On Thinking

While recently reading my favorite blog I was inspired to think about that most noble of subjects: thinking. What is a thought? Certainly it's not simply neurons firing. If you think that, you won't like anything I ever have to say. Well not everything. I like bourbon. There's some common ground for most of us.

But seriously, Heidegger says "The most thought-provoking thought in this thought-less age is that we are not yet thinking." This comes out of a wonderful set of lectures called "What is Called Thinking." The title is beautiful because of one simple word: "called." Heidegger admits that he might not know, and certainly the implication is that Western Philosophy doesn't know. In fact, Heidegger's romanticized argument is that we've forgotten how to think.

But what is great about his argument is that we can recover; we can become poetic again; we don't have to succumb to a mathematical way of thinking that is both cold and soul-deadening.

Last semester after teaching my favorite essay by Heidegger in my Technology and Society class I asked the class how many people bought a book last year. Maybe half the hands. How many of you read a book? A little less. How many of you read a book of poetry? Nobody.

Now, I don't read much poetry on my own, but luckily I do teach Lit courses. And when I read Whitman, or Rilke, or Phillip Larkin or Tom Waits I feel alive. Poetry breathes; it is alive. And for this reason it has become hard for my generation to deal with. We have become digital, analytic. Thoughts are like records - they are analog and they spin. But they spin while moving inwards. It's not a useless circle. It is a circle that produces, forces, real thinking. Thinking that is dangerous, always on the verge of failure. Real thoughts are not safe.

Here's my favorite Phillip Larkin Poem:

This Be the Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad,
They may not mean to, but they do
They fill you with the thoughts they had
And add some extra, just for you

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one-another's throats

Man hands on misery to man
It deepens like a coastal shelf
Get out as early as you can
And don't have any kids yourself

That to me is thinking with a sledgehammer. It's brutal; it's beautiful.