The Idea Factory
I’m never so alive as when ideas are surging through my mind.
Sometimes they meander like a lazy rivulet snaking through the flat plains in the heat of summer. More often, the feeling is like the mighty rush of a mountain waterfall gorged by early spring snowmelt.
They can come in solitude (especially walking alone) or from solitary encounter with another mind at a distance (reading, looking at works of art, listening to music, watching broadcast and online media).
They can also come from a great conversation with friends over dinner, an intense one-on-one with a favorite intellectual partner, or taking part in a seminar or other formal discussion forum.
They can come slowly, as a vague hint, or intensely, like sudden full-blown revelations.
No matter where and how, the surge of ideas fills me with a joyous sense of concentration and focus— what the Hungarian psychologist with the unpronounceable name, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, describes so well in his famous book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
Pascal and Athena
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel that this flow of ideas was the most worthwhile thing in my life.
Growing up in France, I experienced an educational curriculum that introduced me to the great 17th century philosopher Pascal.
His most lasting work was his posthumously published Pensées (“Thoughts”) — a book of random ideas about philosophy and theology, incomplete and tentative, jotted down over the years.
Entranced by the concept, I bought myself a blue school notebook. I named it Pensées.
Then I pasted on it an image that I revered as much as I did the writing of Pascal. It was the thought-absorbed head of Athena, Greek goddess of civilization, whose great bronze statue by the 5th century BC sculptor Phidias once stood on the Acropolis in Athens.
(Yes, I did get a very classical education — one of the treasures of my life…)
In my Pensées, I started jotting down all the ideas that came to my mind over the course of days, months and years. Mostly fragments. Usually propelled by a form of thinking that went something like: “This is what people usually believe…but here’s a different way of looking at it.”
While I eventually discontinued this youthful practice, the devotion to Pascal and Athena has continued into all my many subsequent life chapters.
The Examined Life
I can’t stop thinking, I won’t stop thinking, I love thinking. And I love the company of those who are equally committed to the words of another of my great classical mentors, Socrates — “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
(Incidentally, many people don’t know the context of those words: it was at his trial, when he chose death over being exiled from Athens or agreeing to be silenced.)
So what are ideas anyway? Where do they come from? Why do we have them? What is their purpose? Are they unique to each individual? Or are they part of a shared universe of mentation that we belong to because of culture?
Are they reducible to a survival mechanism born of evolution? Are they pleasant but purposeless play? And above all, why do we humans keep producing them at such a prodigious rate? Why the idea factory?
These are all momentous questions that modern neuroscience is probing with ever greater insight and sophisticated tools — and that philosophers have been pondering for millennia in trying to understand the human condition.
“Thoughts Are Free”
My own understanding of the nature of ideas is more subjective, poetic and metaphorical.
There is a world of psychological difference between the prosaic clutter of practical thoughts that crowd my mind, pushing me through the duties and obligations of my commitments and social roles, and the sheer exhilaration of untrammeled reflection with no practical goal in mind.
The poetry of this concept was never better expressed than in the old German folksong “Die Gedanken Sind Frei” (“Thoughts Are Free”). It dates back to the 16th century, was brought to general awareness during the age of Napoleon, and was banned as subversive during the Nazi period.
As memory of the 1960s for some of you, and maybe a novelty for others who did not live through that era, listen to Pete Singer’s rousing rendition of this ‘anthem to freedom of thought’.
Die Gedanken sind frei, wer kann sie erraten?
Sie fliehen vorbei wie nächtliche Schatten.
Kein Mensch kann sie wissen, kein Jäger erschießen.
Es bleibet dabei, die Gedanken sind frei!
Which translates roughly as:
Thoughts are free, who can guess them?
They flutter by like shadows in the night.
No person can know them, no hunter can shoot them.
The fact remains, thoughts are free!
Chasing Ideas — Without a Goal
So where am I going with this meandering reflection on the idea factory in our heads?
Nowhere in particular. Just thinking out loud, for the freedom and joy of it. Just chasing those ‘shadows in the night’ out of simple curiosity, with no further objective in mind. Something that our goal-and-action obsessed contemporary American world does not value as much as it should.
Think, for instance, of the popularity of business and management gurus who preach versions of the “Ideas without action are worthless” philosophy. This may be helpful for a work team caught up in analysis paralysis. Or for getting people who complain about the state of the world off their couches to actually do something about it.
That’s definitely not the whole story about ideas. The idea factory is meant to operate freely, without constraints, without prior goals. It doesn’t need to justify its existence through tangible results.
Accessing the Idea Factory We Always Had
I’m returning now, many years later, to what first inspired me as a school girl learning the joy of thinking. I’ve decided I will once again commit to that free act of catching thoughts as they tumble out of the idea factory in my mind.
I’ll pursue them wherever they go, and I’ll share them with whoever may stumble upon them and take delight in them. I’ll resume my Pensées and my devotion to Pascal and Athena.
My tools for accessing these fleeting ‘shadows in the night’ are a special kind of mental butterfly net and an ugly little yellow paper pad that says close to me at all times.
The moment an interesting thought arises in my mind, I lift up the butterfly net and snatch that ‘shadow in the night’ deftly to prevent it from disappearing into oblivion. On my ugly little yellow paper pad, I pin down the thought with a quick word, phrase or symbol (the way Agatha Christie used to do when collecting ideas for her next mystery).
Later on, safely at at my desk with screen, keyboard and a ‘Do Not Disturb’ wall between me and my practical life, I recollect and flesh out these thoughts to my heart’s content — that is, if I can decipher my own handwriting.
This totally free act is far removed from the focused and deliberate scholarly, academic, educational, administrative, organizational, opinion and advocacy writing of an adult lifetime.
It involves a kind of ‘unlearning’. And it’s made easier by the wonderful writing and sharing online tools like Medium that we now have at our disposal.
It’s a return to the uncensored freedom of thought we knew as children. When we didn’t even have a concept of goals and deadlines. When we were as yet unburdened by praise or criticism from parents and teachers. When the idea factory in our minds had no other purpose than to lavishly produce and play with those ‘shadows in the night’.
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Karine Schomer, PhD is a writer, speaker, scholar, and a political and social commentator. She writes on Medium at https://medium.com/@schomer44. In her essays, she explores the worlds of society, politics, culture, history, language, world civilizations and life lessons. You can read her writer’s philosophy in The Idea Factory. In her professional life, she earns her keep as a consultant at www.cmct.net and www.indiapractice.com.
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