I suppose you consider yourself to be a “free thinker.” And why not? Who can prove otherwise except by showing that your thoughts precisely imitate the thoughts of others, are tethered to their ideas? But if you were pressed to characterize, define, or identify how you are a free thinker, could you? After millennia of “thinking” by other humans, are we not all simply plagiarists? And in asking that question, I suppose you see where this “free-thinking” stuff is going: Free thinking is not free when it repeats in whole or in part thoughts previously thought.
Of course, there is another direction for defining “free thinking”: Bucking the trends of the status quo or rejecting the “norms” by which the rest of—or most of—the world thinks and behaves. Behaves? How does behavior fit into the “free-thinking equation”? Well, isn’t behavior an outward manifestation of unconscious and conscious thinking?
Is free thinking—if I draw on circumstances around the world in 2020—the product of anarchy or anarchy’s mother? Is the defiance of the irreverent, the satirical, the rebellious, or even the politically incorrect a foundation of free thinking? Or is that foundation based in ingenuity and inventiveness? In artistic creativity? Does free thinking lie in willful and unwavering independence from all groups and philosophies fixed by time? Does it lie in any form of contrarianism? And can free thinking really be “manifested in behavior” that breaks from any and all philosophies or inculcations? Is freedom based on originality?
And who are free-thinkers if originality is the measure? Is Plato, who nearly 2,500 years ago laid the foundation for all who followed, or was Plato, I ask, the freest of thinkers because he was, if not the first, then one of the first philosophers? Is Aristotle freer because he broke with some of Plato’s main concepts? Or, in modern times is Heidegger, who sought to “rethink” philosophy and break the bounds of the Greek tradition, a truly free thinker?
And where in all of this history of thought and “thinking” do you stand? Are you immersed in a view of the world that goes back to ancient Athens? Are you, like Alexander the Great, merely the pupil of Aristotle, echoing his way of thinking? It was Aristotle, as William Butler Yeats notes, who “played the taws/Upon the bottom of a king of kings” and whose thinking spread through Alexander’s victories across an empire, spreading Hellenism down to our own age.* In playing the taws on his young student/future conqueror’ bum, did Aristotle beat knowledge and a way of thinking into Alexander? Nevertheless, was not Alexander an example of a free thinker when he cut the Gordian Knot?
Can we define free-thinking on the basis of individuals who cut the Gordian Knot of past thought, as Copernicus did with Ptolemy, Newton with Aristotle, and Einstein with Newton? Had they remained tethered by a Gordian Knot to past thought, we might still believe in a stationary Earth, an erroneous explanation for relationship among objects in motion, and a separation of time and space.
Why should I broach the subject of free thinking? Am I not one of those who similarly classify themselves as free thinkers like you?
Actually, no, or at least, not quite. Were I to adopt a label for myself, it would be “analogist,” and not “free thinker.” Sure, there are some aspects of my thinking that differ from others, such as my thinking in the subjunctive mood in the previous sentence (“Were I to…”), but generally, the grammar and syntax of thinking isn’t free, and the subjunctive, even incorrectly used, is on everyone’s tongue (“If I were you…,” an unrealistic, or hypothetical, conditional, usually expressed incorrectly nowadays as “If I was you…”). The mood comes with a subscription to a way of looking at a world that doesn’t exist, the irrealis, shaped by language. Language, despite arguments to the contrary, does influence worldview and serve as the primary mechanism for shared thinking.** In my expressions, I might seem to be a free thinker to someone who never uses the subjunctive mood. My use might indicate that all my “original” thinking, my “free” thinking lies in imaginative hypotheticals. But all of us are constrained by grammar and syntax; all of us toy with hypotheticals and unrealities that bear some semblance in our minds to the theoretical and real that we believe separates us from the masses. I cannot, however I try, “be you.” Were we to communicate solely through the language of mathematics, we might lay claim to a truly real, free and original thinking in every new formulaic expression though math’s symbols have themselves become rather commonplace.
Does free thinking entail behavior that veers from widespread cultural practice? In “behavior,” I include fashion, meaning dress, makeup, or body ornamentation as well as lifestyle. Outside of the spoken and written words, behavior is also a kind of language, one that all of us learn to interpret. Behavior, sign language, and body position and movement (body “language”) are outward manifestations of thinking. Could these reveal free thinking? Maybe. Many modern choreographers have astounded audiences with their narratives written in dance. But generally, all the human body has to say through appearance and movement has been said. This morning, for example, I encountered a story online about a female celebrity who has been posing semi-nude on social media during the pandemic. Is she seeking attention? Expressing a thought? Although I have no way of knowing her motive, I assume that she believes her behavior is a mark of free-thinking individual in an otherwise clothed and restricted population. She might, in fact, be demonstrating a “freedom” of sorts; yet, were I to go to the deepest part of the Amazon’s tropical rainforest, I would encounter whole tribes of people who live a life without clothes and think nothing of their commonplace nudity. Free behavior is cultural in a worldwide context; the celebrity’s behavior is quite ordinary outside her western society’s restrictions on public nudity. Is free thinking manifested in any such behavior? Or is her pictorial “statement” nothing more than a juvenile-like defiance as though in her middle age, she has discovered that her sexuality both intrigues and offends?
Have all the fields of free thinking, of original thinking, already been plowed? Do we merely hoe rows already hoed? At best do we merely harrow clumps of thought into smaller and smaller clumps that we claim for our own, sod broken from sod? Are we thought-vassals of long-dead overlords to which we owe allegiance, service, and goods from their lands that we occupy only at their pleasure? Would Plato and Aristotle be pleased that so many in the western world think in a manner consistent with their philosophies? Do we serve in a philosophical system of feudalism not only as their disciples but also as their court jesters? And how far does our compliance with our overlords’ thinking go. Are we obliged as one medieval vassal was every Christmas to make before his lord “unum saltum et siffletum et unum bumbulum” (a leap, whistle, and an audible gaseous expulsion) ***
So much of what modern society professes as free thinking is actually unum bumbulum.
*William Butler Yeats. “Among School Children.” The stanza (VI) reads in full:
Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Soldier Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.
**You decide: You can read Guy Drutscher’s Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, or John H. McWhorter’s The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language.
***Bishop, Morris. The Middle Ages. New York. American Heritage Press, 1970.
Of course, there is another direction for defining “free thinking”: Bucking the trends of the status quo or rejecting the “norms” by which the rest of—or most of—the world thinks and behaves. Behaves? How does behavior fit into the “free-thinking equation”? Well, isn’t behavior an outward manifestation of unconscious and conscious thinking?
Is free thinking—if I draw on circumstances around the world in 2020—the product of anarchy or anarchy’s mother? Is the defiance of the irreverent, the satirical, the rebellious, or even the politically incorrect a foundation of free thinking? Or is that foundation based in ingenuity and inventiveness? In artistic creativity? Does free thinking lie in willful and unwavering independence from all groups and philosophies fixed by time? Does it lie in any form of contrarianism? And can free thinking really be “manifested in behavior” that breaks from any and all philosophies or inculcations? Is freedom based on originality?
And who are free-thinkers if originality is the measure? Is Plato, who nearly 2,500 years ago laid the foundation for all who followed, or was Plato, I ask, the freest of thinkers because he was, if not the first, then one of the first philosophers? Is Aristotle freer because he broke with some of Plato’s main concepts? Or, in modern times is Heidegger, who sought to “rethink” philosophy and break the bounds of the Greek tradition, a truly free thinker?
And where in all of this history of thought and “thinking” do you stand? Are you immersed in a view of the world that goes back to ancient Athens? Are you, like Alexander the Great, merely the pupil of Aristotle, echoing his way of thinking? It was Aristotle, as William Butler Yeats notes, who “played the taws/Upon the bottom of a king of kings” and whose thinking spread through Alexander’s victories across an empire, spreading Hellenism down to our own age.* In playing the taws on his young student/future conqueror’ bum, did Aristotle beat knowledge and a way of thinking into Alexander? Nevertheless, was not Alexander an example of a free thinker when he cut the Gordian Knot?
Can we define free-thinking on the basis of individuals who cut the Gordian Knot of past thought, as Copernicus did with Ptolemy, Newton with Aristotle, and Einstein with Newton? Had they remained tethered by a Gordian Knot to past thought, we might still believe in a stationary Earth, an erroneous explanation for relationship among objects in motion, and a separation of time and space.
Why should I broach the subject of free thinking? Am I not one of those who similarly classify themselves as free thinkers like you?
Actually, no, or at least, not quite. Were I to adopt a label for myself, it would be “analogist,” and not “free thinker.” Sure, there are some aspects of my thinking that differ from others, such as my thinking in the subjunctive mood in the previous sentence (“Were I to…”), but generally, the grammar and syntax of thinking isn’t free, and the subjunctive, even incorrectly used, is on everyone’s tongue (“If I were you…,” an unrealistic, or hypothetical, conditional, usually expressed incorrectly nowadays as “If I was you…”). The mood comes with a subscription to a way of looking at a world that doesn’t exist, the irrealis, shaped by language. Language, despite arguments to the contrary, does influence worldview and serve as the primary mechanism for shared thinking.** In my expressions, I might seem to be a free thinker to someone who never uses the subjunctive mood. My use might indicate that all my “original” thinking, my “free” thinking lies in imaginative hypotheticals. But all of us are constrained by grammar and syntax; all of us toy with hypotheticals and unrealities that bear some semblance in our minds to the theoretical and real that we believe separates us from the masses. I cannot, however I try, “be you.” Were we to communicate solely through the language of mathematics, we might lay claim to a truly real, free and original thinking in every new formulaic expression though math’s symbols have themselves become rather commonplace.
Does free thinking entail behavior that veers from widespread cultural practice? In “behavior,” I include fashion, meaning dress, makeup, or body ornamentation as well as lifestyle. Outside of the spoken and written words, behavior is also a kind of language, one that all of us learn to interpret. Behavior, sign language, and body position and movement (body “language”) are outward manifestations of thinking. Could these reveal free thinking? Maybe. Many modern choreographers have astounded audiences with their narratives written in dance. But generally, all the human body has to say through appearance and movement has been said. This morning, for example, I encountered a story online about a female celebrity who has been posing semi-nude on social media during the pandemic. Is she seeking attention? Expressing a thought? Although I have no way of knowing her motive, I assume that she believes her behavior is a mark of free-thinking individual in an otherwise clothed and restricted population. She might, in fact, be demonstrating a “freedom” of sorts; yet, were I to go to the deepest part of the Amazon’s tropical rainforest, I would encounter whole tribes of people who live a life without clothes and think nothing of their commonplace nudity. Free behavior is cultural in a worldwide context; the celebrity’s behavior is quite ordinary outside her western society’s restrictions on public nudity. Is free thinking manifested in any such behavior? Or is her pictorial “statement” nothing more than a juvenile-like defiance as though in her middle age, she has discovered that her sexuality both intrigues and offends?
Have all the fields of free thinking, of original thinking, already been plowed? Do we merely hoe rows already hoed? At best do we merely harrow clumps of thought into smaller and smaller clumps that we claim for our own, sod broken from sod? Are we thought-vassals of long-dead overlords to which we owe allegiance, service, and goods from their lands that we occupy only at their pleasure? Would Plato and Aristotle be pleased that so many in the western world think in a manner consistent with their philosophies? Do we serve in a philosophical system of feudalism not only as their disciples but also as their court jesters? And how far does our compliance with our overlords’ thinking go. Are we obliged as one medieval vassal was every Christmas to make before his lord “unum saltum et siffletum et unum bumbulum” (a leap, whistle, and an audible gaseous expulsion) ***
So much of what modern society professes as free thinking is actually unum bumbulum.
*William Butler Yeats. “Among School Children.” The stanza (VI) reads in full:
Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Soldier Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.
**You decide: You can read Guy Drutscher’s Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, or John H. McWhorter’s The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language.
***Bishop, Morris. The Middle Ages. New York. American Heritage Press, 1970.
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