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Dear Juan,

Great topic! Our interaction with patients as health care workers (HCW) needs to be developed properly!

At the POSSUM conference day in Birmingham, UK, I heard speakers use words like "thought", "judgment", "subjective", "objective", "shared understanding" in their search for "a single unifying thought". https://twitter.com/RichardLehman1/status/980057655480905729

For me also the notion of "gut feeling" came up.

Over the years I have tried to come to "a single unifying thought", or call it framework around that notion.

Daniel Kahneman talks about slow thinking and fast thinking and you translate that to analytic thinking and intuitive thinking.

Steiner wrote back in 1886 about "The science of knowing" (1) and described the two aspects that you mention Juan, as "intellect" and "reason": "Our thinking has a twofold task: firstly, to create concepts with sharply delineated contours; secondly, to bring together the individual concepts thus created into a unified whole.

The unified whole Steiner called "the thought content of the world".

Interestingly, Thomas Nagel comes to the same conclusion in his book (2) published in 2012. He calls it "the intelligibility of the world".

Nagel writes that the current accepted truth of explaining the natural order based on physical- and chemical laws only, is incomplete, deficient. He writes that these laws can only explain a mindless universe, they can not explain life, consciousness, values and ethics.

Nagel suggests that the way forward to a unifying approach, to an understanding of the world, is to assume that “the intelligibility of the world", as described by the laws that science has uncovered, is itself part of the deepest explanation of why things are as they are.

That is not to say that Nagel takes a theistic point of view, where a God created the world, or intelligent design, because, he says, the same problem arises with this approach as with the reductionist materialistic approach, namely, that we make things unintelligible by placing knowledge outside us.

Rather, he argues, to provide a satisfying explanation of the world we need not only take into account that what we observe outside us, but collect all the data that we have access to. These data include the thoughts that arise in our own being and how these thoughts, through reason, fall into place. Our subjective notions can thus result in objective universals when we actively engage in the process.

This shift from subjective to objective happens when it fits with what Thomas Nagel calls the intelligibility of the world.

“It is not merely the subjectivity of thought but its capacity to transcend subjectivity and to discover what is objectively the case that presents a problem.

Thought and reasoning are correct or incorrect in virtue of something independent of the thinker’s beliefs and the community of thinkers to which he belongs”.

So, concluding, the aim is to transcend the subjective and objective aspect during the consultation with the patient - together with the patient. Through reason letting the individual issues that we and the patient became aware off together and let them fall into place. Through that we together, in the consultation becoming aware of something extra and gain insight how to progress? Might that be what we need to develop in HCW training programs?

1) Rudolf Steiner’s book "The science of knowing: Outline of an epistemology implicit in the Goethean world view: with particular reference to Schiller (CW 2) - by Mercury press 1988. This translation is sometimes hard to get, a translation from 2009 goes by the title "Goethe's Theory of Knowledge: An Outline of the Epistemology of His Worldview"

2) Thomas Nagel's book "Mind and Cosmos - why the materialistic Neo Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false."

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