What is Called "Thinking"?

What is Called "Thinking"? Materiality,
Asbtraction, Expression
In this course we propose to interrogate how
different modes of cultural production across
human history explore the relation between
thinking and materiality, and by extension the
place of the human subject in the order of nature.
Across the history of philosophy, science, and the
arts, various ways to articulate mind and world
have been elaborated, across a variety of forms
and mediums: from narratives which place thought
beyond the realm of material becoming (idealism),
to reductionist attempts which attempt to inscribe
thinking within the natural order (materialism),
to intermediate positions which describe cognition
as suspended between a material and immaterial
dimension (dualism). Beginning with a brief
excursus into the Greek philosophical world and
its attempt to separate the domain of ideas from
the material world disclosed to the senses, and
passing through the history of modernity until the
contemporary day, we will assess a wide variety of
philosophical and literary texts, as well as
exemplars in from the history film, in which the
role and nature of thinking becomes progressively
problematized, looking at works by Rene Descartes,
Immanuel Kant, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Emily
Dickinson, Martin Heidegger, Cesar Vallejo, Sadie
Plant, Danielle Macbeth, Andrei Tarkovsky, David
Lynch, and Lars von Trier, among others.

In particular, we shall interrogate how thinking
has been understood simultaneously as a means for
abstraction, pulling the human apart from the
'here-and-now' by opening new modes of theoretical
speculation and rational cognition, but also as
the lever toward new forms of expression, forging
new practical possibilities for intervening upon
the world. Among the questions we shall
interrogate are: to what extent are the rational
and expressive dimensions of thought at once in
tension and yet complimentary with each other; is
thinking an obstacle which prevents action, or
rather the enabling condition for action? Does
thinking position the human in an exceptional
position with respect to the rest of the natural
order, or does such exceptionalism elide the
continuity between mankind and the rest of nature?
How are theoretical scientific and philosophical
modes of thought coordinated to different
modalities of artistic and political practice? If
thinking is itself to be understood as a kind of
practice, related to the development of techniques
for abstraction, then is aesthetic expression
necessarily rationally bound?