Chapter 5 - Thinking through the Psyche

Summary

Thinking is an activity that has a trajectory. Through the previous chapters, five modalities of pleasure of thinking have been identified: (i) a core and fundamental curiosity; (ii) a semiotic activity of binding experience in more or less complex wholes, or functional pleasure; (iii) the occasional joy of finding a solution thanks to our background capacity to engage in relatively free semiotic explorations, that is, the pleasure of discovery; (iv) the dialogical pleasure of the shared activity of thinking; (v) the awareness of the activity and its pleasure, a meta-pleasure. These five aspects can be experienced in a more or less playful way and lived more or less bodily – in modulations that partly depend on the actual setting as well as on cultural norms and guidance. Chapter 5 proposes a model of the person to account for such trajectories of thinking. It first emphasises four principles we need to hold about mind based on our exploration; it then proposes an integrated model of mind; and it finally qualifies trajectories of thinking and their pleasures.