Common logic that we use is also known as the step by step logic. This is integrated in what is defined as lateral thinking. When it comes to lateral thinking, I often prefer to say it is a causal thinking. Causal thinking is what we learn from early childhood. It is the essential way to rationalize of our present society and culture. It reaches its climax in scientific reasoning and factual approach in giving answers, solving problems. On the other hand, there is a completely different way of thinking. Less known, or maybe less common. It is the vertical thinking, also known as acausal thinking. For those of you looking for relations and correlations in understanding, vertical thinking is a must learn. Here is why.

Any self development quest or effort supposes a future state which is different from the actual one. It supposes a change, a transformation that will bring something more to what there is now. So, in terms of self developmental efforts, it is easy to recognize the patterns of causal thinking. It is dependent on time and movement in time, from a past state towards a future state.

Vertical thinking is essentially the ability to recognize informational units. Even more, to recognize similar qualities of information. So, vertical thinking is more into understanding. Understanding not through rationalization, step by step logic, but through analogies. This also has the property of sequentiality, but not in time. Sequentiality here is present in form of levels.

Aristotle’s doctrine of the four causes

It is interesting to see how this relates to Aristotle’s doctrine of the four causes. In his metaphysics, Aristotle defines the following four causes:

1. Material cause: “that from which, as a constituent present in it, a thing comes to be … e.g., the bronze and silver, and their genera, are causes of the statue and the bowl.”
2. Formal cause: “the form, i.e., the pattern … the form is the account of the essence … and the parts of the account.”
3. Efficient cause: “the source of the primary principle of change or stability,” e.g., the man who gives advice, the father (of the child). “The producer is a cause of the product, and the initiator of the change is a cause of what is changed.”
4. Final cause: “something’s end (telos) – i.e., what it is for – is its cause, as health is the cause of walking.”

Now, if we visualize it in the context of horizontal and vertical ordering, the following picture will be explanatory:

Horizontally we see displayed the past source, the initiating point and the future ending, the finality. This relates to what we previously said that common causal thinking is. The step by step logic of lateral thinking.

Vertical thinking is represented by the formal and the material cause here, displayed along the vertical axes. The formal cause represents the pattern, or as we said before, the informational quality. Material cause represents the levels on which it is organized. The levels are the sequences of informational units.

Vertical thinking means moving on the vertical axes. Analogies are its best expression. Finding the similar informational quality on different levels is the way of understanding here.

This way of thinking as opposed to the lateral one is not available as a matter of course. It has to be learned. Once it was available for us. The language of fairy tales, with all of the myths and legends presented there in their purest form were so dear to us all. And when we grew up, we slowly forgot their reality, sometimes even deny it. But then it often reappears as a must learn in times of adulthood. In time, we realize the barriers of our actual ways of thinking, the incapacity of it to give us satisfactory answers. Then, whether we know it or not, we are in fact looking for the vertical way of thinking.

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