holygoalie3 Yea, because all the media get it wrong, not one person bothers looking before writing about it. George Bernard Shaw posed for the statue, and he was requested to put the fist to the head and it was that pose Rodin modelled it on. Not to mention countless of people who have had their photos taken next to the statue with their fist on their head. Not one of those people bothered looking before imitating the pose. Wake head sleepy.
I have a small version of this in my great room. But the fist is clenching under the chin. Mine is around at least 40 years old. My parents bought it when I was about 10 or 11 years old. I remember trying to sit like that but it was difficult to hold that position. Did not learn about Dante's Inferno until the mid 90's.
It looks like he is sitting on the can thinking that he forgot to by toilet paper. Anyway, it is a very impressive work by Rodan considering he must have been interrupted many times by and had to fight off Godzilla to get this statue finished.
"Rodin first conceived the figure as part of his work The Gates of Hell"(The Thinker , From Wikipedia) "The Gates of Hell (...) is a monumental sculptural group work by French artist Auguste Rodin that depicts a scene from the Inferno"(The Gates of Hell, From Wikipedia) ""realm ... of those who have rejected spiritual values by yielding to bestial appetites or violence, or by perverting their human intellect to fraud or malice against their fellowmen". " (Inferno (Dante) , From Wikipedia) "Inspiration - Rodin conceived that people would walk toward the work, perhaps up a flight of stairs, and be overwhelmed frontally by the massive gates, contemplating the experience of hell that Dante describes in his Inferno. Rodin thought particularly of Dante's warning over the entrance of the Inferno, "Abandon every hope, who enter here."" (The Gates of Hell , From Wikipedia) If I were to interpret "the thinker" is ether "the new man" that people of that time were trying to make. Or just an alienated man. He is larger than life, he forms the world for him self, and he sits outside the gates of hell.
When you said "total thinking machine" I thought, what's really being talked about here is consciousness. It's beyond the brain, the mind. And when you said "What is more opposite to thinking than a stone?" I thought...wait, there is no more 𝑡𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙 thinking machine. This would be why the sword is stuck in stone: until one with total consciousness comes along, the sword is stuck because the person sees himself as separate from the rock. When someone who has become one with the rock comes along, he pulls it out with ease because he has mastered his reality.
