WHat is Called Thinking

Dear Colleagues.

                  “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!
 
See the problem? 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: aims, goals, measurable
outcomes.
 
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.
 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.
Finger tip away.