Porton, John Gabriel A.

9/25/18
BS Computer Engineering Discussion Paper: Thinking as a Hobby
2018-03016 English THX2
“Thinking as a hobby” – William Golding

In his essay, Golding presents himself as someone who has a great understanding on the diversity

among people and their way and level of thinking. He finds observing people around him and their way of

communicating their thoughts, opinions and feelings to others as amusing and very interesting he puts it as his

own “hobby.”

Golding writes about his past experiences and observations with his interactions with everyone he

meets and how he learns to differentiate the three different types of thinkers. He classifies them into his so

called “grades” in according to their style of thinking: Grade-three thinkers, which he associated with the

statuette of the damaged Venus of Milo, is the most common in the society which Golding stated that it is

about nine-tenths of the world’s population. Golding describes grade-three thinkers as people who do not

overthink and only think with their feelings and their predetermined prejudices. Golding also states that “that

thought is often full of unconscious prejudice, ignorance, and hypocrisy” (2) which he learned and discovered

after interacting with grade-three thinkers.

Grade-two thinkers are a step higher than grade-three thinkers, which Golding again associated with

one his former headmaster’s statuettes, the leopard. He described grade-two thinking as the detection of

contradictions, and people who likes to point out wrongs with no intention of making them right, excellent for

destroying thoughts and ideologies, but not for building or creating them.

The last type of thinkers are Grade-one thinkers. Golding describes grade-one thinkers as people who

are steps above grade-three and grade-two thinkers. Grade-one thinkers are people who analyzes everything

without taking feelings into consideration in his decision making.

Personally, I agree with Golding’s classification of thinking. And I believe that thinking is something

that progresses and develops gradually from a simple to a very complex form. I think everyone starts at the
very first grade of thinking and in my opinion are our most natural way of thinking, the grade-three thinking,

where we blindly accept, follow or believe uncritically what we’ve been taught or told. However, once we start

to find certain contradictions on what we believe and accept to be true, started finding wrongs and

contradictions to the crowd and start to stray away from the masses with our eyes and ears open, we start to

progress to grade-two of thinking. Golding describes this as a dangerous and destructive kind of thinking with

the power to destroy but not create ideologies. Golding backed this statement about the relation of these two

types of thinking by telling a story about himself, and a young girl named Ruth, and their discussion about their

religion and their contradicting beliefs and arguments about it.

After the process of going through the first two levels of thinking, comes what Golding refers to as

the “truth” or the ideal way of thinking, known as grade-one thinking. This grade of thinking is symbolized by

Rodin’s Thinker, which represents “an image of pure thought.” (Golding 1) which came after not only realizing

contradictions in his beliefs, but also finds a way to settle it.

At the end of the passage, I sympathized with Golding on how he feels irrelevant by being a grade-

one thinker because the world revolves around the first two levels of thinkers like rotten apples falling off a

tree. On how he devised a coherent system for living, a “moral system,” will be difficult to implement since

this kind of thinking goes against many big businesses, governments, marriages etcetera. I also noticed in the

last paragraph in rearranging the three statuettes, he would put Venus aside, and place the thinker in the shadow

of the leopard. This arrangement supports his view as a grade one thinker and how he comes to accept how

things in this world should be.

In conclusion, although I agree with Golding’s classification, I do not refer to these as simply categories

but rather steps in the thinking process. From the trials, to finding contradictions, to finding the truth. As one

cannot be a Grade-one thinker without first going through being a grade-three and grade-two thinker.

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