Books on Thinking About Thinking
Trick Mirror is quite fun.<p>It’s not a particular book, but nothing has more radically altered the way I think about thinking than the work of Theodor Adorno (and to a certain extent, Horkheimer). I had, prior to reading their work, a tendency to think of thinking as an activity that occurs with quite a definite shape, in quite a well-circumscirbed space. They really exploded the concept for me and broadened my considerations about thought, how it works, what different forms it can take, and that most of the time, it’s more like a peice of music than it is a rational or practical sequence of arguments, and that the societal patterns and forces that attempt to fix your thought into a limited sequence of statements are in fact instances of control impinging itself upon you. This is not to say “don’t be rational” but it is to say there are definte thresholds upon which thought crosses over from the plane of a genuine <i>“thinking through”</i> into an “idiomaticity” or a <i>“thinking about”</i> — a preconception, a repetition, a bias.