Fixation and Movement in the Activity of the Mind (In the Light of the “Adult Man” Education - Homo Edultus)

The study of the activity of the mind, aimed at defining the ways to develop the mind of a genuine adult, which forms part of the anthropological research project and has, as in many other cases of philosophical anthropology, an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary (here dialectical) character, is conducted within the framework of the subject-based anthropological concept. In this context, the phenomena of grasping, research, synthesis, analysis, generalized in the categories of ‘fixation’ and ‘movement’ are analyzed based on the ideas of Eastern and Western traditions: the Dharmic theory of Buddhist phenomenology, Kant’s philosophy and modern cognitive psychology and neuroscience. As a result, a number of correspondences were noticed in the allocation of “fixation” and “movement” and in taking into account the most important, from the point of view of the theory of agency (‘subjectnost’), the fundamentally active role of the mind in the activity of cognition. Key concepts were also outlined in understanding the transition from sensory experience to rationality: in Kant’s ‘schematism’ this is the meaning of the empirical and transcendental ‘I’; in Buddhism, the principle of karma in Dharmic theory; in cognitive science – ‘sorting’ in the mechanisms of memory and the activation of layers of neurons in ultra-precise neural networks. The author concludes that in the Western tradition the cultivation of the mind is based on rationality and ‘I’, and in Buddhism - in attention. In the light of the theory of agency (‘subjectnost’), the nature of attention is defined as a pre-discursive manifestation of ‘subjectnost’, and the reasons for the fixation and movement of the mind in the dialectic of the experience of ‘order’ and agency are clarified.