The inner courtyard of cognition

Sudeep Ghosh

‘You see but you do not observe’.

I will define Critical Thinking (CT) as ‘Pather Panchali’ (song of the road) after the title of the novel by the well-acclaimed Bangla novelist, Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay. Why? CT is a life-long journey with ideas – contested, churned, created. It is a pathless path to put metaphorically. The more we learn, the more we (un)learn. This paradox apart, CT is like fiddling with the frayed end of your ideas till you hit a brainwave. As a facilitator, you catch on to that idea in your classroom discussion, further the search and the ideas grow with a steady drizzle of claims, counterclaims and after-thoughts. Practically speaking, CT is a problem-solving tool, the key to unlocking ideas – fresh, invigorating, pristine. This article proposes an inter-disciplinary take on the nature and value of critical thinking.

To think critically is like decoding a detective novel and savouring each moment of deciphering where the beauty and value of what looks intriguing through implied meaning and allusive associations are unravelled; however, what is revealed can be further revisited to discover the yet-not revealed. It demands keen observation, an eye for detail to tease out meanings with radiant alacrity or sometimes with painstaking slowness till you are ignited. It is worth a search, nonetheless. A critical thinker is often assailed with self-doubt like someone lost in intrusive thought: ‘Who knows what I want to do? Who knows what anyone wants to do? How can you be sure about something like that? Isn’t it all a question of brain chemistry, signals going back and forth, electrical energy in the cortex? How do you know whether something is really what you want to do or just some kind of nerve impulse in the brain?’ However, what appears to be intractable can be accessed through a conventional model. Nickerson’s set of attributes defining a critical thinker is worth applying for before a class activity is initiated. CT, to me, is the only antidote to the malady of social networks turning learners into the ‘Dumbest Generation’.

Inter-disciplinary activity
The class examines Stephen Hawking’s recent caveat: “The genie is out of the bottle. I fear that AI may replace humans altogether.” How would you map the thought process of your learners? Unpack the claim into a pattern: the first statement evokes the power of visualization; the second examines the validity of assumptions. Though creating a pattern fosters clarity, let us not forget the gap between seeing and words proffered by Magritte, the Surrealist painter. In this context, the facilitator can focus on the central thesis and do the following inter-disciplinary activity to understand what is observed, hypothesized, challenged, measured, corroborated, repeated and formulated lending to a pluralistic understanding of how knowledge is acquired through the interaction of science, arts, technology and media.

Central thesis: Imagination is imperative in the production of knowledge.
Give the stimuli below to different groups. They, as different professional cohorts, present their arguments cogently around the central thesis by exploring contexts, concepts, methods, evidence, impacts and implications. The facilitator can provide ‘clues’ to prod them into thinking.

Group 1: Scientists
Stimulus: John Brookman argues through a possible consequence of string theory: “Well, if the universe is really accelerating its expansion, then we know that it’s going to get infinitely large, and that things will happen over and over and over. And if you have infinitely many tries at something, then every possible outcome is going to happen infinitely many times, no matter how unlikely it is.”⁸
Clues: Hobbesian scientific discourse; natural
world and shifting scientific paradigms, falsification;
deductive and inductive reasoning.

Group 2: Theologians
Stimulus: The belief that unity underlies diversity.
Clues: Language of faith; allusion to religious mythology [e.g., Indian – where Krishna affirms: There is “true” knowledge. Learn thou it is this:/ To see one changeless life in all the lives,/ And in the separate, One Inseparable.⁹]; revelation and imagination.

Group 3: Poets/writers
Stimuli: Coleridge’s concept ‘willing suspension of disbelief’10 or Amitav Ghosh’s concept of imagination¹¹ or Jorge Luis
Borges’ speculation¹² of a universe with infinite time and finite mass.
Clues: How does imagination drive scientific beliefs? Einstein’s preference for intuitive knowledge; speculative reasoning; serendipity.

Group 4: Artists
Stimulus: Around the time of painting The Starry Night (1889), comes the expression: ‘It’s beautiful as regards lines and proportions, like an Egyptian obelisk. And the green has such a distinguished quality. It’s the dark patch in a sundrenched landscape, but it’s one of the most interesting dark notes, the most difficult to hit off exactly that I can imagine.’¹³
Clues: Imagination and senses; intradisciplinarity and imagination [e.g., Anne Sexton’s poem The Starry Night (1961) vs van Gogh].

Group 5: Media analysts/social behaviourists
Stimulus: Is Google making us stupid?¹⁴
Clues: Individual, collective and free will; information overload vs freedom; enrichment vs deprivation; addiction vs withdrawal; ethics and utility; phantasmagorical imagination, interpersonal confrontations [e.g., The Matrix – imagination and grotesque]; propaganda and fancy.

Group 6: Philosophers
Stimulus: ‘So is the mind, your mind, capable of looking at the root of fear, not only the expression of it?’¹⁵
Clues: Fear and human evolution, mind vs body, psychological fear, existentialism, alienation, shared and personal knowledge.

CT is wondrous; it beckons one into the luminous landscape which demands an intense engagement with ideas. What is fascinating is the endorsement, transference and validity of varied ideas and how what appears to be doggedly irreducible, undefined or unidentifiable can be tamed with sound reasoning. The facilitator has to create a paradigm of thinking to make the dazzling array of ideas shine forth and enhance the ambit of empirical awareness. See if you can change your classroom into a banquet for the young brains!

In the process of deconstruction through CT, what is worth cherishing for both facilitators and learners is the collective joy of unearthing meanings and feeling enthralled. This mutual relationship, driving the search for meaning is amazing and reminds me of Ingmar Bergman extolling his kinship with his cameraman: ‘I miss working with Sven Nykvist, perhaps because we are both utterly captivated by the problems of light, the gentle, dangerous, dreamlike, living, dead, clear, misty, hot, violent, bare, sudden, dark, spring like, falling, straight, slanting, sensual, subdued, limited, poisonous, calming, pale light. Light.¹⁶ Let me wind up by defining both learners and facilitators, committed to CT, by quoting these telling words:

They are farmers, really –
hoeing and planting
in strict rows ripe with manure,
coaxing each nebulous seed
to grow.¹⁷

References
1. Doyle, Arthur Conan. A Scandal in Bohemia
2. DeLillo, Don. White Noise
3. Hilsdon, John. University of Plymouth
4. Nickerson, R.S. The teaching of Thinking. Hillsdale, NJ
5. Bauerlein, Mark. The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. 2008
6. https://futurism.in/2017/11/06/stephen-hawking-ai-replacehumans/
7. Ways of Seeing, John Berger
8 Brookman, John. The Universe: Leading Scientists Explore the Origin, Mysteries, & Future of the Cosmos. (2014) [footnote 8]
9. The Bhagavad-Gita, Book xviii
10. Coleridge, S.T. Biographia Literaria
11. The Shadow Lines [Examine Tridib’s impacts on narrator]
12. Essay ‘The Doctrine of Cycles’
13. Gogh, Vincent van. Letter to Theo Van Gogh
14. Carr, Nick. The Atlantic
15. Krishnamurti, J. Facing a World in Crisis
16. Bergman, Ingmar. The Magic Lantern
17. Pastan, Linda. Insomnia. W.W.Norton, 2017

The author is TOK Coordinator & teaches English at The Aga Khan Academy, Hyderabad. He can be reached at sudeepmailsu@gmail.com.