Confession: I'm a slow reader (painfully slow) & a slow thinker (excepting some flashes I guess). I need time to absorb & ruminate. The pace of academia (of the world?!) seems ill-fitted for my mind. I feel out of time. So, I've been thinking abt the temporality of thinking. A 🧵
I'll never forget the first time I read On the Genealogy of Morality and encountered Nietzsche's call for rumination. Here, finally, was a way of reading I wanted to practice. I wondered (still do) why educational institutions don't make more room for rumination
Nietzsche, again, on the art of slow reading from the preface to Daybreak
As it is with reading, so it is with thinking. Nietzsche compares thinking to the slow, arduous task of mining and, as the granddaughter of coal miners, I was immediately captured by the analogy (again from Daybreak)
Yes, Nietzsche speaks to me of the temporality of thinking. Who else? Hannah Arendt is fond of calling our attention to the significance of the idiomatic expression: "stop and think"
For Arendt, the stopping of the stop-and-think opens up a kind of timeless space for thinking. It is partly because of this location of the thinker that she follows Heidegger in characterizing thinking as "out-of-order activity"
Having located the thinking ego in this timeless in-between, Arendt points out the "invisibility" of thinking: "The only outward manifestation of the mind is absentmindedness." Perhaps you, like me, can relate?
I'm gonna take a little break on this thread, but I'll be back with some Heidegger and Machiavelli and more Arendt!
You can follow @StreetTheorist.
Tip: mention @twtextapp on a Twitter thread with the keyword “unroll” to get a link to it.

Latest Threads Unrolled: