According to the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, wrote that there are three ways to think. I know, you’re already wondering how you can think three ways with one brain! Well, you probably use the three ways all the time. In fact, Deleuze claimed it was important to know about the three ways so you could both see things more clearly and communicate more effectively. You’ve probably come across arguments where one person is saying “But what are the facts? Just give me the facts!” while another says “But what is your heart telling you here?” and a third wants to know “But what does this all mean?”. These three questions arise from three different ways of thinking and whilst they are all trying to get at THE TRUTH, they are all actually dealing with entirely different aspects of reality.
So here they are –
- Science – thinking about function. A scientific way of thinking takes a focus on how something works. Understanding how something works is very useful. It gives us the chance to try and make it work better, or at least to improve our experience by figuring out how the world works.
- Philosophy – thinking about concepts. Science uses concepts to design experiments and observational studies which will throw light on how the world works. Without the concepts though we wouldn’t know where to start. Many scientists unfortunately confuse concepts with facts, thinking that both are THE TRUTH which leads to closed minds and arrogance. This causes a kind of blindness – “my view is THE correct view, yours is WRONG”. We have to be able to think conceptually if we want to better understand our world.
- Art – thinking about percepts and affects. What do we perceive? And what feelings are associated with our perceptions? This is not about the how of perception or the how of feelings, it is about using conscious engagement with our perceptions and feelings to understand an aspect of reality which science and philosophy cannot achieve.
I really like this idea. When I meet a patient it’s important that I am aware of my perceptions and of the feelings that arise in me during a consultation. It’s important that I have a developing conception of illness and of health and it’s important for me to understand what isn’t functioning well in this person’s body-mind.
I also like this idea when it comes to teaching. We learn better when our learning experience engages our three different ways of thinking. We need education which shows us how things work, which teaches us to to conceptualise and which engages our feelings. Remember “Gradgrind” in Dickens’ Hard Times? His view of education was that children were empty vessels waiting to be filled with facts. Ring a bell? Oh, for more enlightened educators!
Heroes Not Zombies 
I agree with everything above, but I think that a couple of others ‘ways of thinking’ are also worth considering. Spiritual thought is important for some more than others but I find logical thought and plain old common sense invaluable in all my professional encounters, whether clinical or educational.
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First off, I agree with the division into three ways of thinking.
But, how could a teaching experience involve all three of these ways? I can see how you can teach mathematics, philosophy, and literature (I think these three best represent the idea, though you can substitute science for math and art in general for literature), but how could you teach them all at the same time? You can make connections between them, but in the end you’ll have to focus on one mode of thinking at a time.
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This is an excellent!