At the risk of seeming politically incorrect, I have to say that thoughtlessness is an epidemic. We need to look at what forms being thoughtless might take, and what thought might be.

 

A lot of people go about their conscious lives hardly thinking at all, or at least not thinking hard, and very frequently people consciously and unconsciously avoid thinking. We usually have ideas and prejudices that it never for a moment occurred to us to think about: not only things like racism and sexism, but also ideas like the belief in progress, the belief that the truth is good for people, the belief that science can and will understand things (few notice that science understands nothing: it is people that understand).

Even when we devote our lives to thinking we spend hours at a time of conscious life thoughtless, watching videos, using computers, playing videogames, driving cars. Any experience in which we are deployed in the instrument and cease to be aware of ourselves is thoughtless. We end up at work, without being aware how we got there, assuming that we brushed our teeth and ate breakfast because we are now at work.

 

 McCloud, Understanding Comics 

 

Like opinion, thinking is not merely “having something in your head.” An opinion is an accomplishment: it is a statement supported by reasons. Similarly, thinking is not just attention, nor is it repetition or perception, it is an accomplishment of a certain kind.

Instead, thought connects things that are really connected, and distinguishes things that are not. For example, if someone is angry it does not mean that they hate or do not love me: love and anger are compatible, but love and hate are not.

Again, it is not just that democracies are talkative: being talkative is essential to the structure of democracy. It is not just that technologies let us do things we couldn’t before: to perceive technologies is to experience a kind of invitation to use them. So technology changes how the world feels and how we experience ourselves. To think a thing is to grasp its structure or essence and what is implied by this structure.

Avoiding thought

Much more significant and controversial is the argument that people try to avoid thinking. I certainly think  blame us for it, because thinking can be hard, and it can be quite unpleasant at first to think what we are doing and what is at stake in it.

I was alarmed this year when a significant number of students told me that our philosophy course was the first time they’d ever had to understand and actually think about something for themselves.

“Thinking too much” is not thinking at all, but being driven from image to image: the reason this feels chaotic and out of control is that what motivates and connects the things that appear in our mind’s eye remains unconscious and unthought. Actually thinking about it would involve becoming aware of what pushes you, what you’re seeking, and this is not always pleasant to recognize.

In fact, sometimes it therapeutic not to know what drives you until later. This includes especially our common neuroses. For example, you might not be aware why you are fighting with your girlfriend about the bits of dirt she left on the dishes: the fight and the reconciliation you hope for will only work if you do not realize that what really drives you is a deep panic that you might be losing her affection, that you do not feel worthy of love and so you try to take up more space, try to affect a response in her, direct or control her, because if she responds at all then you can interpret that as care.

Similarly, we might be unconsciously propelled to play World of Warcraft because it is reassuring: in our lives we are drifting or failing, or do not even know what to try to succeed at doing. Unlike real life, in the videogame we know exactly how to succeed, we know exactly what the tasks are that define success. So while we are playing the game, the directionless failing at life is still going on, getting worse, holding us inside the game as an escape from a worsening life.

Several of my students said that they often play movies or music as a way to get to sleep. If they don’t, they say, they will be up all night buffeted by waves of worry and overwhelmed with bits and pieces of all the things that are there demanding to be thought—“who am I?” “where am I going?” “what should I aim at in my life?” — This kind of experience of “thinking too much” makes it quite clear why people try not to think: they are trying to turn off a monster.

We need thought

“The thirst of a thoughtless man grows like a creeper;

he runs from life to life, like a monkey seeking fruit in the forest.

Whomsoever this fierce thirst overcomes, full of poison,

in this world, his sufferings increase like the abounding Birana grass.

He who overcomes this fierce thirst, difficult to be conquered in this world,

sufferings fall off from him, like water-drops from a lotus leaf.”

                - Buddha, Dhammapada XXIV.334-336

As Bertrand Russell observes in "The Value of Philosophy," the world of a thoughtless person is restricted: I see a someone on the street only insofar as they are useful to my projects, and not as a person with their own life and care and mind. When he is rude I take it personally: he is rude to me, because of me. What happens in the world might look to me to be all about me and directed at me, as David Foster Wallace's Keynon Address argues, simply because, I cannot be removed from the center of my experience. 

A kind of suffering builds beneath our thoughtlessness. All around it is the world beyond our understanding and control. In our thoughtlessness we are besieged by it instead of opening ourselves to embrace it.

I cannot live in a world restricted to my own interests: in my thoughtlessness I know and feel the presence of the wide world beyond the limit of my interests, just as without thinking, I am not surprised to turn my head and see that there are things there. My field of vision is the world which transcends me. I experience my life as part of a world beyond me.

Things are nested in one another and integrated into whole beings: the yellow of the lemon is sour and the smell is bright, the waxy skin is bitter (as Merleau-Ponty says in The World of Perception). We need to add, though, that without thought to connect things essentially together, this integrated meaning of things is unstable: things are integrated in perception, and we can take them apart through thought, but in thoughtless re-membering and imagination they can slowly fall apart or dis-integrate on their own, without us noticing.

You can eventually understand your friendships as an overlapping list of common preferences, for this or that movie, a certain kind of sandwich, and the personality of your friends appears to you as an aggregate of features, their lives a sequence of posts on facebook. Your own actions, your days at work can subtly take on the character of being one after another: this... then this... and... and.... Your life stretches out into senselessness like the the Birana grass, the more it seems to take this additive form. 

Thinking is a living activity. We thirst for thinking more than we thirst for its effects.