"Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake." - William James
Why Think?
Thinking
takes place on at least three levels: autonomic, reactive and
deliberative. Each involves a specific process that the brain goes
through to effect targeted and desired outcomes. While the first two
are done without conscious effort, deliberative thinking cannot be done
without it. Any one who has tried knows how demanding and draining it
can be. It's a process that many of us have a hard time staying in long
enough to produce anything different from what we think we already
know. Often, at the beginning of the process of deliberative thinking,
we shut it down by saying to ourselves, "I already know that!" This
causes the mind to close and interest to wane. When this happens any
curiosity we may have regarding the truth about ourselves and the
universe does not stimulate us sufficiently to use our minds in the
necessary ways to obtain it.
In the context of the work
environment, sometimes the work we do doesn't require us to think in
order to perform our daily tasks. We are instructed (trained) how to
perform our responsibilities and are judged simply by how well we do
them. Nothing beyond doing our jobs is requested of us.
Sometimes
the work we do requires us not to think in order to do it well. We're
told that we're not paid to think, just to do our jobs the way we are
told to do them. Anything beyond that is unwelcome input.
Consequently, many people do not use their ability to think in ways that
move them into greater realms of opportunity, creativity and
productivity. If it's not going to get us anything except a reprimand
or a pink slip, why try to think more than we need to?
What about
the places where we're supposed to learn how to think and the benefits
of regularly doing so? Even though most educational systems make noble
attempts to instruct students in the ways of thinking well the daily
routine and mechanics of teaching eventually overwhelms the best
intentions of educators and administrators alike. Students exit from
"the system" with some valuable information but not a very clear
understanding of how to knit it all together into a meaningful whole
that has beneficial ramifications for both the students and the
societies in which they live.
Most of what we do on a daily basis
doesn't involve much in the way of our brainpower. Routine and habit
are shortcuts to action without thinking. They're what you do when
you're not thinking about what you're doing. So, why think?
The Purpose of Thinking
The
Seventeenth Century French Philosopher, Rene Descartes began his
exhaustive investigation into the meaning of life with what to him was
the only undeniable fact of life: the human ability to think. The
Cartesian method of philosophical inquiry was revolutionary because it
was the first to use shared concrete, everyday experiences of life, like
thinking, to construct an understanding of the meaning and significance
of human existence. Descartes' dictum, "Cogito, ergo sum," (I think,
therefore, I am) was a whole new way of thinking about life by grounding
it in thought.
If Descartes is correct that because I can think I
therefore exist as a human being, then the question arises, "if I know
that I am, is this the same as knowing who I am?" The answer is no.
Just because I know I exist doesn't mean that I know much about myself.
Your ability to think gives evidence that you "are." The task of
actually thinking is to learn "who you are" and how you can "be the
Self" you were born to be.
Meander, a Fourth Century BC Greek
philosopher, said that the basis of civilization was for citizens to
"know themselves," and that this meant, "to get acquainted with what you
know and what you can do." He assumes that all human beings have
within them, by virtue of their being alive, knowledge born of their
unique manifestation of life. In the Eighteenth Century AD, the
English poet, philosopher and lexicographer, Dr. Samuel Johnson, would
perfectly summarize this philosophy of knowledge when he wrote, "human
beings need to be reminded more than they need to be taught." The
activity of thinking reminds you of what you innately know but have
forgotten. Thinking is the process by which you uncover your Self and
its potential and by which you discover creative ways to apply what you
already know to being your Self within the context of your community of
life. When you spend time thinking, you afford yourself the opportunity
to get acquainted with your innate knowledge and with what you can do
with that self-knowledge.
The Problem of Education
The
primary purpose of employing your ability to think, therefore, is not
merely to exist but to exist in a specific, unique way. How this is
done depends on how the individual is taught to think. The German
philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), one of the foremost thinkers of
the Enlightenment, remarked, "science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is
organized life." He described his approach to education as organizing
life when he said, "the science I teach is how one might occupy his
proper place in the universe." He was undoubtedly aware of the ancient
teaching of Confusius: "Do not worry about holding high position; worry
rather about playing your proper role."
The best teachers I had
throughout my formal education and beyond were those who not just caused
me to think but who helped me to learn the purpose of thinking.
Thinking was not done merely to arrive at solutions to problems and
answers to questions but was to be done to "know myself" and to learn
how to be myself in the world as a unique presence. Knowing myself
through thinking leads to acting as that unique Self and not as a mimic
of any other even though some, if not all of my actions might be similar
to others' in appearance and outcomes.
John Ruskin, a Nineteenth
Century English social critic, said, "Education does not mean teaching
people to know what they do not know; it means teaching them to behave
as they do not behave." A good education teaches you how to use your
ability to think so that you can behave in the ways that emanate from
your uniqueness as a person and that consequently lead to your being a
success as that person. Thinking shapes, directs and expands the
capacity to behave in the particular ways that lead to personal
accomplishment and significance.
In modern times, especially in
Western education models, students are seen as proverbial "empty
vessels" sitting at the feet of "fuller," older, wiser, learned
professional educators who empty their knowledge into those empty heads
thereby filling them with what somebody else knows. During the
socialization process of teaching children how to exist in a particular
culture, the system of education serves to provide the psychological
structures for social homogenization by imparting the "wisdom of the
ages," knowledge handed down from previous generations and that is
deemed that everyone should know. This most certainly is a vital
function of education. However, when this approach becomes the primary
emphasis of education, as it most often appears to be in academic
institutions throughout the West, it translates into teaching students
what, not how to think.
The late 19th early 20th Century English
philosopher, mathematician, and writer, Bertrand Russell, was no fan of
formal educational systems and said so when he commented that education
was "one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought"
and that "men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by
education." He would agree that much of what passes for education is
nothing more than the simple transmission by others of what they believe
is important for students to be taught which often has nothing to do
with the learners. His comment suggests that he saw the main purpose of
contemporary formal education to be to mold children and young adults
into an image that conformed to and reflected the prevailing culture.
Education was the process by which people became like each other instead
of becoming their unique Selves.
Russell would concur that
content often lacks context, meaning that teaching frequently doesn't
involve instructing students how to determine the veracity, viability,
worthiness and usefulness of what is learned. It winds up being mere
"data dumping" with little, if any attempt to help students "connect the
dots" among the enormous array of data being offered from multiple
sources and perspectives. Ben Hecht (1893-1964), an American author and
dramatist, described the significance of context well: "Trying to
determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like
trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock." The
education process is filled with billions of "seconds" and pieces of
information that, all being emphasized as important to know, serve more
to cloud than clarify the meaning of time and what happens within it.
It emphasizes the threads not the tapestry, the parts not the whole.
John
Locke (1632-1704), the British philosopher and medical researcher,
wrote, "till a man can judge whether they be truths or not, his
understanding is but little improved, and thus men of much reading,
though greatly learned, but may be little knowing." If thinking is
taught to be the process by which the thinker is able to accurately
discern right from wrong, truth from falsity, authenticity from
disingenuineness, then merely learning new information is not the way
this can be done. Locke intimates how we can learn to 'judge whether
they be truths or not' when he penned, "reading furnishes the mind only
with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read
ours."
Reading is an indispensable method of education. However,
as Albert Einstein observed, "reading, after a certain age, diverts the
mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and
uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking." Sir
Arthur Helps (1813-1875), English writer and dean of the Monarch's
advisory council, agreed with such sentiment when he wrote, "reading is
sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought." So reading, an
essential means of education, can be a detriment to creative thinking.
(I hope this is not the case as you read this article!).
The
problem is that formal education offers no heuristic that students might
use to organize and focus their thinking about everything they learn or
to help them discover how to practically apply what they learn to the
adventure of living. How often did I scurry between classes in college
going from biology to philosophy, physics to religious studies,
psychology to sociology knowing the content of the courses but without
understanding how they all might be mutually corroborative and
collaborative in providing a comprehensive foundation for innovative
thinking about how to better live and enjoy my life? It took at least a
couple of decades for me to even begin to appreciate the intrinsic
symbiosis of the volumes of knowledge I had acquired throughout my
higher education experience. Today, a couple of decades later still, my
thinking is consumed with and consummated by discovering the
interconnections among the pieces of information I have floating around
in my head as I attempt to purposefully link the data dots into the big
picture of my personal reality. This is more than mere "data mining,"
it is "data melding." It is this principle of information integration
that should, but often does not, guide all educational endeavors.
Commenting
on the rapid profusion of information throughout the early Twentieth
Century, the American poet, e e cummings, paraphrasing a verse from
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,' put it
succinctly when he wrote, "data, data everywhere but not a thought to
think." Without the context, the "big picture," the organizing
principles of how to coordinate and use what we know, whatever we know
will only take us away from ourselves by pointing to all that is outside
us as the means of finding ourselves and the purpose of our lives. Our
proper place in the universe is obscured and eludes us because we've
not been provided, or have not diligently pursued the proper context
within which all of what we know can be brought together to make our
lives sensible and centered.
We cannot occupy a place we have not
recognized as ours alone to occupy. Nor can we properly occupy that
unique place until we have properly prepared ourselves with authentic,
honest, abiding self-knowledge. Formal education, by providing massive
amounts of asynchronous, external information, unwittingly becomes the
chief cause of the obfuscation and "cluttering up" of the Self.
Self-knowledge gets lost amidst the din of seemingly competing voices
and ideas. Consequently, the Self becomes disjointed, disharmonious and
disquieted for it has not found its proper place in the universe. It
becomes as a prism refracting the various inputs it receives into even
more detailed yet diffused bits of data.
Being overwhelmed with
the prospect of learning what we believe we need to know and then
applying it appropriately, many of us simply give up trying to think in
the ways we could. Ironically, we have been educated out of thinking.
Ayn Rand said it perfectly, "man's basic vice, the source of all his
evils, is the act of unfocusing his mind, the suspension of his
consciousness, which is not blindness, but the refusal to see, not
ignorance, but the refusal to know."
Can education be directed to
actually help human beings find their proper place in the universe? How
can we connect the dots of our variegated and vast knowledge? How can
we make it all assimilate into a common core of comprehension? Is it
possible to turn the education process from an ego-driven "give and
take" (where one ego gives information and other egos esteem themselves
on how much they can take and then give back on exams) into a nobler
endeavor that edifies by elucidating the humanity with which we must
live for the brief while we are alive?
The paradigm that will help
us bring it all together and coordinate our fragmented knowledge into
clear understanding is the one that guided great civilizations of the
past: know yourself first. The constituent elements of knowledge
coalesce into a unified whole only after you get acquainted with your
innate knowledge about yourself. Then all subsequent information that
you acquire will gather to weave the larger tapestry of your unique
presence within space and time. Only then will your education
experience be as a crucible into which discontinuous data is poured but
out of which holistic, useful and beneficial knowledge emerges.
In
Part Two of this article you'll learn about the purpose of knowledge
and education, where thoughts come from and the best way to think.
Ken Wallace, M. Div., CSL has been in the organizational
development field since 1973. He is a seasoned consultant, speaker and
executive coach with extensive business experience in multiple
industries who provides practical organizational direction and support
for business leaders. A professional member of the National Speakers
Association since 1989, he is also a member of the International
Federation for Professional Speaking and holds the Certified Seminar
Leader (CSL) professional designation awarded by the American Seminar
Leaders Association.
Ken is one of only eight certified Business Systems Coaches worldwide for General Motors.
