The War For Thoughtfulness

Notes From the Substack Underground

Origin Story

About two years ago, I set out to ask a question every day. My first Substack missive went out to 18 people. I didn’t know what I was doing, but had a sense that something in my life and in the world was missing.

People pray and meditate every day. Religious people learn sacred texts on the regular. But what should people do who don’t know how to pray or study or meditate? And even for folks who are privileged enough to have a contemplative practice and community, where is the forum for combining a love of humanistic learning with the whimsy of everyday life?

At their best, university seminars provide a contemplative space, but that’s only for ages 18-22, and only for a small elect, and most seminars culminate in a capstone “research paper” where the objective is to demonstrate analytic ability, not existential import or personal growth. How do you make regular learning and intellectual reflection a worldly practice? How do you make it as banal as brushing your teeth to think?

I don’t have a quick or easy answer, but I don’t think it will be through a new institution, religion, methodology, or movement. I believe it will come in a more decentralized form, as people across a range of worldviews and temperaments all find local ways to elevate the practice of thoughtfulness. It will come from applied negative theology. Not this, not that, not this, not that.

No, No, No, No, No

There’s a famous children’s book called Are You My Mother? about a bird that goes around asking various non-birds if they are its mother. No, no, no, no, no, no, not you. The Mother appears in this story as the negation of every false mother. Or as Hegel would put it, the bird “tarries with the negative”—discovering the meaning of mother by investigating all the would-be mother substitutes. In Jewish theology “the mother” is Binah or insight, the partner of chochma, wisdom. Read allegorically, the bird is Malchut, immanence, lost in this world. She seeks a higher meaning but cannot find it. Except that she does—because the ability to discern the false mother suggests an internal compass, a soul impressed with the trace of the mother who remains present in absence.

I seek to ask where can thinking be found in a similar process of negation. This is not thinking, this is not thinking, this is not thinking. Occasionally, a flash of thinking strikes, reminding me that the quest is not in vain, nor is it merely a pretext for skepticism. The mother is implied by the bird’s question, just as thinking is implied by my taking up Heidegger’s question “What is called thinking?” This is called thinking, but is it actually thinking? We call thinking thinking, but what does thinking call on us to think?

The motif of tarrying with the negative is evident in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas notes that the Sanhedrin, the court of justice in Jewish law, is likened to “the navel of the world.” Why? Because the navel is the marker of the cut umbilical cord: the house of justice is the place where God and humanity are severed. Human justice is a trace of divine justice: it is an imperfection (not divine) but also an aspiration (to be like God). The desire for justice suggests we have a sense of what it is even as every attempt to carry it out fails before our implicit ideal. For Levinas, the presence of an Other negates my sense that I can be done with my ethical responsibility. I remain in debt to the Other no matter how much I do! For Levinas, ethics plays the role that thinking plays for Heidegger. Instead of responsibility to and for Being, my responsibility is to you, and to you, and to you. You get an infinite demand, and you get an infinite demand, and you get an infinite demand.

Books Are Not Enough

While I believe in the power of Great Books and Sacred Scriptures to incite thought, they are not enough on their own. We need on-ramps, models, and guides who can show us the way to closely read these texts with an open mind and open heart. Most of us are not autodidacts, and even those of us who are need some energetic boosting from others who can help us believe that there is a path and we can walk it even if it will be a new one. A Jewish sage offers the following metaphor: Torah is like an ember—it is only as strong as the breath that blows upon it. We could say the same about the Mahabharata, the Tao Te Ching, or the Iliad. But preserving the ember is quite hard to do.

Most scholars of ancient texts punt on questions of meaning. They come to the texts analytically but are embarrassed by questions outside their expertise such as questions of personal relevance or questions of analogizing from the past to the present moment. Their commitment to rigor forbids them from speculation and personalization. Many are historians for whom the central questions are how did this text come to evolve, what is it responding to, what does it tell us about the people that lived long ago, or about the author’s own prejudices. The idea that the text is wise and could teach us how to live is swept aside. This is the norm in academia.

On the other side, are the appreciators, but many of them are so appreciative that their love for a specific text or tradition obstructs their desire to get the details right or to confront the theories that challenge their faith. If the goal of academia is to be impersonal and scientific, the meaningfulness defenders run the risk of being too personal and anti-scientific. The wisdom is not to be found in the words of the text but in the authority of their expositor. We might call this tendency “apologetics.” Apologists can answer the “so what?” question, but can they hold open a space for multiple interpretations and multiple perspectives on a text when their own love of the tradition leads them to a specific set of doctrinal conclusions?

How do we find a middle way between academic coldness and shallow enthusiasm? Yeats says the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. He might well have been speaking about academics on the one hand and apologists on the other. The challenge is to be the best (at reading and analyzing) without compromising passionate intensity. The challenge is to integrate the analytical and the meaningful, the correct and the insightful.

The War For Thoughtfulness

Archilochus initiates the history of lyric poetry by telling us that he put down his shield and ran away during battle—he’d rather do a shameful thing and sing about it then fight and die. His lyric alchemized his own sense of stigma into a source of pride and delight. He walks away from one battle to fight what poet Peter Cole calls “the war for the imagination.” What battles do we need to run away from so as to fight the war for thoughtfulness? How do we ensure that we are fighting for our true cause and not simply because we enjoy fighting or winning? My own experience in philosophy seminars and in some religious learning environments has led me to the conclusion that intellectual battle is not a virtue unless it is directed at virtuous ends. The Talmud itself often portrays debate taken too far and without deeper thought as an occupational hazard. Disagreeableness is annoying and even damaging unless it is motivated by a desire for learning and personal growth.

My daily writing practice has morphed into a more sustained practice of writing two short-essay reflections at the intersection of philosophy, religion, and culture in the form of this newsletter, What Is Called Thinking? To my amazement, the readership has grown to over 5,000 readers. Whether we are reflecting on AI, mimetic desire, or financial scams, or whether we are reflecting on the Book of Ruth, Wittgenstein, and the Odyssey, the exercise is to find ourselves in these phenomena and to be astonished. To be astonished that we are here. To be astonished that we are still not yet thinking. To be astonished that technological progress has not demystified the fundamental problems of human life. To be astonished that wisdom now lies not in the locked vaults of the classics, but in our exchange with one another over their legacy, in the breath that moves through our discourse, our commentary, and our lives. Wisdom is a conspiracy in the original sense of the word: a “breathing together.”