change your reality

On Beautiful Thinking

Thinking is divided in how one thinks and what one thinks. Thus two men may entertain the same idea yet express it in a different way. The way one thinks, is the province of art; what one thinks, is the province of philosophy very broadly conceived. It is the common distinction between form and content.
Just as thinking has form and content so does feeling. Though Goethe and Rilke might share the same emotion, they do not experience it the same way. The influence of the way one experiences emotions can be so great that it literally transforms the content of the emotion. Just as the same wine would acquire a different taste when it is aged in barrels of different kinds of wood.
Our mental and emotional life usually consists in a continuous alteration of thoughts and emotions. Thoughts and feelings appear and disappear in our awareness like people in train stations. Some stay more, others less; some make an impression on us even though their stay was brief; others are unnoticed even though they’ve been there for ages.
Just as it is possible for painters belonging to different movements in art to produce entirely different paintings of the same subject, so it is possible to shape the way we think and feel in such a way, that we become the Impressionists and Surrealists of our souls. And just as the choice of a way of expression doesn’t hinder the choice of content we choose to express, so it is possible we can become Realist Platos or Abstract Spinozas.
If you want to paint like Michelangelo, you do not study under Matisse. If you want to think like Descartes you do not study the Scholastics. Your mind and emotions are molded according to what you’ve been exposed. Thus, it is not an unwise suggestion that if you want to think correctly, you shouldn’t hang out with fools, and if you want think beautifully, you should befriend poets.