtaposings. The mind “funnels” up to greater degrees of activity and comprehensive, derivative juxtaposing power and the “tip” of that process is what we experience as an introspective self-identity and inner voice.
So how do the two kinds of thoughts come in? Each moment and instance of thought has two dimensions: the contents of the activity, and the activity itself. The fact that some mental contents are dynamically interacting is one dimension, the dimension of the activity itself; the other dimension is those contents themselves. There is generally a categorical difference between these two dimensions.
These two dimensions translate into two types or modes of thinking, a mode aligned to and centered in either the one dimension or the other. Each mode implicitly functions on an ontological principle that it’s own dimension is the primary reality and the other dimension is the secondary reality. So for the mode aligned to the mental contents themselves, mental contents and discrete units and objects of thought become the ground from which conscious reality is built, likewise for the other mode aligned to the activity of juxtaposing this activity and dynamic interactive energy becomes the ground from which conscious reality is built.
The former content-focused mode literally thinks through and thinks as whatever facts or empirical datums happen to be in consciousness at any given moment. This mode corresponds to the psychological type of the scientist: he/she values the discrete unit and the certainty of the discrete, of the identified and clearly defined particle of an experiential datum, namely that the object-contents of any moment of consciousness are always given epistemological preference because are assumed and treated as ontologically primary. A saying that could be applied to this type is know to most people, “can’t see the forest through the trees”.
The other mode, the one aligned to the dynamic activity and ‘energy’ of the juxtaposing process of mental content-relation, thinks through and as this energetic activity and it values the movement, change, process and dynamism of thinking over the particular objects and contents of any given moment of thought. This mode corresponds to the psychological type of artists and philosophers. Artists and philosophers are driven by the energy of thought itself and not simply by the necessity or adequacy of this or that particular object-contents that one happens to be thinking about at any given moment.
For the artist and philosopher there is always a greater process, purpose and comprehensivity that drives individual thinking and that forces mental contents into epistemological arrangements. For the scientist there is not such a greater purview, and any such greater process, purpose or comprehensivity is seen as emerging from the level of individual contents and largely restricted to them. Therefore scientists can be more direct and honest but only within the limited field of their particular object-content interest. Scientists are incapable of the vision that drives artistic and philosophical process.
When two people, one strongly from each different mode, attempt to converse with each other there is an inevitable categorical disconnect. The first mode cannot help treating the contents and ‘empirical’ datums it happens to be thinking about at any given moment as if these were literally the reality as such, while the second mode cannot help treating the active dynamism and energy of synthetic and analytic thought itself as if this were literally the reality as such. The scientist hypostasizes “empiricism” as an absolute psychological category, while the artist and philosopher hypostasizes “spiritualism” (for lack of a better term) as an absolute psychological category.