neurophysiological, or technical– can be capable of conferring to this thought-event the character of a logical deduction, of reducing it to a range of necessary reasons, as if the reasons themselves had the power of bringing it about (Savransky, 2016; Stengers, 1997). To betray the perplexity of this experience is therefore to reject the possibility of novelty as such. This matters, because the attempt I am pursuing here, of seeking to craft a relevant characterisation of the experience of inventing in thought, is one that wagers that, if our knowledge is always somewhat broken –such that we always know only a little, some amount, but never everything or nothing– it is not simply because we are ignorant or because we know more than we can tell. Rather, it is because what is to be known is always in the making and thus keeps changing, growing, branching out, multiplying, being born anew. If intellectual invention is the process of the coming into existence of a new idea, perplexity cannot be reduced to a lack of knowledge, but is to the experience of immanent inventing in thought. Affirming the possibility of intellectual invention requires, therefore, that we learn to appreciate its perplexing character, we learn not to reduce the becoming of new ideas to what we already know, but to confer on ideas the capacity to make us think. The Play of Ideas As I have argued above, conferring on ideas the capacity to make us think involves that we resist giving into the temptation of associating the question ‘how does it feel to think?’ with an act of reparation of what we do not quite know about
neurophysiological, or technical– can be capable of conferring to this thought-event the character of a logical deduction, of reducing it to a range of necessary reasons, as if the reasons themselves had the power of bringing it about (Savransky, 2016; Stengers, 1997). To betray the perplexity of this experience is therefore to reject the possibility of novelty as such. This matters, because the attempt I am pursuing here, of seeking to craft a relevant characterisation of the experience of inventing in thought, is one that wagers that, if our knowledge is always somewhat broken –such that we always know only a little, some amount, but never everything or nothing– it is not simply because we are ignorant or because we know more than we can tell. Rather, it is because what is to be known is always in the making and thus keeps changing, growing, branching out, multiplying, being born anew. If intellectual invention is the process of the coming into existence of a new idea, perplexity cannot be reduced to a lack of knowledge, but is immanent to the experience of inventing in thought. Affirming the possibility of intellectual invention requires, therefore, that we learn to appreciate its perplexing character, we learn not to reduce the becoming of new ideas to what we already know, but to confer on ideas the capacity to make us think. The Play of Ideas As I have argued above, conferring on ideas the capacity to make us think involves that we resist giving into the temptation of associating the question ‘how does it feel to think?’ with an act of reparation of what we do not quite know about
Savransky%2C%20How%20it%20feels%20to%20think-%20OK.docx