HOW TO THINK by ALAN JACOBS

이 책은 개인적으로 Eric Hoffer 라는 미국의 철학자를 다시 만나서 좋았다. '거리의 철학자' 라는 별명이 붙은 철학자인데 그의 인생을 보면 감동 그 자체다. 사실 일본 심리학자의 책을 읽다가 알게된 철학자인데, 나는 '인간의 조건' 이라는 책을 읽었다. 이 책에서는 "True believer" 가 주로 언급되고 있다.  그리고 계몽주의 Immanuel Kant 를 만날 수 있어서 즐거웠다. 그리고 그의 "Sapere aude ! ; dare to think, dare to be wise" 는 감동이다. "Thinking" 은 개인의 산물인가 집단의 산물인가 ...... 이 책은 정독이 필요한 책이다.

 

- This is what thinking is : not the decision itself but what goes into the decision, the consideration, the assessment.

- When there is no listening there is no thinking.

- The more passionate I feel about a topic, the more likely I am to succumb to that temptation.

- When we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts.

- The person who wants to think will have to practice patience and master fear.

- Thinking is fundamentally an art.

- Whoever it was who first said that happiness is something one cannot aim straight at, but rather can achieve only by focusing on other good things, could have said it about thinking and been equally correct.

- Sometimes you can get better at thinking only by turning your attention to matters other than thinking.

- Stories of forbidden knowledge come in many varieties, but in our time this is one of the more common : the tale of a community that provides security in exchange for thought, and the courageous member of that community who, daring to think, sacrifices the security. It's the enlightment

- Immanuel Kant said, Sapere aude ! ; dare to think, dare to be wise .....

- We don't know that. To think, to dig into the foundation of our beliefs, is a risk, and perhaps a tragic risk. There are no guarantees that it will make us happy or even give us satisfaction.

- 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.

- When people command 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.

- This is thinking : the power to be finely aware and richly responsible. We just need to learn how to be more aware, how to act more responsibly.

- Our ability to think well will be determined to some considerable degree by who those others are ...

The problem of belonging and not-belonging, affiliation and separation, is central to the task of learning how to think.

- True loyalty between individuals is possible only in a loose and relatively free society. And this is true on a smaller scale and in less extreme situations as well. The genuine community is open to thinking and questioning, so long as those thoughts and questions come from people of goodwill.

- The modern Western world tends to give us a choice between solitude - not always easy to choose - and inclusion in a collective ....

- for people of all ages, some form of genuine membership is absolutely necessary for thinking.

- We have likewise seen how the pressures imposed on us by INNER RINGS make genuine thinking almost impossible by making belonging contingent on conformity.

- Eric Hoffer comments that the capacity to resist coercion stems partly from the individual's identification with a group ...

- ... isolation is deadly, while genuine solidarity is life-giving..... the need to distinguish between "genuine solidarity" and particiaption in an INNER RING ....

- a questioning of your preferred means can look like indifference toward your most treasured ends ...

- Prudence doesn't mean being uncertain about what's right ; it means being scrupulous about finding the best means to get there, and it leads us to seek ....

- How attractions and repulsions affect our thinking.

- attractions and repulsions alike are simply biases, and biases interfere with our ability to asses evidence and therefore should be "overcome" eliminated ....

- Reason alone is an insufficient guide to action.

- Jonathan Haidt's argument that "moral matrices" both bind and blind, and those matrices do that work largely through language.

- In search of social belonging, and the blessed shortcuts that we can take when we're in the presence of like-minded ........

- ... the relevant taxonomic opposition here is not between man and animal ; it is between the powerful and the powerless.

- Our age is so dedicated to its various lumpings that it has, I think, lost sight of these dangers, .....

- Keynes acerbically replied, "When the facts change, sir, I change my mind. What do you do?"

- Fundamentally, for Hoffer, mass movements are a psychological phenomenon ....

- ... whether your social environment is healthy for thinking by its attitude toward ideas from the outgroup. If you quote some unapproved figure.

- the kind of person who, at least some of the time, cares more about working toward the truth than about one's current social position. And working toward the truth is one of life's great adventures ...

- Thinking does not have a destination, a stopping point, a "Well, we're finally here." To cease thinking, as Thomas Aquinas explained, is an act either of despair .....

- What is needed for the life of thinking is hope ; hope of knowing more, understanding more, being more than we currently are ....

- People make such checklists for themselves only when forced by experience into intellectual humility; proud people don't want to use them.