Thinking Through

What does it mean to think something through? If I have a list of expenses I need to total for the month, thinking about that problem means gathering the relevant data and adding each accurately to the next. This kind of thinking we call calculating or computing, finding the always and necessary connection of facts, numerical or otherwise. But we don’t usually refer to thinking through a calculation, because the adverb through suggests a wider field of observations which could affect our conclusion. This kind of thinking through we instead call reasoning.

Understanding the difference between calculating and reasoning is especially important in our present days of universal access to omnipresence. Each of us is a computer connection away from claiming the attention of an astronomical number of persons, and if we the audience do not listen carefully to what others are telling us—if we do not think through what they often passionately and brashly are asserting, we risk handing away that priceless gemstone which is our own mind and identity. Reasoning is more than logic. Where logic calculates, reason considers, ponders, contemplates—that frame of mind we assume when we study, for example, the great display of stars in the night sky. Curiously, the verb consider originally meant to watch and wonder over the stars, sidera in Latin.

So to hear, as I did the other day, a public academic expert in matters scientific maintain that religious faith will never be able to reconcile itself with scientific truths and therefore religion is fakery, demands an alert and quick attention to the assumptions that remain unspoken behind such a mundane assertion. Human nature seems to be such that we give a reflexive benefit of the doubt to someone speaking from a position of authority, whatever it might be, but in our better moments we know that such deference is often misplaced. One may speak profoundly on one subject and foolishly on another. And we should note that the critical inspection of a claim quite self-confidently made has nothing to do with defending the opposing position. One might very well agree with this assertion that science will always have the final word, but we owe it to ourselves and to others and to truth itself to understand as comprehensively as we can the ground on which a conclusion rests. That will give a chance for truth to arise from unexpected quarters, perhaps surprising both parties to the argument.

What are the assumptions behind a claim someone is urging us to believe? That is the most important of questions when we wish to think something through, when we wish to be reasonable and treat serious questions seriously. To maintain, as did the authoritative voice I heard recently, that religious faith and science will forever stand facing off each other may very well be true if we assume that we come to know matters of faith in the same frame of mind with which we run our lines of logic. And that, in turn, may indeed be true, but let us be aware that the first assertion stands on this and many other assumptions, all of which more often than not stand quietly unrecognized behind brash but brittle propositions.

And making the quiet speak may change the universe of ideas we are discoursing about. Is all faith religious faith, or does that adjective make the claim tendentious by tacitly confusing the religious with the philosophical? Why is there, conversely, no adjective restricting the noun science? The empirical procedures of natural science are not commensurate with philosophical analysis, another kind of science, whose inquiries all remain in the mind beyond the confines of coacting entities in space and time. And if the absence of a qualifying adjective is meant to suggest the unchallengeable supremacy of the logically observed world, on what basis is that frame of mind self-certifying? Why, in other words, is what presents itself to our senses necessarily more certain than what presents itself to our minds? All such questions (and many more) work to articulate the assumptions on which someone is making a claim in any field of knowledge—scientific, religious, political.

And imagine how things can go wrong in a political debate! A brawl of words, a logomachy, where the fight is more often over expression, not truth; where one’s language is out to have an effect, not to bring a bright light to the cause and purpose of public policy and the just action which would accompany it. The forces of human nature always extend in two directions, toward both the emotional and the rational, and the classical position contends that our good life depends on maintaining a balance between those ends, not simply beating down what moves us with denouncing reason. But reason we must have in order to shape and purpose our emotions, which otherwise run about and reach after any ideas which seem to answer a present, pressing, personal need. If our political views—and particularly the views of those who wish to lead us—are not tied to an articulate and coherent and communicable set of presumptions, too many of us will be tempted to default to the one who can most strongly assert passionately what may be overarchingly appealing in the moment.

Hence the supreme importance of language and our knowing how to ask questions with it, direct or indirect: What does what you’re saying assume? Has someone told you what to think, or have you thought about the ideas you are urging on me? How do you know what you are saying is true? In the end, it depends upon whether we want the truth and true things because we respect ourselves enough to expect nothing less. But without the skill to think closely in language, we risk accepting what appears to be true as good enough for us, and that is where the moral danger lurks: we lower ourselves, coming to believe that the lesser—poorer ideas, artificial language—will suffice.

But when we once decide we are worth more than the artificial, there is a test we can apply to what we hear and read: is the language clear and simple and direct, and can we discern a serious disposition behind the words when the subject warrants such? The old noun for this was gravitas, weightiness or bearing, which ironically may be what typifies not the naïve, as is so often charged, but the wise and simple-hearted. And it might just bring us back to another old phrase, the intellectual life, pursuing which, says a long tradition, we can find order and reason and direction in times both peaceful and troubled.

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