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Megan Craig and Edward S. Casey on Thinking in Transit
Thinking in Transit began as a collaboration between two philosophers who have travelled considerable distance in our commutes to and from Stony Brook University. We went by car and by boat on the Bridgeport and Port Jefferson Ferry across the Long Island Sound, the body of water described by F. Scott Fitzgerald as “the great wet barnyard.” Travelling roughly three hours each way, both of us had to find some means of productively using the time, especially in the early stages of our careers before tenure. For Ed, this involved speaking into a tape recorder to capture some of his thinking as he drove home on I-95. For Megan, it entailed writing longhand on legal pads in the hull of the ferry. When we compared notes about our practices, we found that some of our best and most creative thinking had occurred in these situations, which on the surface appeared less than ideal if not outright hostile to philosophical thought. We wondered whether there was more to say about thinking in relation to the vehicles that carry us and the environments we were traversing—environments not normally associated with “serious reflection.”
So began an exploration of what we came to call “thinking in transit.” Our disturbing and demanding times call desperately for innovative thinking. Thinking in Transit explores the lineaments of such thinking, spelling out conditions for its emergence that are rarely explored. How and where creative thinking emerges—or can emerge better—provides the focus of this book. We approach this topic not only as an exercise in philosophical analysis but also as a source of concrete suggestions about where some of the most propitious settings for such thinking are to be found: settings that are rarely discussed and yet give rise to thinking in new directions. We consider the role of the human body in such thinking as well as the elemental settings in which it emerges spontaneously—far from the scholar’s retreat—in spaces and places that foster thinking in new directions.
Our disturbing and demanding times call desperately for innovative thinking.
Our book is about thinking, not in an effort to define it as such, but to detect dimensions often overlooked in traditional treatments. We don’t associate thinking with the head or the mind alone, with thoughts, speech, or mental effort. Nor do we relegate thinking to what we do in schools, universities, libraries, or other sequestered spaces. Instead, we have tried to describe places and circumstances where thinking arises spontaneously in circumstances of transition. Thinking in a car zipping down the highway, in the hull of a ferry, on a bicycle, in a wheelchair, on a bus, a train, or while floating in the water. We are interested in the ways thinking relates to and takes on the qualities of its immediate environment, how thinking happens differently when we are in motion (either self-propelled or carried), and why philosophy has long neglected such forms of thinking in favor of thinking in sedentary settings.
The truth is, academia, and philosophy in particular, are mired in the model of single-authored texts emanating from stationary and solitary writing practices. The figure of Rodin’s Thinker comes to mind, a man bent in thought. But if one perpetuates the idea that serious thinking takes only one form or transpires only in one kind of place, one also perpetuates stereotypes that have made philosophy inaccessible or unappealing to many, especially those in historically underrepresented groups.
We wondered about the ways our own thinking has been impacted and changed by being on the road, thinking in crowded spaces, thinking while moving or being moved about in vehicles not under our own control. Such thinking is liberated from the constraints imposed by traditional spaces of seclusion, and it demands novel mechanisms and media of transcription. Our sense has been that thinking borrows from its surroundings, and when those surroundings are especially sterile and silent, they produce a quality of thought that bears the mark of all too much philosophical scholarship—serious-minded, detached, aloof. This is not necessarily bad, but it has contributed to academic habits of withdrawal, stasis, and a devotion to the mind at the expense of the body.
We wondered about the ways our own thinking has been impacted and changed by being on the road, thinking in crowded spaces, thinking while moving or being moved about in vehicles not under our own control.
Thinking in Transit describes myriad possibilities for thinking outside of the all too familiar paradigm of someone toiling away at a desk. We seek to encourage and celebrate kinds of thinking that are more creatively connected to life. As the world changes around us, with so many of our own students grappling with the epidemic of loneliness and isolation brought on by the pandemic and a reality increasingly lived online, we think it’s more important than ever to encourage philosophical reflection and creative philosophical thinking that arises in the midst of our lives when in movement. But we also need to imagine new possibilities for the shape and tone of philosophizing. Philosophy written on scraps, in song, paint, film, or relayed in a story. Our students need new models for how to write and how to think in ways that bring them back into the concrete world of action and interaction—away from their computers.
Thinking needs air and light. Too many of us remain encapsulated in the echo chambers of online devices, disconnected from each other and from the wider world. We worry that the thinking stemming from such isolation will be drier and more sterile than ever before. We are concerned that students are being stripped of their own creativity, handed over to AI and emergent technologies that undermine the effort of getting oneself going, the first and most difficult step of any creative process. Thinking in Transit explores and encourages this step.
Thinking needs air and light. Too many of us remain encapsulated in the echo chambers of online devices, disconnected from each other and from the wider world.
Writing together has not been easy or simple. We have had to hone a process that took many years to develop, figuring out a rhythm of exchanging text and methods of writing into and over each other’s words to find a viable third voice. In the process, we have learned so much about each other and about our work. We have given up ideas that might have been delimited and obsessive if we were writing alone, and we have watched ideas emerge that have surprised us both. The process of writing this book has made us more aware of how innovative thinking arises not only when we are in motion, but also when we allow ourselves to think together. It is a reminder of the essentially dialogic nature of philosophy as practiced in ancient times, when people gathered to converse and argue, groping toward communal ideas and a “common sense” that no one person could claim as their own.
Our book offers snapshots of thinking on a boat, a train, a plane, a bike. We write about thinking while swimming, cooking, painting, while sick in bed. Our book inventories forms of thinking that have yet to be included in philosophy’s official register, hoping to expand what counts as thinking and to invite more movement in and through thought. In the process, we hope that this book welcomes readers into a form of philosophy that feels expansive and invitational. Thinking in Transit is all about nudging philosophy outside its favored confines so that we might come to think in new and more innovative, collaborative ways.
Megan Craig is associate professor of philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook as well as an artist and essayist. Edward S. Casey is distinguished professor emeritus of philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and past president of the American Philosophical Association. They are coauthors of Thinking in Transit: Explorations of Life in Motion.