When Thinking Takes Its Time

I have sat in meetings and discussion groups where a great deal is said. Each person recounts, elaborates, explains, adds an example, doubles back, opens another parenthesis. One contribution follows another, speech circulates abundantly, and you can come away with the impression that the meeting was alive, that it had rhythm.

Speaking to Fill

And yet, a few hours later, what remains of what was said? Often very little. You may remember a general impression, an anecdote, someone who spoke at length, but far less often a precise idea. And if, in the middle of the exchange, you ask someone to sum up in a single sentence what they have just said, the question comes as a surprise. It may even be unsettling or irritating, because summarising demands an effort altogether different from the one involved in carrying on talking.

You have to return to what you have just said, distinguish the essential from the incidental, give up certain explanations, find a direction. Sometimes the exercise proves almost impossible, not because the thought would be too rich to be formulated, but because there may not really have been a direction at all. The talking mostly occupied the space.

We sometimes speak in order to fill: to fill a silence, to fill a stretch of time that feels empty, to fill the discomfort of not yet knowing what to think. And we readily mistake that abundance for rhythm.

We know this phenomenon well in very ordinary forms. We flick from one channel to the next, we scroll through content on a screen, one image drives out another, one piece of information follows the last, and then come an anecdote, an outrage, a joke, a new idea. There is speed, variety, stimulation and a great deal of available content, yet sometimes almost nothing remains of all that accumulation. The rhythm can be intense and the experience strangely hollow.

This tendency to fill does not concern only the distracted consumer in front of a screen. It can take a far more refined form. One can go from lecture to lecture, multiply one's reading, listen to thinkers, accumulate concepts and feel the satisfaction of having filled one's mind with a great many ideas. Culture itself can become a form of consumption. The point is not to disdain the abundance of knowledge, but to ask what we do with it. Have we genuinely thought these ideas, have we set them against one another, have we taken the time to examine their presuppositions, or have we simply moved from one to the next with rather more sophistication than when we scroll through a screen?

We have perhaps grown used to measuring rhythm by the number of events that follow one another: the faster the contributions, ideas, people, exercises or pieces of information succeed each other, the more we feel that something is happening. Conversely, a silence seems empty, a hesitation seems to slow the group down needlessly, and returning to a single sentence for several minutes can feel laborious. We ought to be moving forward, producing, changing the subject.

Vectorising Thought

Philosophical practice introduces a different relationship to rhythm because it introduces a different relationship to language. Speaking is not enough. You must also try to know what you are saying, what prompts you to speak, and to distinguish what is essential in your own discourse from what is not.

Someone develops an argument for a few minutes and you can ask them: “If you had to sum up what you have just said in one sentence, what would you say?” You can also ask: “What is the operative concept in your argument?”, “What are the presuppositions of your claim?”, “Can those presuppositions be questioned?”, “What consequence do you draw from what you are asserting?” or again: “If you took away the examples and the explanations, what would be left of your idea?”

These questions change the rhythm of the exchange. Speech, which until then could unfold fairly freely, meets a resistance. It is no longer enough to carry the discourse forward; you have to come back to it, choose, rank, eliminate and clarify. You have to give thought a vector, and that operation takes time.

Our thinking generally reaches us accompanied by a great deal of material: explanations, precautions, memories, justifications, examples, associations, parentheses. We tend to add before we have even determined what was essential. Philosophising can demand the opposite movement: removing, separating, pruning, deconstructing, so that a proposition may appear beneath what encumbers it.

A thought that has been given a direction is not a thought simplified in the sense of becoming impoverished. It has a direction. It agrees to formulate what it asserts and to hold to it long enough to be examined. We may then qualify it, make it more complex, discover that it was insufficient or even abandon it — but first we must be able to identify what is being maintained.

Conceptual Fog

Complexity can indeed serve as a refuge. When a discourse multiplies distinctions, parentheses, concepts, nuances, examples and references without ever making clear what it asserts, it becomes very difficult to contradict. Not because it is particularly solid, but because one can no longer grasp the object the contradiction might bear upon. In this way we sometimes manufacture a kind of conceptual fog in which thought protects itself from criticism by becoming impossible to pin down.

Conviction can then take the place of clarity. The harder the content is to identify, the more an assured tone, the flow of the discourse or an apparent mastery of vocabulary can give the impression that a powerful mind is at work. I have often observed this situation: someone speaks at length and with assurance, the people around nod, sometimes with great conviction themselves, but if you then interrupt the exchange to ask, “What did you understand of what has just been said?”, the answers become hesitant. A rather strange phenomenon comes to light: an entire group can feel it agrees with a proposition that no one is actually able to formulate.

The assurance of the speaker and the assent of those listening can thus produce together an illusion of thought. The discourse seems full because it is abundant and convinced, while it may remain difficult to extract from it a proposition that can be examined, discussed or refuted.

Thinking the Way One Sculpts

In this respect philosophical practice maintains an almost aesthetic relationship to speech: it seeks to give it a form. A remark can gain in force when the unnecessary developments are cut away; a well-chosen word can replace several minutes of explanation, and a silence can sometimes carry more density than one more contribution. Thinking then resembles sculpting rather than filling a space, and sculpting means removing material so that a form may appear.

This logic of subtraction is found in a text by Zhuangzi, the one about the craftsman who makes a bell stand. Before beginning his work, the craftsman fasts. Little by little he sheds what encumbers his mind: the expectation of reward, concern for praise or criticism, the preoccupation with success, until he forgets, as it were, his own body. Only after this stripping away does he enter the forest and recognise the tree that can become the bell stand.

Preparation, then, does not consist in accumulating. The craftsman becomes available by ridding himself of what diverts his attention. He empties himself.

We often imagine thinking on the opposite model. To think would be to have more ideas, more references, more knowledge, more things to say. All of this can nourish thought, but it can also clutter it, for what occupies our mind is not made of ideas alone. There is also our impatience, our desire to answer immediately, our need to be interesting, our fear of silence, our wish for things to move along, our expectation of being stimulated and our unease at the feeling that nothing is happening.

But thinking requires not filling that space straight away, and this imposes a certain rhythm. A slow rhythm.

Two Kinds of Slowness

Of course, two kinds of slowness can be distinguished.

There is a sterile slowness: that of repetition, of indecision, of speech going round in circles. We keep coming back to the same point, nothing becomes clearer, nothing shifts, no question genuinely works on the discourse.

There is also an active and fertile slowness. It is defined not by already knowing what we are looking for or where we are heading, but by the activity of thought unfolding within it. Something is at work: a distinction begins to appear, a formulation becomes more precise, a contradiction disturbs what we took to be obvious, an idea we only dimly sensed gradually takes shape. We can stay a long time with the same question without feeling that we are treading water, because thought is in movement.

This activity brings a particular pleasure, very different from the one produced by a succession of stimulations. It is not the pleasure of receiving yet another new idea, then another, but that of feeling a thought build itself, of seeing an apt distinction emerge or a formulation that suddenly holds better. There is a kind of joy here bound to the activity itself, comparable perhaps to that of walking: you do not need an event to occur at every instant in order to feel that something is happening. The movement itself is enough.

This slowness therefore has a rhythm of its own. As in music, pauses, resumptions and suspensions are not interruptions of the movement but part of its form. A silence in a philosophical exchange can be active when it gives someone the time to look at what they have just said, to weigh an objection or to search for a formulation that does not come to them immediately.

Attention and Patience

The philosopher Simone Weil sheds light on this disposition through her concept of attention. To be attentive is not to search feverishly for an answer, but to remain available before what resists, without wanting to resolve it at once. Such attention requires bearing a period of uncertainty, not filling the void immediately with a new explanation, and letting thought transform itself before we even know what it will become.

Philosophical patience is therefore not simply a matter of enduring length. It consists in granting this activity the time it needs. One can abandon a formulation without having the one that will replace it, hesitate without treating hesitation as a failure, or stay with a question because it goes on working on one's thinking. Unlike sterile slowness, where time passes without anything being transformed, fertile slowness is inhabited by an activity that is not measured by the quantity of things said.

This is probably what our taste for stimulation makes harder to perceive: we can believe that nothing is happening as soon as nothing new comes to occupy our attention. Yet thinking sometimes demands exactly the opposite — not multiplying content, but staying long enough with a single idea for it to stop being one stimulation among others and become an object of thought.