What calls for thinking?

Most thought-provoking is that we are still not thinking—not even yet, although the world is becoming constantly more thought provoking. (Heidegger)

For it is owing to wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize. (Aristotle)

If what we mean by philosophy is defined by the sort of epistemological and metaphysical questions that would seem to be the special property of academic philosophy, then Aristotle’s thought is at least true of the intellectual experiences of young adults. Epistemological questions can cause adolescents deep stress, and they may entertain the wildest skeptical and idealist possibilities. Intoxicated by the dawning powers of abstract thought, the teenaged mind builds fantastic models of its place in the world, and its feelings of metaphysical puzzlement are existential and real, not manufactured according to the demands of the academic philosophy industry. The teenaged philosopher doesn’t need to cultivate intellectual eccentricities that fit a particular professional niche; everything is source and text. Books needn’t be fashionable to be worth thinking about; another era’s mass-market bestsellers in psychology, religion, or politics—whatever you can get cheaply at the library book-sale or used bookstore—can inspire thought that ranges way farther than the books’ content, thought to which only the books’ psychedelic cover art is adequate. Moral questions seem genuinely open-ended. Imagination and will are boundless. Sets of abstractions compete to describe the world, and each alteration and negation poses afresh the question of the meaning of being.

For most of us, epistemological questions lose the power to implicate us existentially once we get used to the power of thinking and incur responsibilities that we don’t dare to doubt.

Yet there is a different experience of wonder that is available only to those who already have in place a relatively stable way of dealing with and thinking about the world, and its call for thinking is perhaps more urgent than that of philosophical problems. This is the wonder that accompanies thoughts—in the rare moments when we can sustain them—that the way we carry on is not OK, that our practices and the world that demands them, justifies them, and gives them sense are not natural, necessary, or good. All at once, one sees the trail of wreckage, human and otherwise, that progress leaves in its wake, what comes out the true tailpipe of our drive forward, the wave of externalized costs that buoys us up. One knows in a flash the material price of a form of life previously considered to be self-contained and self-supporting; one grasps that the systems we operate enact a formulation of the second law of thermodynamics; that money represents a sum of entropic acceleration; that sustaining our comfort and security requires the projection of a moving, growing black hole, whose pull we are increasingly unable to resist; that what we perceive as presence is marked out by the negative space of entropy’s shadow; that there is no true autotrophism in nature; that the will to life is the will to reinterpretation, to violent appropriation, to heterotrophism; that our form of life represents the top of a human pyramid the bottom of which is submerged below our conscious representation and is only vaguely perceptible even in extraordinary and unsustainable moments of economic vision.

To the metaphysicians: forget about number, negation, inference, perception, properties, and identity. Think about conditions of the possibility of affordable and diverse consumer goods. Think about carbon. Do what philosophers do—strenuously separate the logical from the psychological, the intelligible from the imagistic—and recognize that third-worldism doesn’t definitionally require bright clothes or tropical weather; that fascist systems of social control don’t definitionally require uniforms, emblems, pledges, or dictators; that the primary forms of world political power don’t definitionally require flags, capitals, governments, or geographical locations. Recognize that the possibility of massive error in our cultural, moral, social, political, and economic representations is not just real but likely; that the falsity of our stories about ourselves is becoming impossible to ignore; that the violence in which we are complicit is real, even if its effects are distant, and that these effects are in fact increasingly proximate. (It can strike one as curious that those who want to understand what flashes on us in these moments of horror and recognition can pursue the content of these flashes in departments of history, economics, political science, sociology, or literature, though not in departments of philosophy.)