What is Being Called Thinking?

06 Thursday Oct 2011

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Subjectivity, Why thinking?

To think is to proceed on a subjective journey, to go to a new place. Thinking is an act of re-orientation, a leap into novelty of mental focus and direction, self-directed re-orientation in aid of growth, increase, or going farther in questioning. Getting further along can be building a personal mark on the environment from subjective impulses, or evaluating the findings from digging into history and current events. Both involve an individual’s creativity, and both involve accumulating orientation by reference to inertial non-intelligent nature as well as collective culture. Thinking is the creative gusher of impulses and orientations building a global mental synthesis by positing probable relationships among variously discovered features of the world. Thinking is progressive re-orientation by questioning, mentally opening experiences through various principles of relevance, discovering the consequences of different assumptions and possibilities.

Thinking is different from meditation in which the intent is not to get further along but rather to abide with or be with immediate experience. Thinking is more like doubting than like knowing. Thinking is not the same as talking silently to yourself, although sometimes it may take that form.

To think is to engage in some part of a cluster of subjective activities related to questioning, to notice your questioning and develop it, to be a source of questions. Thinking is a searching, holding to a principle or tree of relevance. To think is to wonder or question and sometimes to be borne by questioning to an evaluation of nature, sometimes measurements of nature, and to question differently by including findings in subsequent questioning. Questioning opens features of the world and so connects the reaching intelligence with inertial non-intelligence. Ideas are questions which create openings of the world and become vigils, and as such are ‘through the looking-glass’. An idea is a vigil, a vector of ‘listening’ sensitivity.

Thinking could include any part of an individual’s complicated subjectivity, typically “listening” for pattern building, tentative orientations, or placements from a semi-conscious dream-like process. By far the greater part of thinking is unconscious and pre-linguistic. The mechanics or habits of the process make up the visible tip of the iceberg. You “load” information, theories, and principles, the insights and observations of others, by reading and listening to people, getting things in separate bits without being judgmental too quickly. You let it work in the semi-conscious dream-engine and ‘listen’ for patterns, follow-up questions, and conclusions shot into consciousness. The “visible tip” is often a process of writing by which ideas can be developed through stating a tentative claim, collecting elaborations as well as alternative claims and contrary evidence in the most charitable interpretations, re-reading and correcting, accumulating and organizing by relevance.

Thinking can be more than problem solving. Problem identification is part of survival and creature comfort. There are irritations and hazards to survival and security too urgent for much deliberation. Subjectivity is often dominated by a sense of predicament and vigilance to overcome it. Curiosity and impulses to make a distinctive mark are often interrupted by that. Thinking is personal curiosity, appetite, and ambition evaluating, tasting, and re-making surroundings. Thinking quests after orientation-truth, science; grace (appetite gratification); self-declaration (intelligence creates voices, personae), and self-possession; all without dependence on an existing social order, although much concerned with mutual attachment. Thinking about the social and cultural context of an individual life will always involve questioning history and the legitimacy of authority and the value of the talk going around. Collective memories are often misinformed. There is a kind of mental soaring involved in getting beyond the influence of conventional or current cultural assumptions and projects.

The push of subjectivity should be upgraded as a marker of orientation. Since the perceiver projects so much selectivity and contextual placement onto sense-intuitions, the deliberate re-orientation that is called thinking has a claim to transcendence as a source of experience. Self-possession is awareness of the subjective gusher, awareness that deliberative intelligence shakes loose from the objective world by exercising freedom. (In Kant, freedom is transcendence.) Freedom does not have to be a godlike unlimited power. There can be real freedom within limits.

Disinterestedness: The Vita Contemplativa

05 Wednesday Oct 2011

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in disinterestedness, University

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Individuals have questions which they, as students, bring to the university to develop skills necessary to find answers. They tap into scholarly conversations with that readiness to research their questions, but study cannot be approached with too narrow a sense of relevance. Study in humanities, for example, is a deliberate encounter with great literature and requires some ‘rising to the occasion’, challenging ourselves to respond in a spontaneous and charitable way to products of original thought, insight, inspiration, and expression. Reading as a study activity requires charity and patience. It requires a suspension of one’s own questions in order to grasp those of another voice. Encountering greatness can enlarge anyone’s thinking, emotions, and sense-of-self in a general way, even in people who simply want a ticket to a professional career with a degree of dignity and gravitas.

Thinking about any issue is assisted by awareness of complications and objections already on record. Being aware of a variety of points of view comes with an awareness of history. Education should leave a person with the knowledge of why it is valuable to know the record of observations and discoveries. Academic disinterestedness includes a willingness to accept that others have recorded important insights and interpretations of observations and that learning them will improve anyone’s thinking. There is no accomplishment in re-inventing the same wheel continually.

Academic disinterestedness is also a subordination of personal likes and dislikes, wishes and fears, to the principles of rational evidence and recognition that one’s personal view might have gaps and misconceptions. Knowing this adds the purpose of identifying biases, agendas, needs, wishes, and fears, as much as possible, and making efforts to reduce their distorting effects. That is part of academic disinterestedness and involves relying on measurement, verification, and logic as much as possible. It is a subordination of ego to logic. Craftspeople of all kinds learn a similar disinterestedness in the love of materials, tools, technique, skill, and of learning itself. The work involves displacement of ego in favour of an openness to nature and materials and a patient searching and trying over until skill and sensitivity are achieved, an acceptance of the solitude of the process. There is a determination to keep going in spite of making mistakes, to accept fallibility while trying to do better.

For any claim to knowledge, it is necessary to consider objections and inconvenient observations, either in debate as Socrates did, or over time by reading and thinking. Writing then re-reading your own thinking is a technique that enables comparisons.

The best thing accomplished in education is contemplative disinterestedness: a discipline of submitting to evidence and logic in the joy of learning and understanding the truth, rather than to wishes and fears or a ‘party line’. Kant’s idea of duty is doing what is right for the joy of something greater and more honourable than personal or party benefits. Socrates thought ethical action results from knowledge of The Good (the greater good, the good overall) which removes the knower from narrowly self-interested motives. For Kant, calculating duty, a general will rather than a private will, had the same result.

Is There a Narrative Here?

28 Wednesday Sep 2011

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Narrative, University

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There is a narrative here that is not yet very distinct. It has something to do with a sense that the personal use of thinking will sometimes be at odds with what is taught us. Most of the guidance we get about using such intelligence as we have comes from educational institutions, and in the contemporary world those institutions are largely market driven.

Students are Market Commodities

The labour market is a competition. Universities understand and proclaim their mission as enabling students to perfect themselves as high-end labour market commodities. In addition to specific preparation for law, medicine, management, or engineering, for example, employers assume that university graduates have proven themselves capable, that they have been tested in general mental abilities, and also improved by university courses. Grads are assumed to have a high level of general knowledge, and interest and skill at continuing to learn. There is an expectation that grads can mentally organize and evaluate new experiences and information that might appear random and incomplete. The mental discipline of university programming is supposed to test and enhance critical thinking abilities, that is, abilities to assess claims and persuasive presentations for precision, plausibility, and logical validity, to sense relevance relations, to analyze and extrapolate. Awareness of basic investigation techniques is also assumed. Research skills go beyond laboratory experiments, and include awareness of sources of information and how to locate and use them, how to use a library, for example, to take possession of relevant material already published. The practicalities and logic of investigation should be in the skill-set of any university grad. There may even be an expectation that grads are able to get absorbed in work projects, that they are used to getting things done, and are not too self-absorbed to persevere through the hard parts, mistakes, disappointments, and failures. All this enables these people to add important value to their employer and their national economy.

The Well Rounded Gentleman

From their earliest existence, and up to, say, World War II (1939-45), universities were intended as hatcheries of clergy, lawyers, medical practitioners, and (Latin) grammar teachers. Within that mission, the ideal product of university was some version of ‘the well rounded gentleman’. Such a man was acquainted with classical literature, knew Latin (the seven Liberal Arts) and at least a second contemporary touring language. He had the ability to participate in vigorous sporting competitions and to dance and converse with ladies at formal parties. He was acquainted with a broad literary canon which, beyond Christian scripture, included refined poetry, heroic dramas, some Aristotle, the history of Rome, certain military campaigns, and the stories of important generals. He was prepared to be a soldier by practice in using weapons and transport vehicles, by athletic training, and respect for social hierarchy. His preparedness for military life included a sense of practicalities both in basic engineering principles and in ways of persuading others to join a team and follow orders, leadership skills. His presentation and communication skills included the ability to form effective sentences and short written messages, as well as clear public speeches. He valued team loyalty but respected all instances of competitive spirit, strategic cleverness, strength, and skilled performance.

Along with producing such professional scribes, it was, for a long time and until quite recently, part of the culture of university life to cultivate ‘a life of the mind’, the vita contemplativa. Perhaps that focus was most developed at the top and the bottom of the traditional university hierarchy, in the Faculty of Theology and the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Philosophy, but to some extent it pervaded university culture because of the very idea of a university. For the earliest centuries of university operation graduates would engage professionally and socially with aristocratic families and depend on them for patronage, since that was the social segment which could afford the routine services of lawyers, medical doctors, and teachers of children. Theologians entered Church hierarchies and engaged with the aristocracy as partners in social supervision and control. Qualities admired in aristocratic culture were distinctly masculine, military, and formally social, distinctly different from qualities cultivated by monkish scholarship, which was the previous high culture of literacy. University education was conceived to bring those two “high cultures” into a mutually beneficial partnership, to inject some vita contemplativa into the lives of men of action, men of affairs. Graduates should be manly but not thuggish, capable of refinement in thought and behaviour without being otherworldly or indecisive, capable of taking charge but also of deferring to higher authority. Maybe the university idea was an attempt to improve on the dominant aristocratic ideal, namely chivalry, a blending of military and Christian devotional cultures. The new life of the mind had more inspiration from the pagan literature of ancient Greece and Rome.

Do We Have a Narrative Here?

The personal use of thinking might require rejecting aristocratic values along with the quantification of value in terms of money.

Encountering Subjectivity

21 Wednesday Sep 2011

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Subjectivity

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Rebalancing Inward and Outward in Personal Identity

The description of human intelligence as “being-in-the-world” is a way of expressing the existentialist observation that the being of intelligence is outside-in. On an extreme version of that, intelligence has no inside at all and has no choice but to construct an external mask or icon to represent itself. Trophy culture, for example, is a version of that. With trophy culture a person demonstrates or constructs a self-portrait by entering competitions and accumulating a record of results, which are trophies when things go well. On that view, you are what you own. Trophy culture has huge mainstream support. Everybody in the star system is committed to it, and evaluates the world from within it. On that ground, envy is the right-wing theory of everything.

Outside is Not Simple

No one is ever aware of nature or culture except as scanned, filtered, sampled, probed, and then imaginatively re-constituted, re-modeled, or re-mixed by their struggling intelligence in desperate flight. These are operations of subjectivity. It isn’t knowledge that fountains up from subjectivity but rather what might be called inspiration, questing. Action does result and skepticism does not apply.

A common concept of knowledge is one in which the consciousness is a receptive slate upon which, little by little, is stamped a representation of the non-personal world, nature. Knowledge consists of impressions, data, projections from the determinate, given, immutable objective nature leaving an imprint on the pristine receptivity of consciousness. “Knowledge” is a sort of property, an appropriation or incorporation of the external not-self.

“Man is the measure of all things” (Protagoras of Abdera, sophist) refers to the fact that anyone’s impression of the measurable world will be edited and evaluated in terms of that person’s location and sensitivities, as well as biases, projects, needs, wishes, and fears, acquired often from ambient culture. There are personal and cultural filters. There is no such thing as a pure disinterested blank slate, no ‘pure’ cognitive rationality. All consciousness weighs and measures the impediments and resistances which enclose and restrict its getting further.

Perception is not an isolated mental condition, but exists in intimate involvement with speculating on probable futures, imagining, negating, remembering, searching and selecting, feeling gratification or irritation, and striving to make some imagined possibility into reality. There is more to thinking than soaking up data and facts about the measurable world. Every individual’s innate mental process is a source of curiosity, orientation, and questioning. Each individual is a source of selective questions and structuring creativity in combination with a specific and limited capacity to sense and make sense of externally supplied data. That is part of the ‘desperate flight’ of intelligence.

The World We Project

The human body’s sense organs are no simple opening between intelligence and the ‘real’ contents of the world. You search for dandelions in your grass and you don’t see any, and don’t see any, and then you see one and then another and then lots that must have been there all along. A curve drawn on paper does not have to be perfectly round and regular or completely closed to be seen as a circle. An observer will ‘fix’ imperfections, and see an ideal circle. We ‘read’ that mark drawn on paper on the basis of the briefest possible encounter, the quickest impression, and read it as ‘meaning’ a perfect circle. Rather than merely opening to let the world in, a person invents and constructs a reading process to relate brief and fleeting sensations with more enduring mental models, patterns, dreams, and narratives which are simple, schematic, and ideal.

To some indefinite extent, see what we look for, we see ideas. The pieces of the world we live among, we’ve domesticated them, made cut-outs and icons, myth-pieces of them. We see the myth of the material object, democracy, socialism, Canadianism, liberalism, or the myth of the wisdom of the free market, the myth of money. Many of these are parts of language-borne narratives taught us by our closest community.

We have a sense of the wholeness of things, the whole world of Eternity, within which local objects and events are placed. That awareness comes with human consciousness and not from sensations of local objects and incidents. The wholeness of the world is not perceivable by the senses, but is known by the perceiving mind. We can be in Eternity by contemplating even relatively simple forms: the beach, the night sky, art. These simplicities enable us to touch something of, or allow an intuition of, an Eternity we ourselves bring to experience. It is an intuition of intelligent subjectivity which cannot be an object to itself.

What Do We Want From Thinking?

21 Wednesday Sep 2011

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Why thinking?

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Building a sustainable and gratifying life is normally a person’s main thinking project. What we want from thinking breaks that down into something like the following list.

We want a life-sustaining engagement with nature. We want to know nature’s beauty and wonder, and to draw from its fruitfulness of food, energy, and other comforts and sustainers of life. (Science helps with this.)

We want to participate in authentic and loving attachments. We want to be enlarged and inspired by attachment to others, by encounters with great writings and works of others, to rise above self-absorption to experience a sense of disinterested justice and a devotion to justice. We want to inherit the whole legacy of human discovery, insight, and accomplishment.

We want to function competently in a cooperative production and exchange operation. (Vocational and professional programs emphasize this.)

A life can be analyzed as a system of production, consumption, and exchange but there are also considerations of subjectivity acting to relish personal intelligence and animal embodiment, as well as child nurturing family life, communal engagement, and a strictly personal orientation to cosmic god or nature. Sensing the importance of that whole range of interests, we want to protect ourselves from being enslaved, stunted, and exploited by production organizations or grandiose cultural spooks such as nations, religions, and corporations which promote and reward types of ‘groupthink’. Placed as thinking is between forces for social control and impulses for self-possession, we must be wary of stealthy attempts at external control of thinking. We want to protect ourselves from having our self-definition diminished by cultural categories and culturally assigned values. We want to understand the political, social, and economic issues engulfing us, legacies and realities of perennial class wars. (Humanities studies, history, literature, philosophy contribute to this.)

We want to create a personal mark on natural and cultural surroundings with the freedom enabled by deliberation and creativity. Labyrinthine subjectivity can present a challenge here. Freedom can’t be merely letting the subjective buzzing buzz and the bubbling bubble, although innocent play is a dimension of freedom. Innocent subjectivity alone and unfocused can be a bog of isolation, powerlessness, and nowhereness. A sort of thinking to experience freedom and self-possession needs development of a personal voice, a voice-avatar. Deliberation, discretionary actions, and creativity are required for expressive power, and those all share persistence and perseverance in building a unity of effort. That is building artifacts and complex orientations from the buzzing and bubbling. The same skill and impulse applies to digging into and investigating nature and culture. Digging can be building, carving out a shaped opening, a path through the wild unknown.

With thinking, innocence equals play, and for adults that includes the power to build in unsupervised authorship. The special thinking in focus here could be called deliberative play, the practiced creative process. (See also TED Talks, “The Play Manifesto”, Bulgaria.) However, the really revolutionary thing about play is that it is self-generated and removes much of the need to engage with markets.

We want to be fully acquainted with personal nature as intelligence without forfeiting animal embodiment, sensuality, and groundedness. We want to engage the experience of transcendence, the supra-natural freedom of intelligence. We want to be acquainted with that profundity that was hinted at or channeled by religion: to be in the world but not of it.

The Personal Use of Thinking

14 Wednesday Sep 2011

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking

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“In the blind spot” refers first to the observation: “Thinking is an act of subjectivity, and subjectivity is the blind spot of science.”. Science is not going to help us much with the personal use of thinking. Science also tries to stay clear of politics and the personal use of thinking is definitely political. However, even though thinking is an act of subjectivity, it is not performed in isolation from nature, culture, or history. In fact the meaning of “in the blind spot” could be extended to focus on history. History is a blind spot in all of us, because we just weren’t there and we need so much of our energy and attention to survive the present. Learning something helpful about history is a painstaking process and there is too much to permit a really thorough thinking through it. Unfortunately, ignorance of history does not free us from the influence of the past. It is worth making some effort to reduce the ignorance and to build a better sense of what looms over us in that blind spot.