The Pre-Disciplinary Mind

I want this to be brief and relatively unstructured. I have been tossing this phrase around in my mind for a few days now. The 'pre-disciplinary mind'. What I am trying to communicate with this phrase is the way the disciplines used to blend in minds.

Nowadays everyone is so pigeonholed; we have physicists, chemists, mathematicians, philosophers, historians, and so on. Everything is segmented into the dominant disciplines. Everything is so structured. But it didn't used to be this way.

People used to grapple with thought and knowledge as something much larger and trans-disciplinary. Trans-disciplinary isn't even the right term. Because they weren't transgressing any boundaries: there literally were no boundaries. Math flowed into philosophy and literature and everything else.

Thinkers like Descartes, Spinoza, Vico, these men I hear about and have read some writing by, they were mathematicians, philosophers, scientists, literary critics. Their minds were so dynamic and capable of so many different things that I can't do. I can't do the math, the physics. It is fascinating to think about a mind that didn't understand the division of the disciplines the way I do. The way we all do.

I want to know what it was like to have a pre-disciplinary mind. What was it like to not know the distinctions of knowledge, to regard different types of thought as open and porous entities.

Nowadays it is as if each discipline is a tower that he inverted on itself. It only communicates within its own little self contained world. There is very little flow of knowledge and information across disciplines. Especially when it comes to the disciplines that seem distant from one another, like math and science.

But I find it fascinating to try and conceptualize a mind in which all the 'disciplines' as I know them were porous and flowed in and out of one another. Interesting stuff.

Again, this is short. This fits in with a ton of my thinking. Most of my writing prior to this relates to this in some ways.

In many ways I want to have something like a pre-disciplinary mind. But it is impossible. I don't do math well, never learned it very well. But I can try and get as much of a total view as I can of knowledge.

Get closer to this point where knowledge is porous. I want to think about all the disciplines. I can't help but think about all the disciplines.

I want so badly to imagine a way of thinking that isn't limited by the disciplinary boundaries.