Analytical Thinking, Its Drawbacks & The West
Do you know this feeling when you get confronted with the same problems in life, not knowing how to deal with them right, although you analyzed them many times over? If you live in a Western country, be it in Europe, America or even Australia, don’t you feel the one-sidedness and surface-level of people’s thoughts, views and opinions, even the ones coming from yourself? Don’t you think something is perhaps missing in your intellectual life, something very crucial to overall understanding?
Let me help you here. In the following I would like to give you a brief overview of the “Western way of thinking”, show its importance and limitations, highlight how it relates to the emergence of Global Culture, and clarify what crucial ingredient you might still be missing to see the bigger picture in your way of looking at things.
Definition of Western Culture
Before I proceed further, let me define what I mean by “the West”. The West is the cultures of Europe and Northern America which despite their local differences were strongly characterized by rationality, individualism and civic liberties as a unifying fundament - ideas based on Greco-Roman and (partly) Christian traditions, and asserting themselves ever more clearly during the Renaissance and the Era of Enlightenment.
There is no doubt that historically speaking Western technology and culture have had a profound effect on the world. The process of globalisation kick-started with the discovery of America under the guidance of European colonial powers in the 15th century and sharply accelerated during the 19th century with industrialization and international trade. In the 20th century the USA took over the role as the main driver of this process, a role that the current American elites have decided to slowly give up on (a different topic for another time). This is the narrow definition.
A broader definition of the West can include all the countries which took over great parts of these values and traditions, thus founding modern institutions, and creating modern liberal democracies as a result. By this definition the West also covers some Asian and Australasian countries as well, e.g. Japan, Australia and New Zealand. The word “Western” is therefore not defined in a strict geographical sense, but refers to a set of values and norms that first originated in Europe (the western hemisphere), then quickly spread to America, and subsequently to the world in various degrees.
Historical Outline Of Developing Thought
The meteoric rise of the Western world began about 500 years ago when the Renaissance and the re-discovery of Greek scriptures initiated the artistic and scientific revolution in Europe. It all culminated in the 18th century when the accumulated economic wealth from oversea colonies and scientific progress helped launch the Age of Enlightenment in which the growing and aspiring middle class, called bourgeoisie, had time and the resources to dedicate themselves to intellectual pursuits. After the next two and a half centuries of countless wars, Industrial Revolution, further scientific progress, two World Wars, the Cold War and the latest developments in telecommunications and internet we arrived at where we stand nowadays.
Technological inventions and medical progress took away lots of drudgery under which previous generations have always lived and suffered. Today, we can focus more on self-realisation in our spare time in the form of hobbies, special interests and extra activities. Our lives have become more complex, but also more exciting than in the previous generations.
The modern world view at its core is based on that Age of Enlightenment from the 18th century that put to the fore the power of reason and rationality as the main motive for human interactions, explorations and decision-making. It was all about the development of intellectual faculties of the human mind instead of relying on emotional wishful thinking and dogmas as it was prevalent in the previous medieval, religious Europe. All science, philosophy and real knowledge is based on reasoning and logic and it’s the development of those mental faculties and their effects on society that have defined the current modern era.
However, let’s be clear about the following: thinking and reasoning are common human properties, regardless of geography, history and ethnicity. Any culture can utilize the powers of intellect to benefit society and the world. It’s just that the West focused on and described these in philosophy and literature in the most distinctive way possible due to many factors in its long and complex history.
Ultimately, the universal values of rationality and individual freedom cannot be solely claimed by a single culture for all times to come. It was just the pioneering spirit of the West, Europe in particular, that has initiated the modern culture, defining the scientific method, producing technological inventions, division of labour, mass industry etc. that was slowly taken over by the world at large. Nowadays, any individual, culture or nation can claim and contribute to the unfoldment of this process of mental awakening.
Analytical Thinking & Reductionism
“Western thinking” is stern rationality. It likes to break up any issue into its components in an attempt to understand it. In that view comprehending appears quite reductionist. You break up a topic or substance into smaller parts to gain a better understanding of it. This breaking up is actually the definition of the word “analysis” (Ancient Greek term “analusis”, meaning “a breaking up” or “a loosening”). If you analyse something, you break it up into pieces to check the various components that make up the whole. Analytical thinking is a sure sign of an advancing mental development, because analysis is based on logic. And all critical thinking is based on logical conclusions.
On the contrary, a simple mind learns from daily experiences. To begin with, those daily experiences are based on concrete objects and events, so there is no work of abstraction involved. Abstraction only ensues when we start applying logic to our fund of concrete experiences. That’s what makes planning and predicting possible, in short: an analysis. Only then are we able to summarise our daily observations into recurring patterns and principles. Such a summary or classification of recurring phenomena is a work of abstraction. Abstraction summarises experiences into concepts, and logical analysis uses those concepts as units for thinking so that the mind can draw conclusions, i.e. comprehend.
The function of thinking is to create an inner system of thought that explains reality, and a developing mind only has insufficient information and incomplete experiences at its disposal. That’s why thoughts in a developing mind are only loosely connected with each other. There are always gaps missing in our understanding. And the fact that we break up things into their components to comprehend them makes the Western way of thinking a reductionist process. And to clarify the definitions: “reductionism” means analysing and describing complex phenomena in terms of their simple or fundamental constituents.
However, reality is vast and cannot be pigeonholed into a category only because our thinking is limited. There’s definitely something missing in the process of Western ways of looking at things. And what is it?
Well, it’s the need for a SYNTHESIS of ideas.
What do I mean by that?
Synthesis: The Missing Component In Thinking
Synthesis is the combination of components or elements to form a connected whole. It’s about a holistic approach. Synthesis is the opposite of an analysis. In fact, synthesis is the next stage in thinking that comes after analysis. Once you break up something into its components to comprehend, you then reassemble it to see the bigger picture. And the result of seeing the bigger picture is very different from seeing only the effects of the components. Your mind needs to complete the whole process of both analysis and synthesis to stand a chance of getting to know an issue sufficiently.
If you focus only on the components of an issue, then as a consequence your comprehension will be very limited and simply reductionist. You won’t be able to understand the whole, only its separate parts. But reality works as an integrated whole. There are many parts in it, but we experience things, people, processes and phenomena as an integrated and interconnected whole. Nothing ever stands in isolation to its environment. That’s why our minds need both mental approaches, the analysis and synthesis, to complete the intellectual cycle and understand reality.
“Western thinking” has always tended towards more analysis, but less synthesis. Historically, it’s understandable, because civilization coming out of the dark Middle Ages had a lot to learn about the inner workings of nature. And in the Medieval times thinking was heavily influenced by the Greek philosopher Aristotle who can reasonably be called the father of analytical thinking.
In the modern days however, we’re way past that threshold. What we now need more is the synthesising aspect of thinking. What would that mean in practice?
Between Form & Meaning: Analysis & Synthesis at Work
The analytical mind attaches much importance to exact definitions and words. Although exactness is immensely important to avoid a confusion of terms, there is also a risk that you can get stuck with certain labels without realizing that others might be talking about the same thing as you, but using different words. Then, if you can’t recognize the actual meaning behind words, vocabulary or terminology will present an obstacle for your understanding, resulting from a discrepancy between form and meaning. Analysis gets bogged down in terminology and definitions. It often can’t see the forest for the trees. Do you need an example of what I mean?
Take a look at an encyclopaedia. There, you can jump from definition to definition, from author to author and read various descriptions about what has been said about a certain topic by what author at what time. But the actual ideas or meanings or essences behind authors’ statements aren’t extracted or summarised across the board, they are just listed as separate repetitions of what an author has said on a topic in a chronological order. There isn’t any work of synthesis done to extract the actual reality import of those various ideas and thoughts in an encyclopaedia. It’s just an analysis and listing of separate authors about the separate domains of reality.
On the other hand, a synthesizing mind would proceed differently - it would go much further than analysis. Synthesis would look behind the surface-level words and terminology in search for the actual meanings and references to reality. Then it would summarise (synthesize) those meanings from various authors, recognizing and pointing out when those authors actually meant one and the same thing although using different words and concepts. The newly gained insight on an old topic could then be re-formulated using modern words in a completely new article.
Call For More Synthesis
Analysis and synthesis are roughly speaking two ways of describing two different developmental stages of the mind. The analytical mind breaks up things in order to comprehend the basic reality of concrete objects. The synthesizing mind draws more abstract essences from those analyses to recognize patterns, similarities and reality.
I claim that there is a preponderance of analytical thinking in the Western culture due to historical and cultural reasons, and that we should all start focusing more on synthesizing our experiences. When you actively perform the intellectual inner work based on your observations and thoughts, only then you can learn something valuable about yourself and life. Knowing the parts is not enough. You have to start seeing the bigger picture.
