Author: Joyce E. Bellous Why did I write Learning to Think [Together]? In general, I write to understand something I can’t quite grasp. I ...
Author: Joyce E. Bellous
Why did I write Learning to Think [Together]? In general, I write to understand something I can’t quite grasp. I put ideas on the page that Ican’t yet get my head around. The discipline of writing allows me to work out and realize what I think. Writing changes my thinking. I now spend most of my time writing. I’m currently working on two books, each one with a different colleague. When the Global Journal of Human-Social Science asked if I would submit a text that hasn’t yet been published, there was something compellingly attractive in their invitation. I usually say no, due to current writing commitments. But this time I sorted through one or two unpublished essays I keep in a desk drawer and came up with one that’s at the centre of Learning to Think [Together]. It had a different title and covered research I wrote about more than 20 years ago. When I read it, in response to the Journal’s invitation, it raised questions that still puzzled me, especially considering COVID. How do people learn to think? How does thinking develop over a lifetime? What does healthy thinking look like, sound like? What should motivate us to change what we think?What helps thinking become wise? What gets in the way?The essay I picked up in response to the Journal’s invitation contained observations that were surprisingly relevant in the aftermath of COVID.
I’ve learned a great deal in the last twenty years about thinking. Current brain research is a rich resource. It reveals how thinking begins in infancy and how brains operate during the growth of the intellect. In the context of my own questions, I brought the work of several people to bear on my inquiry. German philosopher Hegel is a favorite resource. As I linked his term experiencing (self-consciousness of self-conscious experience) to current brain research about perceptual and conceptual learning, I was blown away—firstly, by his insight into human thinking (without the benefit of neural science), secondly, by how closely he matches my observations of people who remain open to the real presence of people they hope to understand. I elaborate that link by describing a woman named Nancy who shifts in her thinking as she considers past experiences with her father and current experience with her husband Jim. The match between her process and Hegel’s view is astonishing. I still find reading about Nancy quite moving.
French philosopher Jean Baudrillard was relevant to my questionsas well. He provokes thought in his analysis of TV images. His views helped me reflect ona mass digital culture that didn’t exist twenty years ago. When I was a professor at McMaster Divinity College, McMaster University in Hamilton Ontario, I was part of the research group Pluralt,an interdisciplinary group focused on issues of plurality and alterity (Otherness). During 1994-1998, we invited three Hooker Distinguished Visiting Professors to the University. Baudrillard was one of them. He was complex. He frustrated some of my colleagues with his provocations, but he also spent an entire evening with a member of our research group who was bed-ridden and dying of cancer. Elaine had organized the event but couldn’t attend. Baudrillard saw her disappointment and kept her company. In 1996, I published my analysis of his views in "Jean Baudrillard: Reclaiming Evil Talk," in Lire Baudrillard aujourd' hui/Reading Baudrillard Now for the Journal of recherches semiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry (Canadian Semiotic Association) 16, 1-2, 27-47. That essay informs one part of Learning to Think [Together].
There is a great deal of darkness in Baudrillard’s assessment of images that confront us daily and from everywhere. Canadian urban theorist Jane Jacobs provides hopeful relief to our current situation in her analysis of the human wisdom that’s kept us alive over the centuries. Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan (whose work Baudrillard studied at depth) offers a hopeful response to the shadow lands of media culture by focusing on the human agency of those who learn to think well together. Current media cultures are what we need to think about, think with, and use wisely to grow intellectually, personally, and socially.
Carolyn Bayard was another member of the Pluralt group. She seemed to know everyone in Europe who was part of the Dissident movement—European philosophers whose disgust at the atrocities of the Second World War compelled them to discard belief in the Grand Narratives they thought lay behind the abuses of the Holocaust. Their revulsion strongly influenced western philosophy in the second half of the last century.Learning to Think [Together] raises aspects of religious experience. I think living inside a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end addresses our spiritual need for meaning and allows us the security of knowing ourselves as well as offering the existential confidence that we are well known. However, religious reality must remain open to the growth of the intellect as we engage with real people who don’t share the same grand narrative—or who come with a different story that has and is shaping them.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is another important source of insight for me. Although Hegel and Kant bring very different moves to the 2600-year-old chess game that is western philosophical tradition, each brings something essential. Once again, the brain science research included in Learning to Think [Together] explains and informs some of Kant’s difficult ideas, particularly what he says about the complex role of sense data (sense experience) in pure and practical reason. But unpacking that connection would require me to write another essay.
Writing to help me understand something I don’t yet understand is hard work. But reading is also hard work. At least, it should be hard work. If readers pick up a text and skim through it in one reading, how does that text introduce something new to them? Of course, we skim through a novel, and rightly so. As we read, we learn something new about the human condition,if it’s a good novel. We take novels on holidays to the beach and read them while sunning ourselves. But scholarly reading is not like reading a novel. The hard work of reading a closely written essay creates the need to read it again and again. That’s what medieval scholars did as their regular practice. Reading is about compelling the words, sentences, and paragraphs to reveal themselves to the reader.
A book I recommend to my students (and require them to read) is Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book. It’s invaluable. Our son Dave outlines for my students how the principles of Adler’s book are built right into the features of Kindle. Using Kindle allows readers to follow the best practices Adler recommends in his book.
Even though I was using a polished text written over 20 years ago, it took me three and a half months to complete Learning to Think [Together]. The surprising relevance of my earlier work moved me to investigate our current circumstances to see how to understand the situation in which we find ourselves. Two questions motivated my inquiry. What is this moment in which we are living? This question echoes French philosopher Michael Foucault’s notion of telling the history of the present. Foucault thought Kant wrote the first essay to examine what Foucault called the history of the present in an essay Kant titled, “An answer to the question: What is Enlightenment?” Kant wrote that essay in the last decade of the 1700s and you can find it in his Political Writings, published by Cambridge. The second motivating idea for Learning to Think [Together] belongs to German philosopher Hans George Gadamer’s theory of social science research. His question is: What kind of knowledge is it that understands that something is so because it understands that it has come about so?The growth of the intellect is inherent in Gadamer’s probing question.
I hope you read Learning to Think [Together]. I believe it’s worthy of your time. I learned a great deal by writing it that benefits other writing projects I have on the go. I hope your experience is similar. Best regards, jb
Research paper at Global Journals:
https://globaljournals.org/GJHSS_Volume23/3-Learning-to-Think-Together.pdf
Published by Global Journals
