With our way of using language we create a fixed system which is also dominating the way we think. The investigation of the mineral, inanimate world, which was our primary objective in the past centuries, has given us the understanding and usage of language that we have today. We demand clear definitions, sharply outlined concepts, and a precise expression, which can capture the essence of a thing with a reasonable number of words. Once completed, we can preserve the result in written form, add it to the list of things that are established and move on. This method is well suited to grasp unchanging, lifeless things. We can say what a sphere is, what a circle is, what a line is, what a dot is, what a year, a day, a second is. We have finished, definite and specific concepts for this in our minds and in our encyclopedia. With this we get a good representation of the mineral, the frozen part of reality. However, this method is not suited to approach the idea of living organisms, of life, the ever changing and transforming that only temporarily appears to our senses surrounded and partly covered by its perceivable but evanescent shell.
Dead thinking, or thinking with dead, petrified thoughts is a way of thinking reduced to the structure of how we commonly use language today. Langauge expresses with words whatever we want to refer to, and that will dull anything which is more than an inanimate thing. For example, when describing a chicken with words, I can only highlight and express certain aspects of it. Even if I describe it for the rest of my life, I will not be able to put everything into words that is included in the idea of a chicken. I could take a chicken egg, capture the location and condition of each atom in it and write it down, and I still have not captured what a chicken is. I just described the current state of a single appearance of it. When we think the way we speak and only capture what can be captured with language, then we do something we can call “dead thinking”. Language, when it makes use of fixed definitions, can only accurately capture the inanimate, the petrified and mineral world. For example the shape and atomic structure of a chicken egg, the way it exists at a specific moment in time. Living organisms we fail to do justice with our language, we can only point towards them. In the realm of life we have genus and type, we created a structure where we can categorize the way we do with minerals. This creates a box where we can put each creature, but it does not bring is much closer to the mystery of life. We think in stereotypes, we form prejudice. We lift certain features out and neglect others. We try to freeze what is always changing. In simple but inaccurate words: we document the static appearance of something when the nature of it is in its movement.
Lively thinking lets go of the established specific concepts, of the fixed expectations, and allows a development of the concepts and the network they are arranged in. It considers the concepts themself to be alive, to be in constant transformation, just as a tree never stays the same and grows from a seed to a seedling to a mighty wooden structure with many eaves and roots. No tree is identical with another, but all of them are trees. As soon as I am aware that I want to indicate with my language at something that is alive and constantly reshaping, I will deal with it differently. I will continue to look of words that can describe an aspect of it, another condition. But I will not become a victim of the fallacy that this description fully captures the nature of something. And as a listener I see my task in finding the living thing, that the words are guiding me towards, within my own thinking. A razor sharp analysis of the expressed concepts, that will give me all I need to find an inanimate, mineral thing, is not sufficient when talking about the living. We need clear concepts as well, but we have to know that they can only ever capture a single aspect of it, reflecting just one condition of an appearance of life. The concepts points towards a living thing, but does not contain it, unless it is alive itself. Same as sensory perception points towards the concept, but does not contain it. We grasp the concepts and the living nature that appears in an organism with our thinking, and not with perception or language alone. Both can only point us the way towards the nature of anything that is alive.
When we assume that the world is as it appears to our sensory perception, then we overlook that we are thinking and we become materialists for a period of time. As soon as we become aware of the concepts, and their appearance in our thinking, we have done the first step to overcome this period. But our thinking will only become really alive as soon as we realize that language also covers just a part of our thinking abilities. It also delivers something that we can complement further, so that we become capable of creating thoughts about living things. Then we can dress those thoughts once again in language and find words that will direct the thinking of another human towards the nature of a living thing that we wish to point out. It is an art that requires both structure and flexibility.