Dare to think! Not just a captatio benevolentiae

Doing things without thinking versus thinking about how things are done

The problem with thinking is (not "thinking" but is) "the problem". The problem, then, is when and why humans think, which in turn conditions what and how they think. Let us call it "the problem with thinking"; and let us leave the expression "the problem of thinking" for psychologists and philosophers who, engaged in an exercise of thinking about thinking as impossible as "I forgot I forgot you", try to elucidate how it is that one thinks (the types of syllogistic, modular, speculative, erotetic, narrative reasoning...) when they don't even know what it is to think and, at worst, when the common mortal thinks (well or badly, as an act of thinking) much less than they think. If I were one of these institutionalised scholars, I would first worry a lot about the fact that humans do not think enough before worrying a little about the fact that they think in this or that way. Sure, I do not belong to that tyrannical epistemic caste according to which —as Bilbo Bolson would say— my opinion is worth so little that I have to quote them for it to be worth anything, and so little that it cannot be quoted by anyone. All of which, however, does not deprive me of being a thinking (non-human) subject because I junglefeel like it.

And it is thus, in thinking, that I come to share these reflections aloud which, in no way, are going to interfere in the problems of or with thinking. But I did want to distinguish them in order to better invoke the latter —with— for being the root cause of what humans and their world are today. Because the world is the way it is more because its human inhabitants do not think than because they think this way or that way, good or bad. And on this point, if it is the case that humans do not think, I don't see that the beast cupidissima rerum novarum has any comparative advantage over the other beasts. Otherwise, perhaps a non-thinking jungle is better than a non-thinking society —and if you don't understand me, human, you'd better stop reading.

If Kant, at the height of the Enlightenment, challenged the world to know with his "sapere aude!" (dare to know), in this dark time built on soft multicoloured cotton wool, what we must shout loudly is:

Aude cogitare!