License to Think

Argues for developing literacy of listening and silence as as an alternative to the dominance of logical procedures and the exactness of calculative thought. License to Think argues for a necessary reconsideration of thinking in the age of the dominance of information and algorithmic culture. Krzysztof Ziarek proposes an alternative way of understanding how thought receives its "license" or "authorization" from listening and open attentiveness, which tend to be neglected or downplayed by dominant modes, especially calculative thought and computationalism. Preparing for the possibility of "the other inception" of thought, Heidegger remarks that it "needs a poetic thinking. This thinking is more rigorous than every exact calculation." If the "first inception" in Ancient Greece shapes thinking in terms of ideas and grasping intelligence, which provide the basis for the development of Western rationality and its dominant mode of calculative thought, how can we understand poetic thinking and its mode of thoughtful nongrasping? The fundamental change involves the shift of priority from assertion and statement to listening and attunement. Modern rationality's emphasis on active grasping and articulation overshadows and even disregards the key importance of listening, especially the role of attentive attunement. In this context, Ziarek argues for developing literacy of listening and silence as key to rethinking thought and lending it "license"—that is, the possibility of an open accord, of being in tune with what prompts thinking in the first place. Drawing on Heidegger, Cage, Daoism and Zen thought, Beckett, and Stein, as well as contemporary composers Iannotta and Saunders, License to Think explores the permeable boundaries between naming and namelessness, silence and sound, human and nonhuman, nothingness and being to understand how thought is licensed to think, first and foremost, poetically.