The way we think plays a great impact on how we live our lives and relate with people around us. This article may seem like it’s going down the path of one of the internet articles on temperament.
Temperament is involved whenever or wherever there is a talk on human thinking as it has to do with individual personalities based on Wikipedia. However, I promise this article is not totally going down that path. I’ve come across different types of temperament from different sources. I mostly think of this 5 as the major genuine temperament types
- Melancholy
- Phlegmatic
- Choleric
- Sanguine
- Supine
To read more on them, I recommend this article. I have a melancholy/sanguine temperament and so do many other people as usually we are made of about two of the temperaments.
Relative and Absolute thinkers may fall under any of the temperaments listed so this makes this topic a different perspective of the human thinking.
Relative Thinkers
Relative thinkers are common. A lot of people I come across daily are relative thinkers but they are totally unaware of it. A relative thinker is someone who lives based on things he has been brought up with. He/She keeps and believes in the principles giving to them without a second thought. There is hardly any form of skeptism with a relative thinker. Their thoughts are relative to the things they’ve heard. In the long run, some of them end up being so gullible.
Absolute Thinkers
Absolute thinkers are mostly scientists by nature even if their field of nature has nothing to do with science. They believe every thing that has not been proven should be taken hypothetically rather than theoratically. They are the most skeptical people. Some absolute thinkers just doubt things without trying to see if there are ways those things can be possible, while others are the curious trying to decipher things and understand why exactly things work the way they do in order to have a reason for believing in the things they believe in.
A good instance is a religious point of view. Anyone in any religion is born to hear things like:
There is a God, God created us
A relative thinker believes this without any doubt. They follow all the steps their parents had thought them to being good believers of the religion because it is what inculcated in them. On the other hand, an absolute thinker may and may not believe in the religion he was brought up in. Every absolute thinker take their time to come out of their regular thoughts and see a reason to do whatever they do. For an absolute thinker that had chosen not to believe in the religion they were bread with, it is either they found that religion not to be worth the time because everything they know about it seems ingenuine. Another category of people that may not believe in religion are the ones who never try seeking a reason to believe and remain skeptical.
An absolute thinker that believes in a religion has spent time considering why this religion exists, how it came about, what may make it worth believing. The illustration with religion does not mean this has to do with religion and this article is not meant to also be one of the argumentative religious posts. I am Christian and I believe in God and this is because I took my time to see reasons to because I’m an absolute thinker. At some point in my life, I stopped believing in any religion and I just lived life even with the fact that I was born in a Christian home. Now, I’m a christian because I want to be and I have reasons to be.
In the technology field I find myself as well. If you keep doing the things that the regular software engineers do or whoever they are in your field, then there is very little for you to discover about yourself, your career, and life as a whole. Just like temperaments, this things may be so much of who we are and you may find it uneasy to change from one to the other.
I really believe the inventors we know are absolute thinkers because they believed in something that didn’t already exists. Steve Jobs is a great example of an absolute thinking inventor.