Thoughts About Thinking, Thinking is for the Livingby Gerald Angelo Cirrincione
Thinking is for the living. Dead men (or women) think no thoughts. Neither do books, computers, or gods. Thinking is the province of people learning and growing: men, women, girls, boys, living, breathing folks, mortal creatures brimming with life. Fallible, struggling, imperfect beings in physical bodies have done all the world's thinking. (Thinking is defined as looking, listening, and considering.) Thinking is alive. A thinker's mind is never at rest. Like the universe, like life itself, thinking involves movement, activity, action, growth. Thinking is dynamic, not static. Thinking happens in the present tense. Thoughts may be written down, codified, illustrated, recorded, preserved, but thinking is nimble, happening, solving, discovering. Thinking is neither superhuman nor subhuman; it is just human. The discoveries of human thinking happen at the interface between a human being and the world. Thinking is 100% natural. There is nothing divine or "psychic" about it. Still, it is marvelous, wondrous, awe-inspiring. It enhances our survival and defines who we are. It's our species' bird song and spider web. Wholesome and healthful, thinking is how we digest and assimilate our experiences and experiments. Faith, ritual, superstition, and dogma are nothing more than a perversion of our natural, healthy appetite for thinking. A believer is a potential thinker whose growth has been stunted. And may want to stunt yours. Thinkers think. Your thinking is an expression, an outpouring of your life. Thinking isn't stored in libraries. Books preserve the ink markings that represent thoughts. Our predecessors have left us records of their thoughts, and we make those thoughts alive and living when we understand and appreciate them, when we apply them and extend them, test and modify them, and explain and prove them to ourselves again. The thoughts are like freeze-dried crystals that come alive in the hot water of our living, breathing human organisms. Thinking is not technological, either. Bits representing information can be transmitted faster, more portably, and in greater volume, vividness, and detail than ever before. Information and data, however, are raw materials. Creative and critical thinking about them is necessary. How much of the new speed-of-light digital interactivity is at the service of improving thinking? What use is it to be able to instantaneously communicate unimaginative or sloppy thinking? Thinking is not something that exists in computers. It is an organic, vital activity of flesh-and-blood human beings. Thinking is animate, a conscious expression of the life force in humans. It isn't thinking until human minds start to do it. Just as eating isn't eating until living creatures begin to chew and swallow, likewise thinking isn't thinking until it enters the senses and nervous system of a real human being. Thinking is very personal. It is as intimately part of us as our blood, heartbeat, tears, and perspiration. It is woven into the fabric and texture of our lives. Thinking is our job - both our individual job and our species' job. Thinking is your task whatever you're doing. In this sense, you will never be unemployed - even in a recession. Thinking will always be a growth industry. Thinkers will always be in demand. When you need help, you need a thinker. Whatever the job to be done, hire somebody who grasps the intended purpose of the work, and who understands its foundations, somebody who is alert and who can improvise when unexpected events arise. When interviewing job applicants, you need to be able to recognize a genuine thinker. And not a pseudo-thinker, an intellectual chameleon created by academia or the media. The future of thinking has never looked brighter. The traditional attributes of a thinker - individualism and resourcefulness - continue to be born into each new child. Every newborn has a chance to make a contribution to thought. You can expand your capability to look, listen, and consider - to the point of greatness. When you see for yourself, hear for yourself, consider for yourself, it is dazzling. You are on your own, you might fall, you might make a terrible blunder. You might get everything all wrong. But so what? You have this one life. You may not have an afterlife, you may not reincarnate another lifetime. Look around, listen to anything and everything. This is your world. Explore. Isaac Newton had one of the most beautiful, fertile, and orderly minds that ever lived. He was a solitary, species-employed thinker. Newton has provided two metaphors that shed considerable light on a thinker's work. Each metaphor illuminates a distinct side of thinking. The first deals with a thinker's connection to the past and the future; the second with the thinker's relationship to the present and the unknown. When considered together his metaphors complement each other and provide a binocular view. They are worth meditating on.
None of us is the first human being to think, nor will any of us be the last. This means that none of us is starting from scratch, and also that we will not find the final answer to every question. What is our proper relationship to the thinkers who have come before us? We need not put past thinkers above us; rather, they are there to lift us up. Newton's giants are fellow human beings, mortal, fallible, who knew the subtle alchemical art of combining inspiration with perspiration to create truth. Newton's metaphor beautifully accentuates the difference between thought and faith. In contrast to thinkers, believers throw themselves abjectly at the feet of their giants; it would be sacrilege for a believer to presume to stand on the shoulders of Jesus Christ and aspire to look farther. Hero worship is incompatible with thinking. Faith is stagnant, and complete faith is completely stagnant. Newton's metaphor implies to me that the giants are friendly and will give us a boost up, that they want us to see farther than they did. They are not threatened by our desire to see more, hear more, and consider more. They are not jealous gods. Their work is a place for us to stand and to do our own. There is another of Newton's metaphors that I find particularly enchanting. "I do not know what I may appear to the world," Newton said, "but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." When you are absorbed in thought, it is as though you're the only thinker who ever existed. You are absorbed in timeless wonder. There is no hurry and no competition. Thinking shifts from being a means to being an end in itself, abundant and lavish, as we think everywhere about everything. There is so much that we do not know, may never understand, but that does not discourage us. The existence of a Newton should encourage us. Physics may not be our chosen field, but we can find some area in which we can add to human knowledge, or we can have the challenge and the joy of learning about what he discovered and thereby associate with a great mind. The planet needs a multitude of thinkers, whose only common bond is vigorous thinking - unflinchingly realistic, and creatively imaginative. May the next generation be a generation of thinkers. I like to imagine Newton both as the child playing on the seashore, and as the giant ready to have you stand on his sturdy shoulders. I imagine I hear him saying, "There are pebbles and shells on the shore of Truth, look for them." And then inviting, "Stand on my shoulders. Take a look." Gerald Angelo Cirrincione is a recovering talk show host. He lives in Marinette, Wisconsin, where he is writing the first two volumes of his memoirs, to be entitled Portrait of the Atheist as a Young Parochial School Student, and Odd Jobs and Odder Hobbies.
Table of Contents | 1995 Issues | Subscribe Credit card Orders call: 800-321-9054 or fax: (619)676-0433 Truth Seeker is published by Truth Seeker Co., Inc. (ISSN 0041-3712) © 1996 |