Thinking and Sensing
An ancient and modern division
I’m Bryan Kam. I endeavour daily to make philosophy accessible and relevant. To that end I write this newsletter and host a podcast called Clerestory. I’m also writing a book called Neither/Nor and I’m a founding member of Liminal Learning. In London, I host a book club, a writing group, and other events. My work looks at how abstract concepts relate to embodied life, and how to use this understanding to transform experience.
Two Ways of Learning
On 20 March I gave a talk at a salon in London. I’ll be giving another one in July for Philosophy for All. A few people asked for the paper, but I thought I’d adapt that talk to a written piece for posterity.
In this talk, I explored an ancient philosophical divide that continues to shape our world today.
If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you’ll be familiar with it — it’s the division between:
Conceptual thinking, rational abstractions, mathematical frameworks, reason, inference, theory, and the stuff of thinking.
Experience, perception, action, embodiment, practice, and the messy business of living and sensing on the other.
To put it another way: We can learn from language, from reading, hearsay, frameworks or abstraction, or we can learn from experience — from actually doing things and living in the world.
I use a lot of synonyms for these words, as I don’t find technical terms helpful in making my argument. This is not a narrow, technical argument. I use synonyms to emphasize how wide the argument is, how many areas of life it crosses. I hope that using synonyms shows how widely the divide can be applied.
I'll say upfront that I don't think there’s any clean division, but instead that different approaches either emphasise thinking over sensing, or else sensing over thinking. I argue that neither approach is healthy — nor is it a simple and unqualified “both/and,” but a series of skills to understand which one is appropriate. Hence the title of the book I’m working on: Neither/Nor. Neither one strategy nor the other is sufficient.
Thinking and sensing
As an example of the former, i.e., thinking, let’s take a numerical example. We can learn the fact that there are are billions of people living, but we can never encounter population statistics in our embodied experience. We can experience individual crowds of individual people, but we can’t experience “worldwide population growth” — or even “a city of one hundred thousand people” — directly. We can only learn about this through numbers and concepts.
As an example of the latter, i.e., sensing, we have an embodied sense of being in a place, feeling a certain way, wearing certain clothes, an utterly unique set of sensory experiences at every moment. Experience never repeats exactly. Take music, for example. Even if you play the same recording of the same song twice in a row, your experience will not be the same. Your mind will have changed. You will have changed. At the very least, the second time you will now have the feeling that you’ve just heard this song! But even the ability to play the same recording is very recent, evolutionarily speaking; until the past few centuries, recordings were impossible, and every live performance of the same song is different from the next.
My interest into this philosophical inquiry has been shaped as much by personal experience as it has by my interest in academic theories. To put it another way: my interest in the relationship between theory (thinking) and practice (experience) has had both theoretical and practical aspects.
Personal Background
My interest in this divide arises from my own experience. As I’ve mentioned before, I'm mixed race — my father is ethnically Chinese (though he grew up in Hawaii), and my mother is Puerto Rican and Irish (in American usage of these terms).1 Throughout my childhood, I'd often be asked, “Are you Asian?” with the expectation that I’d say something more like “yes” or “no” rather than some convoluted answer that goes back to 19th Century China, 18th Century Kentucky, or 15th Century Spain. Such uncertainty made me wary of rigid categorical thinking from an early age.
As I’ve also mentioned here, I'm a Type 1 diabetic, which means I must constantly balance between abstract measurement and embodied experience. Right now, my blood sugar is at 9.0, which is very slightly high, so I should give myself a tiny dose of insulin to bring it down. This requires mathematical calculation, which is of course an abstraction done in thought. But if I miscalculated and take too much insulin, I could lose consciousness, which would occur in my experience (or lack thereof!). Walking this constant tightrope has sensitised me to the difference between abstract reasoning and lived experience. I find myself especially attentive to when people are speaking in the abstract versus speaking from lived experience.
The tension also marked my academic background. As an undergraduate, I thought I wanted to study philosophy. I enrolled in Philosophy 101, expecting a profound investigation of what life is all about and how best to live it. Instead encountered formal logic, with its “if p, then q” and “if not p, then not q.” Although I was able to muddle through, I couldn’t see when such eternal, timeless, contextless propositions would arise in my life — and they still largely haven’t. I struggled particularly with the law of the excluded middle, which is the declaration that either a proposition is true, or its negation must be true, with no third option. This seemed too rigid for describing many real-world situations, including my own mixed identity.
My dissatisfaction led me to explore alternative philosophical traditions. I studied English literature, Chinese intellectual history (including Daoism), Russian literature, and eventually Buddhism. Only during the first COVID lockdown did I undertake a serious reading of Western philosophy, starting with the Pre-Socratics, the Stoics, Epicureans, and the Sceptics. Eventually this led me on to Plato, Aristotle, the Medievals, then Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, and more.
I take issue with the Western tradition and its claim to timeless and contextless truths, as you'll have gathered if you've read my pieces. And I think these issues are very relevant today. Most bureaucracy, for example, comes out of privileging the conceptual, and misunderstanding when experience must be brought in, to counteract equations. I'll also argue that the same over-reliance on abstraction can fuel political polarisation, black-and-white thinking, catastrophising, anxiety and depression, and more!
Greece: Thinking over Sensing
While my life sensitized me to this divide, it has very ancient historical roots. It appeared, for example, in the Vedas (1500–900 BCE). But it also became explicit and central to Greek philosophy.
Among the Pre-Socratics (6th–5th Century BCE), we see this contrast between Parmenides, who favours a static “being,” and Heraclitus, known for his doctrine of “becoming” (“you can't step into the same river twice”). Parmenides used abstract reasoning about “being” and “non-being,” while Heraclitus emphasised the constant change and flux we perceive through the senses.
Plato (428–347 BCE) wove these threads together, but wound up moving away from “sensing,” and squarely into the corner of “thinking.” In his early life, he was influenced by a follower of Heraclitus who had a strong emphasis on sensory flux. Later, he gravitated toward the more categorical thinking of Pythagoras and Parmenides, and under the sway of that irrepressible conceptualist, Socrates.
In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates pursues conceptual questions — “What is piety?” “What is love?” “What is virtue?” and so on — through language and dialectic, presupposing clean, orderly, universal answers, and explicitly rejecting embodied experience.
In the Theaetetus, for example, when considering “What is knowledge?” Socrates dismisses the possibility that knowledge comes from perception (the senses) in favour of judgment (with or without an account) — a much more rational approach.
Plato’s theory of Forms intensifies this tendency. The individual table we experience through our senses is, for Plato, less real than the abstract form of “table” that exists in the realm of Forms. I wrote last week about how disembodied this view in the Phaedo is. Reality, in this view, is found by ascending away from embodied experience toward abstract concepts — illustrated in his famous allegory of the cave.
Although Aristotle has a salutary interest in the living world (and was an excellent biologist), he still regards things as having essences. And in the shift from Plato’s Forms to Aristotle’s essences, these essences also become more rigidly hierarchical, another tendency I have never much liked.
Although there are a few holdouts in Greek philosophy, notably the Sophists, Cynics, and Sceptics, most of the major Greek philosophies assume that concepts are stable and real. This includes not only the Platonists and Aristotelians, but also the Stoics and Epicureans.
Buddhism: Sensing over Thinking
Buddhism presents a contrast to Platonism. While Buddhism certainly uses conceptual frameworks and categories (especially in the Abhidharmic tradition), these concepts are used as guideposts (or rafts) for experience. Think of the “finger pointing at the moon,” in Zen, as popularised by Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon (1973; see below). The goal of Buddhism — liberation, or nirvana — is only ever achieved through direct experience, and it can be neither attained nor described conceptually.
Consider the basic Buddhist meditation practice of “mindfulness of breathing” (Ānāpānasati) While you might begin by counting breaths, the goal is to move beyond these conceptual markers toward direct sensory attention. Plato, by contrast, advises thinking entirely separately from the body. Unlike Plato, for whom the conceptual Forms represent a liberatory potential, for Buddhists, liberation comes not through concepts but through intense attention to perception.
This contrast becomes even more marked with the Buddhist philosopher Dignāga (5th Century CE), who distinguished between perception and inference — just as Plato distinguished perception and judgment. Whereas Plato elevates conceptual understanding to ultimate reality (the Forms), Dignāga maintains that concepts apply only to conventional or “mundane reality” of tables and chairs, while the “ultimate reality” of liberation comes only through direct experience.2 As in William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), this experience remains “ineffable.” Moreover, Buddhism lacks Plato’s dogmatic presupposition that reality be amenable to concepts.
From Aristotle to Modern Philosophy
Aristotle (384–322 BC), Plato's student, has had, and continues to have, an enormous impact on Western thought, with his logic and taxonomical hierarchies continuing to shape our fundamental understanding of the world today. While Aristotle was not committed to Plato’s separate realm of Forms, he maintained a distinction between particulars (in experience) and universals (conceptual categories).
His hierarchical soul model in De Anima places reason — which apprehends universal concepts rather than particular objects — at the highest level. His three levels of nesting souls are:
the plant or vegetative soul, which involves nutrition and reproduction,
the animal soul, which includes the plant soul’s functions but adds movement and perception, and
the human soul, which includes the animal soul’s functions, but adds reason.
Aristotle's writing was preserved and developed for centuries by Islamic philosophers like Avicenna (980–1037 CE) and Averroes (1126–1198) after the fall of the Western Roman Empire left now-powerful parts of Europe without knowledge of Greek. Following the Islamic scholars, Aristotelian thought subsequently became central to medieval European philosophy in, e.g., Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) and Duns Scotus (1265–1308). This means that Aristotle’s split between sensing and thinking persisted. It also means that his tendency towards taxonomical hierarchies became central within Christianity, for example in the medieval “Great chain of being,” which put God above men, men above women, women above animals and the rest of nature, and so on.
In the early modern period, the same tension reappears in the divide between rationalists, like Descartes (1596–1650) and Leibniz (1646–1716, both of whom emphasise rational/abstract thought), and empiricists like Locke (1632–1704) and Hume (1711–1766, both of whom emphasise sensory experience). Hume, to take just one example, explicitly divides sensory “impressions” from rational “ideas.” Hume also distinguishes between two types of philosophers: those “chiefly born for action” and the “abstract reasoners” in his Enquiry (1748).
Since Kant (1724–1804), Western philosophy has generally acknowledged the interdependence of thinking and sensing. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), Kant famously wrote that “thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind” (A51/B71). He argues that we can only access the phenomenal world (the world of appearances), not the noumenal world (things as they are in themselves). Yet he still constructs an elaborate conceptual framework to make sense of our sensory experience.
Schopenhauer (1788–1860) represents an interesting reversal of this tendency in Kant, though he considered himself to be a close follower and interpreter of Kant. In The World as Will and Representation (1818), he links the will to the body and argues that while we can only intellectually represent external objects, we directly experience our own bodies from the inside as will. The body and the will, for Schopenhauer, are primary, though like Kant he sees them as interdependent with the mind and representation.
Like Buddhism, which influenced him, then, Schopenhauer puts living before thinking, viewing humans as primarily creatures that live, survive, and suffer rather than as beings made for thinking or understanding “nature” or “the mind of God.” In this he prefigures thinkers like Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957), Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), Varela (1946–2011), and Bessel van der Kolk (1943–), although these later thinkers are often credited for coming up with the idea of “embodiment.”
In the 20th century… the divide continued! Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) distinguished between “knowledge by acquaintance” (direct experience) and “knowledge by description” (conceptual knowledge). Moore (1873–1958) and Ayer (1910–1989) followed him in splitting concepts from perception. More recently, philosophers like David Chalmers (1966–) differentiate between qualia (qualitative experience) and propositional attitudes (conceptual constructs).
Latent Platonism
I call “latent Platonism” the tendency to disavow Plato's metaphysics of Forms while still retreating to the conceptual in conversation. For example, if you share a personal experience about social media, and I respond with abstract generalisations about how “social media is ruining everything,” I've shifted from your concrete experience to a broad abstraction — a subtle but significant conversational shift which tends to undermine whatever experience you were trying to share.
Most thinkers today are not Platonists, but they have habitually Platonist tendencies. This tendency occasionally appears even in thinkers who are as critical of conceptual thinking as Nietzsche, especially in his early and middle periods.
A Methodological Divide
Rather than simplify identifying this divide as a problem, I believe we can develop a better approach by reframing the divide itself. Rather than viewing the thinking versus sensing divide as an ontological or epistemological one, I propose using it methodologically.
To quote from our forthcoming paper:
“The ancient views tended to be oppositional, whereas thinkers in recent centuries have seen the two sides of the purported divide as being complementary. I side with the complementary view, but more importantly I assert the divide neither ontologically nor epistemologically, but methodologically. Rather than debating which side is better or how they might support or conflict with each other, I argue that dividing them allows each to be trained independently. To move toward abstraction requires one skill and to move towards experience requires another. To make a physical analogy, all physical motion involves both the muscular and cardiovascular system, but it is still possible for an athlete to undertake strength training or cardiovascular training, which emphasizes one of the two.”
Our educational system privileges the conceptual skills — teaching abstract frameworks, mathematics, and reasoning — while relatively de-emphasising the experiential skills. Yet there are modes of knowing that come primarily through experience, such as intuition and emotional judgment.
Consider cooking as an example. You can study cookbooks and recipes (conceptual knowledge), or you can learn intuitively by watching others and developing feel (experiential knowledge). Ideally, there's a looping process between these approaches: you follow a recipe, adjust based on experience, judge the result through experience, and then recapture that learning conceptually.
Concepts have advantages in durability and transmissibility. But when divorced from experience — as often happens, for example, with workplace KPIs or OKRs that measure performance “quantitatively” — they can become detached from their original purpose and even undermine it.
Broader Implications
I believe this divide has broader implications. It appears not just in individual experience, but in group dynamics, and even at the socio-historic level. For example: Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), which distinguishes between “normal science” (working within an established framework) and “revolutionary science” (establishing a new framework and disrupting the old one), describes this distinction at the level of scientific progress. The explore-exploit trade-off in machine learning exhibits similarities to my proposed methodological divide. (The explore strategy relates to sensing, and the exploit strategy relates to the conceptual reification of explored material.) I will argue that the methodological differences between historical and experimental sciences also reflect this fundamental divide.
These examples across different domains suggest that this divide is not merely a philosophical oddity, but a fundamental pattern in how humans gain knowledge and experience the world.
In Buddhism, the concept of “dependent arising” offers a sophisticated way of thinking about both conceptual and experiential directions. It describes both causal relationships (A causes B causes C) and conditional relationships (C could not have happened without B, which could not have happened without A). I’ll write more in future posts about how this technique can be used to practice Neither/Nor in daily life.
In our increasingly abstract, digital world, recognizing this ancient divide offers not just philosophical insight but practical guidance for how we might live more balanced lives. We should be neither trapped in disconnected abstractions, nor immersed in experiences without ability to step back and reflect.
The challenge, then, is not to choose between thinking and sensing, but to develop the discernment to know when each approach serves us best — and perhaps most importantly, to recognize when we've strayed too far in either direction. And yet, as I’ll argue in future posts, it may sometimes be necessary to go “too far” in order to find where the limits are.
As always, I’d love to hear from you.
Bryan
To simulate British usage, I might say “My mother’s mother was born in Puerto Rico, and her father is White American.” On the British forms, I sometimes have ticked “White and Asian” and at others “Any other Mixed or multiple ethnic background.”
I’d like to thank Amber Carpenter for her talk on Plato and Dignāga, which introduced me to the latter’s work.