Systemic and Anthropological Characteristics of Thinking

Abstract

The article describes such systemic anthropological characteristics of thinking as multidimensionality, projectivity, inclusion in life relationships, transtemporality, and nonlinearity. On the one hand, these characteristics are inconvenient phenomenological "anomalies" for the classical psychology of thinking. On the other hand, in the context of progressive anthropologization of psychological cognition and interdisciplinary discourse, they make it possible to study thinking in a more holistic and human context, as well as to establish new conceptual links between the psychology of thinking and the psychology of human existence. Thinking is a multidimensional and nonlinear act that simultaneously unfolds in several registers of one’s mentality, capturing a variety of temporal, active, and noetic aspects of one’s being. The projective function of thinking consists in overcoming event uncertainty, building a semantic markup of living space, and producing semantic orientations in the activity and existential dimensions of the living environment. The fact that thinking is part of one’s life relationships ensures the integrity and transtemporal continuity of one’s life world. According to the polyphonic principle of mental dynamics, the dialectic unity of its spatial-temporal and modal correlations unfolds at each moment of thinking.