Thought-Shaping, Reflection and the Refractive Element, #1.

Still from Gesaffelstein’s video clip for their song “Hard Dreams.” Dir. J. Hemingway/Division, J. de Chateleux, 2024

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction

2. Three Central Questions

3. Reflection and its Limits: A Historical Sketch

4. The Refractive Element

5. Conclusion: Refraction and Thinking as a Field of Action

The essay below will be published in four installments; this, the first, contains sections 1-2.

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Thought-Shaping, Reflection and the Refractive Element

1. Introduction

In an earlier article on thought-shaping, Robert Hanna and I made a basic distinction between (i) thought-shapers that are restrictive and (ii) those that are generative (Hanna and Paans, 2021). Restrictive thought-shapers trap the mind in a self-imposed conceptual and affective prison, while generative thought-shapers provide ways out of such mental labyrinths.

Unthinkingly adhering to dogmas, parroting “expert” nonsense, and inhabiting an (online) echo chamber, are all examples of restrictive and ultimately destructive, limiting thought-shaping. Re-inventing oneself, questioning, revising one’s viewpoint, and finding new ways to approach familiar problems are all examples or generative and often liberating thought-shaping.

But if we consider the relation between convictions and firmly held ideas on one hand, and the notion of openness on the other, we must wonder where creativity comes from or how it functions. We might be convinced that we are critically reflecting on some topic, while silently imposing our half-hidden biases, assumptions and tacit convictions on it. The existing literature dealing with biases is immense, and it demonstrates how prone we are to poor judgment, self-delusion, and disavowing information that undermines our deepest convictions. Indeed, this is one of the driving insights of contemporary philosophy: in an attempt to overcome biases, privilege and bigotry, critical theory and the social sciences have vigorously adopted Foucauldian methodology to examine, analyze and overcome biases. (When one thinks of it, this is quite dangerous: adopting a single method across a discipline with such single-minded conviction leads one in circles, an ideological trap Foucault would probably have recognized).

Why this methodology? Simply put, to inhabit that Archimedean viewpoint of complete transparency, objectivity and non-biased judgment. And so, the core tropes of scientism and Vienna Circle positivism return with a vengeance in the humanities and social sciences. To be a perfectionist in this sense seems to me a doomed attempt and a very powerful thought-shaper. We are embodied, embedded, and enactive creatures. In a sense, we also share a culturally extended mind. Given these characteristics, and given our imperfections, to demand of ourselves perfectly sound reasoning seems to me misguided. The best we can do, I propose, is to cultivate skills for flexible thinking, and opening ourselves to the world, while also practicing cognitive vigilance.

One way in which we can practice such vigilance is to observe ourselves when we take ourselves to be reflecting on a given topic. We need not to go as far to practice Cartesian doubt about our own cognitive and sensible predicament, but a level of critical awareness must suffuse our thinking. Often, when we think that we reflect, we wander aimless through the mental mirror palace of our own convictions. It is no wonder, then, if we keep reaching conclusions that conform to the invisible boundaries that gently yet firmly lead us toward them. And so, we create often a self-reinforcing mental loop through rumination, although we are not aware of the fact that we are ruminating. We feel as if we are thinking freely, but only because no one forces us to think the way we do. The pathways and rivulets in which our thinking runs are self-imposed; that is why we experience ourselves as free thinkers.

As an antidote to this predicament, I propose shattering the mirror palace. This is the refractive moment. One must break the image of reality one uses to think; not in a spirit of unconstrained relativism, self-flagellation, destruction, rejection, despair, or frustration, but as an exercise in deliberate openness, refracting the possibilities inherent in our thinking. Each limit is a boundary with two sides: that which is inside it, and which is outside it. As such, the limit itself is a postulate of our thought. Once one realizes this, one comes also to the liberating realization that rethinking or repositioning the boundary is always possible. This realization is of tremendous importance; it makes one a genuinely free thinker: not in the sense that one’s thought is unconditioned (it always is), but in the sense that one grasps the possibility to play with the limits and resulting categories whenever the opportunity presents itself. One learns to “dance with concepts” as Nietzsche—himself quite an agile thinker—put it. The result of this free thinking is not perfect or completely free of mistakes. But that was not the goal, anyway. To think means being fallible; to demand otherwise is to slide back into the perfectionism that has spawned positivism, scientism, and political correctness. There is no need to be perfect, but only a need to be able to recognize limitations and their consequences for reasoned thought. Only practice is needed. Mastery in any craft is not synonymous with perfection; it is synonymous with striving and honing one’s capacities to the best of one’s ability. Refracting the images that appear in the mirror palace of the mind does not lead to a heap of shards: it leads to a generative multiplication of possibilities that transcend the thinking that furnished them in the first place.[i]

2. Three Central Questions

To reflect is a capacity that all people possess and many people exercise. Curiously, while philosophy is often taken to be largely synonymous with reflection, the well-known online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) features no entry on this topic (Zalta and Nodelman, 2025). One would at least expect a voluminous literature, yet there is none to be found. Even while artworks like Rembrandt’s 1632 Philosopher in Meditation or Rodin’s 1904 Le Penseur reinforce the image of thinking as individual, introspective reflection, the notion itself has received scant systematic treatment by many Western philosophers. This absence is possibly symbolized by the obvious gap in SEP.

If reflection in the everyday sense is mentioned in philosophical discourse, it is often under the heading of critical thinking (i.e., to reflect on a certain topic) or else under the rubric of meditation (i.e., introspective thinking). In turn, this notion was inherited from the Christian theological tradition. Theologians like St. Augustine in the Confessions, St. Anselm in the Proslogion, and a veritable tradition of Christian mysticism treated reflection as an inward-oriented state, framed as a moment of insight or silent communion with the divine.

Not all reflection is philosophy, just as not all philosophy is necessarily reflection. Apart from whether reflection and philosophy are synonymous or not, we might raise a question about the effectiveness of reflective thought itself. While the necessity of reflection seems undisputable, there are certainly grounds to question its efficacy as an instrument for thinking.

Elsewhere, Hanna and I have worked out the theory of thought-shaping (TTS). The theory of thought-shapers about human thinking says that our embodied human thinking processes are either, (i) shaped negatively by mechanical, constrictive thought-shapers, or (ii) shaped positively by organic, generative thought-shapers (Hanna and Paans, 2021). As has been recognized by many philosophers, our thoughts do not emerge from a primal substrate as purely rational assessments about real-world affairs. Instead, they emerge from a thoroughly embodied and embedded locus in the manifestly real world. Whether we invoke biochemical, immunological, mental or cultural factors that shape our thoughts, we can in the end only conclude that such factors are all bodily and mentally mediated. They give rise to image-like entities that have a topological and processual nature, called thought-shapers.

Thought-shapers are mental representations that include analogies, images, perceptual schemata, stereotypes and symbols, and which shape embodied human thinking processes. Thought-shapers operate pre-consciously by structurally and schematically combining non-conceptual and conceptual contents. This pre-conscious (and therefore almost invisible) feature makes it hard to catch them “at work”, as they actively shape conscious thought and disposition, while we are often only intermittently (or not at all) aware of them being active. As thought-shapers are mental representations with both topological and processual properties, we access them primarily through our conative and cognitive attitudes of imagination.

Thought-shaping is a continuous process, and that can be utilized in ways that are either advantageous and conducive to our well-being, or that can turn out to be constrictive and disadvantageous.

Before contemporary psychological research on biases and TTS, philosophical poststructuralism also analyzed the influence of cognitive mechanisms that determine how the world is categorized, and its order is construed. While volumes could be written about the methodology of poststructuralist thinkers like Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze, it suffices to note that they share a common interest with TTS, namely, to uncover and map formative influences on thinking. Yet, far from being just a poststructuralist or psychological critique of deforming influences on one’s identity, TTS provides simultaneously a conceptual framework for philosophy as a creative endeavor.

Whereas the poststructuralist line of thinking led to paralyzing postmodern relativism and the “politics of fragmentation,” TTS sought to avoid these nihilist and debilitating consequences by providing a constructive account of thought-shaping (Paans, 2020).

Thought-shapers can be analyzed as embedded entities themselves. Through reciprocal determination, they are defined by the environment they shape, forming an inextricable unity with it (Kondor, 2022). Thought-shaping creates a new cognitive item, the shaped thought, simultaneously expressing and modifying various features of the thinking subject’s internal and external context. So, thought-shapers are causal, irreducibly normative and necessarily external context-sensitive or indexical (i.e., “embedded”). Therefore, they cannot be adequately or fully characterized apart from the external circumstances in which they arise, although they are not in any way reducible to or wholly determined by them.

Surveying this situation, we can identify three central questions:

(1) If TTS and poststructuralist thought are both interested in mapping and analyzing formative influences on thinking, do they not run the risk of falling prey to unconstrained relativism? If both strands of thought conclude that we cannot reflect beyond our preconceptions or biases, then how is free thinking even possible?

(2) If reflection is “thinking about thinking”, or at least the causally efficacious effect of higher-order thoughts on lower-order thoughts, do we not run the risk of setting up a mental “mirror palace” in which the same thoughts inflect and reinforce one another? Put differently: is reflection in that case not just conformation-bias-in-action since the same thoughts and notions are utilized repeatedly throughout successive reflective processes?

(3) Given questions (1) and (2), how can thought-shapers be generative? Or, how can thinking be creative? If our preconceptions and biases undermine critical thinking, how are we able to think truly creatively to advance beyond the constraints they impose? Is an “escape from thinking by thinking” possible? How is changing your mind possible?

Thought-shaping and reflective thought are joined at the root: the very pathways that are either constricted or widened by thought-shaping are utilized in reflection. To some degree, this question has always puzzled philosophers. Although the trappings of language are often held up as the culprit, I believe that trying to isolate a single factor responsible for trapping thinking in repetitious patterns is not the road to pursue.

2.1. Structure of the Argument

What if we inverted the question and investigated what makes reflective thinking creative? If we succeed in doing so, we make some headway in understanding how we can break through cemented habits of thought. Could we glimpse the cognitive and affective mechanisms that widen our thinking? I suppose so, although I cannot lay claim to a comprehensive theory, merely to a few fundamental outlines.

To provide these outlines, I synoptically outline how the notion of reflection was conceived from Kant via Hegel to H.-G. Gadamer. This examination allows us to draw several methodological parallels between Hegelian dialectic and hermeneutic thought, demonstrating several problems with philosophy predicated on a naïve notion of reflection. My aim is not to provide a comprehensive history, but to show that “the philosophy of reflection” has been regarded as problematic in several important respects.

Subsequently, this discussion segues into Henri Bergson’s notion of refraction, continuing into what I call the refractive element, or an exploration of the instance where reflective thought and thought-shaping become properly creative. The notion of refraction is of more recent origin, yet if we recast the concept of reflection against its background, we can extend and improve our commonsense notion of what it means to reflect.

In the concluding section, I draw these lines together, arguing that TTS and the refractive element provide the conceptual framework to respond to the three questions that I formulated above.

NOTE

[i] An earlier version of this article, without the introduction, which has been written specifically for Against Professional Philosophy, was originally published as (Paans, 2024a).

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