Critical Thinking to Liminal Thinking
Tomorrow’s events:
Collective Journaling. Daily @ 8:00 AM ET. Patreon event. 90 mins.
Embodiment Hour. Every Thursday @ 12:00 PM ET. Patreon event. 60 mins.
Newly posted events:
Global Guerrillas Report: Swarms vs Nukes w/ John Robb. March 4th @ 2:00 PM ET. The Stoa Patreon and Global Guerrillas Report Patreon event.
Life Art w/ Jonathan Harris. March 18th @ 2:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
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March 2nd, 2022
People often talk about how important critical thinking is. I agree. Important stuff. What exactly is critical thinking though? I see many people using the phrase in a dismissively weaponized way, in order to convey that those they disagree with are what they otherwise call “SED” - stupid, evil, or deranged. Weaponized dismissals are also an indirect way to convey the following:
Look at me fam, I am a critical thinker!
It feels good to think of oneself as a critical thinker. It does invoke a bunch of warm fuzzies. If one is a critical thinker, it means one is not dumb, a baddie, or someone unhinged, falling prey to embarrassing-to-believe “conspiracy theories.” My strong sense is that most people who use the phrase “critical thinking” do not know what critical thinking actually is, though, nor do they have regular practices cultivating it. They may even have practices that reduce it, e.g. being on Twitter way too much.
In fairness, I do not really know what it is either. Jonathan Haber, who we chatted with at The Stoa last year, did a survey of the various definitions of critical thinking in his MIT introductory book. As expected, there is no definitional consensus. Haber argued that John Dewey’s 1910 How We Think is the first incarnation of modern critical thinking; Dewey referred to it as “reflective thinking,” which he summed up as…
[A]ctive, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it tends.
The other definitions Haber surveyed do not really get better than this. What is perhaps more important than definitions are the actual practices of critical thinking, but again, there is no consensus for which practices get housed under the conceptual umbrella of critical thinking. There is a lot of good stuff out there, and I am personally called to become more sophisticated in understanding what it actually is, and becoming a better critical thinker through practice.
I do not actually think critical thinking is the most critical thing to learn these days though. I sense what Dave Gray calls “liminal thinking” is more critical to learn. Dave has a specific way he uses the term, which is worth checking out, but I will be using the term here in the following way: thinking less foolishly during the liminal. “Liminality” means being in between states, which is itself a wildly disorientating state, most commonly during rites of passage. If people associated with the “Liminal Web” have the correct sense, we are in a planetary rite of passage, globally transitioning into a new way of being. And this new way of being could become heavenly or hellish, or anywhere in between. The outcome probably depends on how well we think.
One thing is sure, during any great transition, the previous ways are no longer enough. I still think we need to cultivate a critical thinking talent stack - informal logic, applied rationality, street epistemology - along with other critical things to have, but critical thinking is often biased towards figuring out what is true. When one is in the liminal, knowing what is true is not the main task. Getting to the other side is. And besides, in this sensemaking graveyard that is now the internet, truth is next to impossible to know authentically.
Many people are doing good work discovering what “liminal thinking” could mean, such as our friends at the Liminal Space Agency, and there are many things The Stoa is exploring that can be added to one’s ecology of liminal thinking practices, from ontological flooding to polarity management. There are a few I do publicly that might help with developing liminal thinking…
Journaling, in an authentic way, which is to say in the way that helps me author my life, is obviously the main thing I recommend. I would also say journaling in an embodied way, where I take time to feel each word, also helps. Journaling deeply calms my mind and gets me to think slower, hopefully helping me think better when the time comes to think fast.
In my journaling practice, I often engage in two techniques, both of which may help with liminal thinking. The first technique is making up new terms, models, constructs, concepts, or whatever you want to call them. There are definite failure modes in doing this, but there is something wonderful about having the agency to create your own models of reality. It affords an expansiveness in thinking and feeling, opening up new pathways in logical and emotional space. I might write about this in an upcoming entry.
The other technique involves becoming really clear in what basic words mean, or said more personally: becoming really clear about what I mean when I use a word. I absolutely love getting basic, looking up definitions and etymologies. More importantly, each word has a felt-sense, for myself and others, which is critical to feel. Becoming intimate with words, by owning your own definition, along with meeting all the emotions tagging along with them - especially the unmet ones - is incredibly helpful in sensing how you use a word. Or how a word uses you.
The feeling of an intellectual imposter syndrome does come online here for me: who am I to define a word? Should I not instead spend my time doing a literature review, of minds stronger than mine, who spent a life thinking on a topic related to that word. For sure, doing that stuff can be awesome, but the exercise here is not to know the truth, be super knowledgeable about a specific topic, or fanboy over some dead philosopher.
The exercise here is to own your words, so you think for yourself, with your self, and beyond your self. All of this usually leads to the discovery that you really do not know much, along with how much you are outsourcing not only your thinking, but the meaning of the words you use, especially the everyday ones.
When you engage in the Socratic method with someone about the meaning of a word they just used, you can pop them into aporia pretty quickly. This even works with super articulate galaxy brains who seem to know everything. The reason it works: below each word is a gateway to something deeper. A deeper sense of what is and what could be. And most deeply, the mystery.
I deeply sense that in order for us to make it to the other side, we need to use words-as-portals, so we can begin to access the full spectrum of our senses.
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