Chapter 2/5

Not Thinking Is Dangerous

If you are not a DIALECTICal thinker, you will continually have problems that could easily be prevented, problems that are the result of misunderstandings on your part. Without the DIALECTIC, you are more likely to be blind-sided because you haven’t looked at the other side. You are more likely to have difficulty getting along with people who are important to you, because you haven’t taken seriously their unique perspective. You are more likely to regret the attendant results.

Some people believe that logic is the pathway to good thinking. Logic is very important and will make you a much better thinker, but logic alone is inadequate. Good simple logic makes our thought clear and precise, but that is not enough. As we will see in Part Two, logic is a component of the DIALECTIC. It is immeasurably useful, but has serious limitations.

Critical thinking is often pushed---in the university and in business--as the way to good thinking, but it also is inadequate. Thinking in the critical mode is, in the strict sense, an analytic process. Analysis, by definition and nature leads to disintegration; by itself it cannot integrate. Again, the DIALECTIC is a corrective to critical thinking.

Logic and critical thinking are both important. They are essential considerations if one is to become an exceptionally good thinker. But on the other hand . . .

Nor will it be enough that you have a lot of good common sense because, for one thing, “common sense” is a vague idea. It might even include the DIALECTIC, but everything depends on what you mean by “common” sense, and on who shares this sense in common with you.

The only way to become a good thinker is to think DIALECTICally, to make the DIALECTIC as natural as breathing. Isn’t it presumptuous to say it is the only way? The DIALECTICal answer to this affirms both the statement and the challenge. It is the only way, but by its very nature, the dialectic challenges the idea that the dialectic is the only way. It has told us that “there is always something more,” and that “we always might be wrong,” as well as “no human statement is complete by itself.” The dialectic tells us that there is more to good thinking than the dialectic includes. However, if there is more, that more is merely the other hand of the dialectic.