Meditative vs Calculative Thinking

Thinking, as Heidegger describes it in his Discourse on Thinking, may take one of two forms: calculative thinking, which is driven by the will, and meditative thinking, which enables and is enabled by an openness to the mystery of existence. Richard III is a calculative thinker, Edgar a meditative thinker - but only when he assumes the guise of Tom o' Bedlam. For when Edgar drops the guise he reverts to given wisdom: "When we our betters see bearing our woes, / We scarcely think our miseries our foes," he says after his encounter with Lear on the heath. This kind of willed language, based on the presupposition of justice and proportion in the universe, is precisely what King Lear beats to nothingness.

It is also the kind of language we first hear from the mouth of Lear himself, who begins the play as a calculative thinker - which is to say that, in a sense, he is not thinking at all. After he's exiled to the heath, Lear must go deeper than Edgar: he must learn truly to think, to surprise himself - which is a way of saying that, in the narrowly prescribed psychic economy of the play, Lear goes mad.

                                            They flattered me

like a dog; and told me I had white hairs in my

beard ere the black ones were there. To say 'ay'

and 'no' to every thing that I said! 'Ay' and 'no'

too was no good divinity. When the rain came to

wet me once, and the wind to make me chatter; when

the thunder would not peace at my bidding; there I

found 'em, there I smelt 'em out. Go to, they are

not men o' their words: they told me I was every

thing; 'tis a lie, I am not ague-proof.

Lear's realization here is the same as Prospero's, and it is the simplest but most profound realization of all: he is mortal, he too can catch cold. But Lear had to learn to sound like Tom o' Bedlam, to become a meditative thinker, in order to achieve this realization. At the beginning of the play, Lear's language evinces very little interiority; he is simply walking through the role of the benignly despotic monarch. But by the middle of the third act, we feel, listening to Lear, that we are experiencing not only the outward drama of self-consciously performed language but also the inward drama of a mind remaking itself by speaking itself.

This is why the conclusion of Lear's speech on the heath ("I am not ague-proof") does not feel merely ironic or paltry or funny; it feels truly like something the actor playing Lear does not know until he says it. The fourth sentence of his speech begins with a sequence of clauses delineating exterior actions (when the rain came, when the wind blew, when the thunder clapped), but the real action of the sentence is interior. And while the logic of such thinking may initially feel occluded, it never feels puzzling. For however disjunctive the movement of the sentences, conclusions arrive with an assurance that casts a retrospective sense of rigor over the process by which we've reached them. This is why the language gives us pleasure (we feel that something happens to us at the same time that we observe something happening to the character), and our pleasure depends not on mastery but on submission: we feel something happen because we've trusted an utterance we cannot yet fully comprehend.

- James Longenbach