What is Called Thinking?

“What is called Thinking?”
We are playing with the verb
“to call.”

One might ask, for instance,
“What do you call that village
on the hill?”

Martin Heidegger

I continue to be provoked by a
student 20 years ago who told
a faculty task force charged to
reconsider aims, objectives, &
purpose in our curriculum:

Your job is to teach us to think.

I asked my classes: who here
don’t know how to think
and wants to learn?

Raise your hand.

Might as well ask who’s got no
sense of humor—and wants
one?

Raise your hand.

Who’s going to say: ME, I don’t
know how to think and got no
sense of humor either.

HELP!

Everyone knows how already;
everyone a comedian. We are
maybe calling these noggin
notions by the wrong names
or worn-out & need new monikers
so as to be able to get them back
in play.

Call them Interactive Cognitive Sonar,
say, & Affective Ludic Reciprocation:
getting good at re-determining pre-
determined terms of discourse so as to
not occlude the necessary but never
sufficient violence going on whenever
attention is efficiency-disordered ignoring
its ignore-ance so as to Get R Done, damnit,
so to speak.

Faculty L is down—
our electric company
open-source colloquial
collegial Hyde Park
transparent Cheers
where every body
knows your name
& no smile’s left
behind: village idio-
syncrasies & local food
banking home-groan
manna to sustain our
particular higher
edification not for
every body but
then perhaps we
aren’t & what’s
a college for these
days but to be learning
how to think out of the
pox, no easy task force

Sustainable Converse-Action

How else show up, expose,
unveil & reveal the
unsustainable
sustainabilities
my unsustainablity is in?

o yes I am
o no you didn’t
will too
never not
might be
could be
should be
ought

Fundamental
dis-agreeabilities
working IT out &
how else get good
as a whole figuring
up the elephant in
the middle of the
room or naming
the village on
the hill?

Call that thinking.

Turn it up.
Put it in play.