Thinking as Gathering
The Art and Asceticism of Thought
“The mind’s dynamic quality is perhaps best seen in Gregory’s likening the mind to flowing water. . . . This is the passion of the mind; it will move. It is a question of training this mind so that it moves in the right direction.”
— Martin Laird
In this newsletter you will read about:
Augustine on thinking (cogitare), gathering (cogere), and memory (memoria)
Gregory of Nyssa’s contemplative ascent
The problem of dispersion and attention
The art and asceticism of thinking
Good thinking is skillful gathering, and skillful gathering requires preparation.
If you enjoy The Base Camp, consider forwarding this email to your friends and colleagues, or just share this link with your networks.
To think is to gather.
In this essay, I want to open up thought and attention once more to look at how both are gathered together in specific ways in the first place. Thinking, at least some of the time, is a kind of concentration and this concentration requires gathering, but how?
Augustine and Gregory of Nyssa both have insight on this topic.
Augustine draws our attention to the connection between thinking (cogitare) and gathering (cogere). I’ll quote him on this point. He says, “By thinking we, as it were, gather together ideas which the memory contains in a dispersed way, and by concentrating our attention we arrange them in order as if ready to hand, stored in the very memory where previously they lay hidden, scattered, and neglected.”
“To bring together” (cogo) is “to think” (cogito). (NB: for Augustine, memory includes remembrance, but also attention to the present and anticipation of the future.)
Thinking means bringing mind together through attention.
Augustine suggests we will this to happen, we even compel it to happen, he says. Thus we say, “Let me gather my thoughts” or “Let me collect myself” because we don’t, for the most part, walk around with fully formed thoughts in our heads, even about things we already “know.” Knowledge is always reconstruction, on this view.
What we walk around with is a generative capacity—to gather, to collect, to organize the memory of things we have, including our knowledge of things (this includes for Augustine mathematical knowledge). Each thought is a gathering; even if it’s not a new idea, every bringing-together-in-thought is re-instantiation of an idea.
Memory is a kind of repetition.
Bringing to mind things we already know is thus a kind of collecting again, a re-collecting. Recollection is a deliberate action performed by an intentional mind who wishes to draw him or herself back to presence in the present in a more or less unified state of awareness. Our thoughts and attention are often scattered about, and we have to re-collect them in each moment. This is the skill of memory.
Augustine is describing in these passages our use of thinking and memory in-the-moment, but his autobiographical Confessions is the same kind of gathering-together of thought and memory over the period of a life time. The narrative structure of a life hangs together through this ability to collect and arrange.
You could in this sense view short- and long-term thinking better as short- and long-term gathering, each involving different strategies and tools (books, records, etc.). There is a gathering of me, today, over seconds and minutes. A gathering of my life over years and decades. A people gather together to gather thoughts about their own history over decades and centuries. You get the idea.
And there is an aesthetic to this process, right?
We say someone’s thinking is “clear” or “muddied” or “straightforward” or “deep” or “meandering.” These are aesthetic criteria; each one is a comment on the structure of someone’s thinking, on its order and arrangement. It’s done more or less well in the same way that a work of art is created more or less well.
Thinking is gathering but gathering isn’t just making piles; it’s creating shapes and forms and structures and patterns. There’s a whole craft and art to thinking—ascetics and aesthetics. Information processing alone it is not.
This is where Gregory is helpful.
For if thinking is something like an aesthetic craft, it is also a discipline of its own, an askēsis or exercise. Or, in Gregory’s terms, thinking is a least surrounded by preparatory exercises that shape our capacity to gather, to think. Good thinking is skillful gathering, and skillful gathering requires preparation.
Martin Laird is an excellent resource for thinking about Gregory along these lines. Laird is especially focused on what I would call Gregory’s therapeutic treatment of dianoia (discursive thinking). Without the proper training and guidance, Gregory says, our discursive thinking gets entangled, dispersed, aimless.
We could say, we lose the ability to gather through our distracted inattention.
On this account—as on most, I think—Gregory observes that our discursive thinking, our dianoia, is ceaseless and without end. It’s always on the move, necessarily so. In it’s healthy functioning, dianoia affords our competent rationalization, verbalization, and investigation. It gives accounts of what’s happening, hopefully in a truthful direction. But it’s also always grasping, or trying to take and seize hold of things and events, in an automatic way.
The problem is it can’t stop giving accounts, and in it’s unhealthy expression, dianoia “has a tendency to grab in a snatching, ravishing sort of way,” as Laird puts it. This is where the training comes in. Dianoia must be properly trained and directed to avoid falling into pathological states of functioning. Treating such “rapacious thinking” goes beyond evaluating the contents of one’s own thoughts alone and into an observation of and intervention into deeper patterns of thinking—to those processes that give rise to thought and its character in the first place.
I’ll quote in full Laird’s description of this relation between thought and practice:
The mind’s dynamic quality is perhaps best seen in Gregory’s likening the mind to flowing water. Caught up in the world of obsession with physical pleasures and reputation, the mind gushes in dispersion. Ascetic practice serves as a pipe which constrains the water of the mind to protect it from dispersion. If so constrained, the dynamism of the mind, previously encouraging a downward flow into dispersion, pushes the water up to higher levels. With support the mind flows up; with no support the mind flows down. This is the passion of the mind; it will move. It is a question of training this mind so that it moves in the right direction.
We’ve switched metaphors here from gathering to flowing, but the emphasis on dispersion is the same in Augustine and in Gregory.
In the former, dispersion is gathered back together in thinking. In the latter, dispersion is like flowing water pooling around in need of direction.
It’s hard not to see lots of thinking done today as this kind of distracted dispersion, flitting about from topic to topic, issue to issue.
Gregory places dianoia in the context of his larger image of contemplative and epistemological ascent towards God. Laird is excellent in this treatment of dianoia in relation to this movement. Baptism and studying scripture figure with high importance in this account, as does the pursuit of virtue (essential to our knowing and perceiving), but much of the diagnosis centers on a few additional terms.
These are pistis (faith), kataphasis (saying), apophasis (unsaying), aphaeresis (clearing), and a term of art that Laird himself introduces into the discussion, logophasis (logo-, “word” and -phasis, “expression”). Let’s look more closely at these ideas.
Gregory picks up a number of terms and themes from his Neoplatonic forebears, but in a Christianized way. The ultimate re-gathering and re-collecting for Gregory is the return to God. For the neoplatonist the ultimate return is to the One. In both cases, the absolute is understood as beyond Being. That is, God or the One aren’t themselves beings but are understood as the causes or conditions of Being and beings.
I’ll say more on the importance of this distinction in a moment.
The key point in both neoplatonic and Christian traditions is that ultimacy is fundamentally ungraspable. It is, to a borrow a phrase, dark, empty, and purely simple. It is to this simple but luminous darkness that Gregory’s contemplative ascent aims, and here our new terms of art are central.
Contemplation is unlike dianoia in that its key activity is no activity. It is rest, rather than action. Stillness, rather than movement. Silence, rather than sound. Unknowing, rather knowing. And yet, it is also a process. The process, crudely construed, is a movement of saying to unsaying (an assertion and its negation), and aphaeresis, or a clearing away, of thoughts, sensations, images, or ideas.
Dianoia has an important role to play in this process, but the contemplative moment ultimately moves beyond what dianoia can narrate to itself. And so Laird says, “It seems that the nature of the mind is to try to catch hold of something in a discursive act, but when it moves beyond to what cannot be grasped, such as darkness, the divine sanctuary, and, here, an abyss, it cannot function properly and can even experience duress and disorientation.”
For Gregory, what moves us beyond the discursive mind into these spaces of empty darkness is faith, pistis, and here Gregory inverts the older Platonic hierarchy of knowledge. Where pistis in Plato’s analogy of the divided line amounts to something like opinion or belief (and so can’t obtain true knowledge), in Gregory, as for his Christian tradition as a whole, pistis becomes a central kind of knowing.
And this is necessarily so for the apophatic tradition.
The concepts and words and arguments fail, but the loving faith keeps going—a theme we also saw pronounced with the Middle English mystics. But the apophatic emphasis, for Gregory, doesn’t mean we have nothing to say about moments of contemplative ascent. Instead, even as words, language, and symbols fail to grasp the silence of contemplation, we nevertheless come out the other side with a whole vocabulary that tries to narrate what happened.
This is what Laird calls logophasis—the outpouring of words or images that fills us up after the silence and emptiness passes. Laird describes this as a process of watering the mind. This dianoia is likened to the condensation of water droplets; he says the mind is “bedewed” with new thoughts and ideas. These dew drops of thought are not the experience itself, but they do tell us something about it. The analogies and metaphors we come up with to account for the moment are in some sense accurate, though not total, images of the more ultimate formless emptiness of God or the One.
These practices of contemplation—pistis, kataphasis, apophasis, aphaeresis, logophasis—mark this particular kind of asceticism of thought, as an abstaining or fasting from identification, we could say. These practices can be engaged with varying degrees of veracity. I think of them more as a thoughtful irrigation of the mind—one you might use to water a garden—than they are a thoughtless force of direction for its own sake.
And here, I think we can say, that this kind of gardening is its own art, the art of gathering together the mind in a certain way—of directing the water to flow upwards, as it were—a way generative of new kinds of thinking, being, and understanding.
Augustine and Gregory in these ways call our attention back to thinking by turning our attention onto the surrounding conditions of thinking itself, including on the conditions in which our thought fails to grasp what’s happening. They use different metaphors, but the emphasis on redirecting our dispersion is the same, whether its redirecting the flowing water of mind or regathering the direction of our thinking.
Both require skill and preparation, and, I would say, an aesthetic touch.
This is the art and asceticism of thought.