Fourth Logic - "4L" / "Schoolboys"

"Schoolboy" (4th Logic). 

I'm afraid that the reader has an impression beforehand, voluntarily or involuntarily, of the 4th Logic as a deliberately mentally helpless and backward function. Therefore I'll emphasize once again that it is not so. The essence of problems of the 4th Logic consists not in the low quality of its functioning, but in the fact that an individual gives Logic the last place in his inner hierarchy of values. Let us read into such lines: 

"It wasn't hard for me to wean myself off feasts, 

Where the idle mind glitters while the heart slumbers." 

Who is the author of these lines, where Emotion ("heart") is unambiguously preferred to Logic ("mind")? The author is a great clever, unsurpassed polemicist, according to the evidence of his contemporaries - Alexander Pushkin, whose 1st Emotion was really combined with the 4th Logic, which is clearly reflected in the above lines. 

In Pushkin's example, it is easy to see one of the specific traits of the 4th Logic: the combination of quality work of the logical apparatus with complete insanity. Pushkin was a brilliant polemicist, losing at cards to anyone who could hold them. There is nothing paradoxical here. His polemical gift was revealed in a serene atmosphere of a friendly circle. Whereas a big card game itself led to discomfort, tense situation, when, according to the laws of the Fourth functions, Pushkin's Fourth Logic was switched off, and all inner energy was concentrated in Emotion - the function which was the first in his inner hierarchy. And I think it's easy to predict the result of a card game based on emotions beforehand. And so, depending on the situation, any "schoolboy" smart and stupid in one person lives. 

The Russian Tsar Nicholas II was not denied his intelligence by those who knew him well. But. Pobedonostsev considered him intolerant of "general questions" capable of assessing the "value of a fact in isolation, without relation to the rest, without any connection to the totality of other facts, events, currents, phenomena. The king himself said, "that he agonizes hard, choosing from all he has heard the right", "that he has to strain his mind", and "he thinks that this effort mind, if it could pass in the horse (when he sits on it), it would be very troubled. That's just the way it is. The 4th Logic finds it difficult to do independent mental work, to engage the intellect at all without an immediate and obvious need to do so. The "schoolboy's" brain is pragmatic, does not like to look far ahead and quickly goes mouldy without any stimulus from outside. 

And so, in appearance, the 4th Logic is almost indistinguishable from the 2nd. It is also intellectually non-partisan; it easily assimilates, accepts, reproduces, develops any views: dogmatic, dialectical, skeptical... The 4th Logic is as free and fearless in its premises and conclusions as the 2nd. And let's give credit, omnivorousness combined with fearlessness is a major and very weighty trump card in the hands of the "schoolboy". 

Two things allow us to quickly distinguish the 4th Logic from the 2nd Logic. First, the ideology of the "schoolboy" is completely detached from his life, and he is in no way inclined to follow what he himself postulates. Of one such holder of the 4th Logic, Tolstoy wrote: "Sviyazhsky was one of those, always surprising for Levin, people whose reasoning, very consistent, though never independent, goes by itself, while life, extremely definite and firm in its direction, goes by itself, completely independent, almost always contrary to reasoning. 

The second sign of the 4th Logic is innate skepticism. However, let us not confuse it with the active skepticism of the 3rd Logic. "Schoolboy" skepticism is toothless; Pasternak's remark that to engage in intellectual activity all your life is like eating mustard all your life is the edge beyond which a "schoolboy" rarely crosses in his critique of rationalism. The skepticism of the 4th Logic is not a vigorous denial of the efficacy of the intellectual element in man, but a simple indifference to it. And this is the great difference between the skepticism of the 3rd and the skepticism of the 4th Logic. Because the indifference of the 4th Logic, which was colored by skepticism a while ago, may be colored by dogma tomorrow, and the day after by something else. Because of its indifference to intellectual questions, 4th Logic is easily seized, but the mistake will be made by one who thinks he has seized it forever. No - until a subsequent interlocutor. Of one such "schoolboys" Labruyere wrote: "He appropriates another's mind with such naturalness that he himself is the first to be deceived, sincerely believing as if he were expressing his own judgment or explaining his own thought, although in fact he is merely an echo of the one he has just parted with." Chekhov wrote very self-critically about the same: "I do not have a political, religious or philosophical worldview; I change it every month...". 

In a word, the "schoolboy" is energetic only in need, idly curious, internally completely uninhibited, an intellectual chameleon. And here are all his pluses and minuses. As a consolation to the "schoolboy," it must be added that he is a champion. He outnumbers all other Logics among the population of the earth. There is no country or nation where a Logic above the "schoolboy's" one would dominate. Purely hypothetically, we may assume that in Greece in the Y-IYth century B.C. and in Germany in the YIIIth and XIXth centuries, at the height of their philosophies and sciences, the 4th Logic was slightly displaced. But at other times and in other spaces, the dominance of the 4th Logic was and is undivided.