Question

How can one say or claim anything about the structure of our thinking—define it, characterize it, and so on—if that itself is being said and analyzed by means of the very structure of thinking itself? Seemingly, that gives it no real or absolute value.
And one more thing—many times I find myself frustrated when I encounter a person who simply cannot contain intellectual complexity or hold a broad and deep account of things. The kind of person you “just can’t talk to.” And it’s not because he doesn’t understand (or so it feels to me) what I’m trying to say that I get frustrated, but because my way of thinking—the one that leads me to stop the flow of initial conclusions that arise in my mind, to think about the issue again from additional angles, and to honestly weigh sides that do not sit well with the basic assumptions of my worldview—all this stems from internalizing the principle that just because I think something doesn’t mean it’s true. That very way of thinking obligates me here too to stop and wonder each time anew whether perhaps this fellow, whom I take to be shallow and not understanding anything, is actually right after all, and everything I think about him—that he cannot contain complexity—is nothing more than my own partial judgment… This is basically a kind of skepticism that I can’t get out of, because on the one hand I recognize integrity in it—for maybe I really am the one who is mistaken and grasping the issue incorrectly, and he is the one who is right. But on the other hand, there is something in me that recoils from the ignorance and rigidity of the kind I described and is “sure” that the truth is not there… What can be done? How do you deal with this?