Sterling Terrell

recovering economist

Independent Thinking Is Impossible?

Independent Thinking Is Impossible?

There is no such thing as independent thinking.

For virtually every idea is a compounding of others.

All thinking, in this sense, comes from the broad context of history.

Standing on the heads of giants, as they say…

This passage made me laugh, because it is so true.

Let’s appreciate the encompassing relational aspect of all of our thinking.

To think independently of other human beings is impossible, and if it were possible it would be undesirable. Thinking is necessarily, thoroughly, and wonderfully social. Everything you think is a response to what someone else has thought and said. And when people commend someone for “thinking for herself” they usually mean “ceasing to sound like people I dislike and starting to sound more like people I approve of.”

-Alan Jacobs, How To Think

In Favor Of Deep Thinking, By Everyone

In Favor Of Deep Thinking, By Everyone

Why does there exist such a deficit of deep thinking?

I mean, I don’t even know if this is recent or the way it has always been.

For emotion lives in the place of measured examination.

I sense that there should be slower opinionated reactions, a less certain “knowing,” and more sentences that end with question marks.

Shame on us for not beginning to answer most questions with something along the lines of:

“Uh. I’m not sure about that. That’s a complicated issue.”

Before going home and considering it for a few days.

Shame on all of us.

Let’s have more discussions like Peter Thiel is reported to have.

Sherlock Holmes had it right too.

Because we all need thinking.

For me, the fundamental problem we have may best be described as an orientation of the will: we suffer from a settled determination to avoid thinking. Relatively few people want to think. Thinking troubles us; thinking tires us. Thinking can force us out of familiar, comforting habits; thinking can complicate our lives; thinking can set us at odds, or at least complicate our relationships, with those we admire or love or follow. Who needs thinking?

-Alan Jacobs, How To Think

Sterling Terrell