There is more than one kind of thinking, in some sense, we have a choice. We can identify at least two kinds: calculative thinking and sober thinking. In capitalist realism, calculative thinking dominates and sweeps aside all others. As a result, we are losing sight of a more meaningful sober thinking and, as we lose sight of it, we lose the possibility of making a choice.

Calculative thinking does what it says. It is an instrumental thinking geared to determining predictable, effective, and efficient means to achieve one end or another. You want to know how many warehouses you need and where to locate them in order to deliver Coke all over the world within 24hrs. Calculative thinking is the thinking you need. If you want to optimise nutrition to run a marathon, find the sources of funding in a cartel, or where and when to disrupt a meeting to gain maximum publicity, you need calculative thinking. Calculative thought is logistical, quantified, means-ends rationality. It is strategic systems thinking.

Mark Wrathall equates calculative thought with “cybernetic rationalisation” and cites Heidegger’s definition that, ultimately, it “amounts to the establishment of a system that guides itself without deliberate intervention. It requires a kind of thinking that succeeds in uncovering the precise, replicable, calculable unfolding of causal interactions, and in arranging a system so that those interactions can be predicted and governed” [1]. When it succeeds, it is the death of sober thinking.

The alternative to calculative thinking is sober thinking. Heidegger has in mind the kind of calm, clear-eyed reflection we might engage in if we wake just before dawn to reflect on a restless night. This reflection stands back and outside of the relentless means-end reasoning of capitalist realism. Sober thinking sees the intended and unintended consequences of the hurly-burly and calls our ends into question. Sober thinking brings a question where none existed, provokes a struggle, and calls for a personal decision.

Thinking in general does not happen when we know what we are doing. When we are, in the jargon, fluidly coping with the world and ourselves we “just do it”. If everything works well we just go along with whatever the norms are.

We only think when we encounter disappointment, failure, breakdown or uneasiness. We learn to think by sensing the thought-provoking. If I come home and the house is empty, I start to think. Where is everyone? I run through my last conversations before I left the house. Did my partner tell me she was doing something tonight?

We might also be prompted to think by a situation to conflicting presumptions of how best to deal with the situation. For instance, suppose you are an employer considering whether to hire a worker. You view the position as having certain skill requirements and wage bands that can be made into explicit criteria to judge the worker against. You think of the situation as one of getting a “bum on a seat.” Looking at the situation as a pure example of this, instrumental, calculative reasoning is appropriate. We fill the role as quickly and cheaply as we can. But, if we see that this job may be someone’s first step to recovery from drug addiction or from escaping an abusive partner, we don’t see the situation as one of expedience. We see that considering human beings as objectifiable entities (and nothing but that) is a category error. It is wrong in itself. At these moments, instrumental thinking that simply corrects the system and allows it to run on unaffected is inappropriate, now we need to think that is a skill of keeping us open to what is thought-provoking and will disrupt the system. We need to think.

If one microtechnology is knowing the difference between calculative and sober thinking and when to apply which, how do we develop the skill of knowing the difference? We develop sober thinking by becoming sensitive to the contingency of the way we are first addressing the situation.

“An education in thinking would provide us with the discriminatory capacities for recognizing such mysteries as mysteries, a taste for reflecting on the mystery rather than trying to solve or dissolve it, and the dispositions (inclinations and skills) for exploring the implications for our existence of such mysteries. A key part of this education is to become “sober” in the sense we’ve discussed—to come to the clear-sighted recognition of the way that options in the technological world sweep us away, intoxicating us with possibilities for consumption.” [3]

We can say that sober thinking is a reflection that takes place in the mood of composure that disposes a sensibility that keeps one open to possibility. Composure names a kind of relaxed engagement with the situation that both accepts the current way in which the situation makes sense, even Capitalism, but that also sees it as contingent as only one of many possible ways of making sense. It is a simultaneous yes and no.

Sensibility denotes the sense with which we have grasped that things make sense but in such a way that stays open to its contingency and to other possibilities. We have developed a sensibility when we have been let into the sense in which it currently works - how it common-sensically makes sense and the possibilities for action that it holds - but in a way that stays open to what is question-worthy. Rather than “insisting” that the current way of making sense of the situation for instrumental purposes is the only way, one is able to view this way as contingent and stay open to other possibilities.

when reflecting this way, we stay open to an absence - the lack of a justification for how things already are. In our times, there is no unassailable justification for capitalist optionalisation. Things might be different.

How can we practically develop such thinking? We develop it (1) by getting a sense of history that is specific to your world, reveals how sense was made radically differently at other times, and gets you to endure its lack of groundedness and (2) by developing the phronetic sensitivity to particularity and situation.

We can define 5 genreal steps that can be followed to practice sober thinking in any context, using the temp worker industry as an example.

1. Review the history of your own world. In business that can mean reviewing the history of an industry not in terms of dates and major figures but in terms of styles and as sensitivity to what is most taken for granted in the domain. In temp work, this history could for example include the worker-company identification during the heyday of corporatism.

2. Look at the radical difference between practices for dealing with what is taken for granted. Note how (a) one company takes really seriously achieving an emancipatory perfect fit for meaningful work between employers and employees and their two antagonists, (b) automated and cost-cutting recruiters who just wanted speedy placement of bums on seats and (c) punishing low-road employers who enjoy abusing workers. Note how the emancipation was smothered and marginalised in the 1970s and 80s.

3. Identify a marginal practice that bridges the difference: Work is meaningful for all three - even the monsters — and virtuosity finds the appropriate style for each. (Note that it still leaves open a choice of which you will continue to pursue.)

4. Create a historical review of the place of the marginal practice in the past - for example, guilds might be a good example for that lived marginal practice?

5. Design a thought experiment that blends the marginal with the dominant practice by studying the particularity of each situation - can you imagine a business of only high-road customers and employees looking for them?

Further habituation and the development of a community by habituation to the new practice - HR reviews, meaningful exchange conversation, preparations and the inculcation of skillful mastery of a domain - without this the thinking remains blind to the affordances of reality and is abstract.

References

Most of this understanding of thinking draws on Mark Wrathall’s essay The Task of Thinking in a Technological Age (In Heidegger on Technology (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Philosophy) (Eds. A.J. Wendland, C. Merwin, and C. Hadjioannou.) Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition. (pp. 13-38). It also draws on Spinosa, Hancocks, and Glennon (2017) What calls for thinking in business: consulting as a Heideggerian philosopher (In M. Dibben, S. Segal (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Management) and Martin Heidegger’s lecture series What is called thinking?

[1] Quoted in Wrathall, 2019, p23. [2] Quoted in Wrathall, 2019, p23. [3] Wrathall, 2019, p24. [4] Wrathall, 2019, p35.