Steiner distinguished three kinds of thinking: ordinary combining thought, morphological thinking that lives in time, and a third qualitative thinking that turns inner and outer inside out.
The Three Kinds of Thinking in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's staged typology of cognition, given in the lecture Paths to Knowledge of Higher Worlds (Christiania, 26 November 1921, GA 79). The first kind is ordinary combining thinking, which arranges its contents spatially and links one thought to the next along the thread of sense observation. The second is morphological or plastic thinking, which lives in the medium of time rather than space: one thought grows organically out of another the way a shoulder grows out of a neck, and it yields what Steiner called imaginative knowledge. The third is a qualitative thinking of reversal, pictured as a glove turned inside out whose elasticity also changes, the relation Steiner drew between thigh bone and skull. That third movement leaves space and time behind. Together the three describe how ordinary cognition is trained, not replaced.
The three kinds of thinking answer a practical question: what has to change in a person's cognition before spiritual research is possible. Steiner did not ask his Christiania listeners to abandon ordinary logic. He asked them to add two capacities to it, each reached by exercise, each with its own medium, each opening a stage of super-sensible knowledge.
In Steiner's Own Words
Imagine this process of metamorphosis like a glove which is turned inside out, but at the same time the elasticity of the glove undergoes a change. A new form arises. It is as if the glove is not only turned inside out, but takes on quite a different shape through the new elasticity. You see, as a first indication of this third kind of thinking I must bring before you a very complicated process. This kind of thinking does not only live in constantly changing forms, but it is able to reverse the inner structure, so as to change its form. This can only be achieved through the fact that now our thinking no longer lives in the medium of time, for in this process of reversion the subject of our thoughts transcends space and time and penetrates into a reality which lies beyond space and time.
What it Means Today
Henri Bortoft, the English physicist who studied quantum wholeness under David Bohm at Birkbeck College in London, spent his working life on the question Steiner circles in this lecture: whether there is a second way of seeing that is not the analytical one. In The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe's Way of Science (Floris Books, 1996) Bortoft separates the mode that stands outside its object and combines finished parts from what he called the dynamic way of seeing, which follows a plant or a sentence in the act of coming into being. His later Taking Appearance Seriously (Floris Books, 2012) gives that mode its sharpest instruction: go upstream to the movement that produced the form, not downstream to the finished product. Goethe's leaf sequence, held in mind until the separate leaves become one gesture, is Steiner's second kind in practice.
Thalira synthesis: the third kind is where Bortoft stops and Steiner keeps walking, because reversal is not a better way of looking at an object, it is arriving at the object from the far side of it.
Practically, work the second kind before reaching for the third. Take one growing thing, a bean over ten days, and rebuild the whole sequence inwardly at each sitting rather than recalling it. Steiner is explicit that imaginative content cannot be stored in memory, only the conditions that produced it.
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