There are people whose psyche is wired for logic. They are rational, logical and by-the-book. And on top of that — devilishly curious, forever experimenting and poking their nose in everywhere. We are talking about people with the “Contact with Cognition” Ego type. It is also called the “Ontological Ego type”.
When we speak of cognition, we automatically think of analysis, logic, conclusions. It reminds us of university scholars in white coats endlessly running statistics on something. Or of the people in the planning department drawing up a strategic development programme.
But there is also the other extreme: the “mad” experimenters. The kind who are itching to stick their fingers into a socket just to see what happens. And they, too, move science forward — along with civilisation and comedy series.
So logic and experiment are two poles of one and the same instrument — Contact with Cognition. Analysis, logical assessment, is a system for comparing the situation at hand with our past experience and knowledge, whereas experiment is thinking aimed at the future: assuming, building hypotheses. Analysis answers the question “WHY”, experiment answers the question “WHAT FOR”. “What for” points into the future, “why” closes off the past. We can grasp something through deep analysis, drawing a conclusion at the end of a chain of reasoning, or we can arrive at an illumination, an insight, as the result of an action we have taken. And we cannot do both at once.
Their sore spot
If you have taken an interest in a relationship with someone who has the Ontological Ego type, what is worth knowing about them? Probably that these people are fixated on sex. Or rather, they are either hyper-fixated on it, or flatly at odds with it (which comes to the same thing). What has sex got to do with it?
The highest degree of cognition between people happens precisely through sex. In sex we come to know both ourselves and our partner. We see an interesting object, we want, there is mutual understanding, there is contact, there is a response. We are interested! We want!
The key moment here is to notice your own interest, to become aware of your own desire and to put it forward. It matters to understand when you want something and when you don't. But people fixated on cognition do not see, or do not notice, their own desire. They “tuck” their own interests away into the background. And it turns out, comically enough, that they are either hyper-preoccupied with trying out every position in the Kama Sutra, or with “how to satisfy my partner”, or they are bored to tears by the very word “sex”. Well, naturally — what is there to get excited about in the dull missionary position!
