The definition of image-taking thinking mode in this paper is: in the process of thinking, it is inseparable from objects, and an abstract and rational thinking method is directly deduced by imagination as the medium. The core of this way of thinking is to infer abstract things through imagination with concrete things as the carrier, and its essence is a logical method of direct reasoning with China characteristics. It originated in primitive times and developed in the Book of Changes.
Primitive man was in the early stage of human civilization. In the long-term struggle for existence, they have acquired the primitive thinking ability of taking pictures. Their thinking level is the same as that of children. They only have concrete physical images in their minds, and the words they use are all physical symbols they touch. In their language, there are no species words that contain the same nature of things, nor words that express general concepts. For example, they only have the concept of this person and that person, but not the general concept of "person"; There are only different kinds of trees, but there is no general concept of "tree". With the development of thinking, they gradually transferred some special nouns to related things, indicating the homogeneity of things, thus producing the performance of image-taking thinking. Its characteristic is that there is no such word in the language, but to find a physical object similar to it and related to it to some extent. For example, "like a stone" means "hard", "like the sun" means "hot", "round" and so on. The words "hard", "hot" and "round" here are abstract words, which are extracted from the objects that impress them the most, such as stones and the sun. This is the primary stage of image-taking thinking.
The primary stage of image-taking thinking shows that human thinking has entered the stage of simple analogical reasoning. Analogical reasoning is the essential feature of the thinking mode of taking images. This way of thinking was developed and perfected in the Book of Changes, and gradually became one of China's traditional ways of thinking.
The divinatory symbols in the Book of Changes are the main basis for him to speculate on the quality of things. Such as doing for the sky, Kun for the earth, earthquake for thunder, sorrow for the wind, etc., and try to show the changes of everything in the universe, and then reveal the essence of things. Most hexagrams are also used to explain abstract truth by taking images. For example, the words in Sleeping on June 3rd say: "It is a fierce thing to be trapped in a stone and enter its palace without seeing his wife, according to thistle." This means that a person tripped over a stone and reached for the stone on the thistle. When he got home, he lost his wife, so he met this fierce man. This is an abstract truth, people in the rough, relying on the bad guys, there will be no good results. It lies in the expression of concrete things, which makes people connect concrete things with abstract things and feel something.
Another example is the divination in Longxian County in Gan. "Well" hexagrams are well written and shoot into the valley. The hexagram in Dazhuang says that a sheep touches a vassal and so on. Through the description of specific things such as "dragon", it is intended to explain abstract things related to it, that is, not to explain specific things such as "dragon" itself, but to stimulate people's imagination and realize an abstract thing, that is, to take pictures.
The essence of image-taking thinking is a logical method of analogical reasoning. The so-called analogical reasoning refers to the logical method of inferring an abstract thing directly from a concrete thing through imagination. In addition to the above analysis, for example, the 92 words in the Book of Changes: "If you die, you will have a wife, and there is no disadvantage." Here, the withered young people in nature are linked with the married old women in the world, and their similarities are taken to imagine, and then the conclusion of "no harm" is inferred from the comparison. It is intended to tell the fortune teller that what he asks will prosper. Images with hexagrams in the Book of Changes infer "meaning" through the media of imagination. Images and hexagrams are visible, but "meaning" is invisible, so it is difficult to explain clearly. For those things that can only be understood but can't be expressed, people can get them by taking images, which are "get carried away" and "get carried away". The obtained "meaning" is the reason, while the forgotten "image" and "shape" are concrete things that are chosen, and their thinking process is analogical reasoning, and their thinking mode is taking images.
There are two main characteristics of the thinking mode of taking images: one is the supplement to the overall thinking, and the other is the great fuzziness.
The complementary thinking of taking images and overall thinking constitutes the thinking framework of the Book of Changes. With its unique form of expression, the ancient classics of Zhouyi pay full attention to understanding and grasping the world from a holistic perspective, regard man and nature as an organic whole corresponding to each other, and take the eight diagrams and sixty-four hexagrams as the basic framework of this whole. Here, man and nature are in a completely unified structure, and this holistic view and the thinking mode of taking images complement each other. That is to say, in the process of taking images, there is a kind of holistic thinking, which is based on the characters of taking images and the arrangement and combination of divination, which is also inseparable from the thinking of taking images. For example, the divination in Gan takes the dragon as the concrete image object, and reveals the whole process of the occurrence, development and decline of things through the description of different situations of the dragon, such as "diving", "seeing", "leaping", "flying" and "rising". Here, image-taking thinking and holistic thinking are complementary and indispensable. In this sense, the so-called "get carried away" means that the "meaning" is exhausted and the image is forgotten; "Catch a fish and forget the basket" means catch a fish and forget the basket. The best requirement is overall integrity.