A decade or so ago, I was rereading — as I have many times since I first read it while still an undergraduate student at the University of Colorado back in the mid-1960s — Edmund Husserl’s short work The Idea of Phenomenology.  At one point during that particular rereading, the thought entered my mind that Husserl’s phenomenological thinking could suggestively be called tendentious thinking. 

My dictionary tells me that tendentious means “marked by a tendency in favor of a particular point of view: BIASED.”  That surely captures well enough the contemporary common usage of the term, but it is not in that sense that Husserl’s thinking is tendentious.  In fact, in that everyday, pejorative sense of the word, Husserl strove his whole life to think as un-tendentiously as he possibly could, and he largely defined “phenomenology” itself by such striving, including very much so in The Idea of Phenomenology.

Accordingly, what occurred to me, when that idea came into my mind that Husserl’s thinking might well be characterized as “tendentious,” was not at all that he was a biased thinker. He was anything but that.

Rather, the idea that occurred to me was one that itself “tended” in a very different direction, one based on the etymology of tendentious, an etymology buried over and concealed well by what long ago became the customary, pejorative, common usage of that term.

The word tendentious points back to the word tendency, which itself points back to the word tend.  For tend, in turn, dictionaries themselves tend to give two different, numbered entries, from the second of which derives tendency, in its modern usage at least.         

My dictionary goes on to give the two following definitions for that second sense of tend itself:  “1:  to move, direct, or develop one’s course in a particular direction  2:  to exhibit an inclination or tendency: CONDUCE.”  (My dictionary is no doubt to be forgiven for the circularity of that second definition:  to tend is to exhibit a tendency.  Dictionaries tend on occasion to repeat themselves.)

My dictionary tells me, at any rate, that tend comes from the Middle English tenden, which itself, my dictionary also tells me, derived from the Middle French tender, meaning to stretch. That comes in turn, I’m further told, from the Latin tendere, for more on which I am then referred to the word thin.

However, before trying to stretch thought all the way from the tendentious to the thin, let me cite the definition my dictionary gives for the first numbered sense of tend: 

1. tend \’tend\ vb [ME tenden, short for attenden to attend] vi 1 archaic: to give ear:   LISTEN  2: to pay attention: apply oneself  3: to act as an attendant:  SERVE  4 obs :  await

 I’ll pause there for a moment — though my dictionary doesn’t.     

*     *     *

We should, perhaps, think both of the two basic senses of tend at one and the same time, whenever we use that term in our own thought.  If we did that, then whenever we used the word tend we would simultaneously think both of attending to, serving, or waiting upon, on the one hand, and of directing or conducing, on the other.  To do that, thinking would indeed have to stretch itself thin. 

It is just such tendentious thinking we need to stretch thin if our intention is to aid others, most especially if those others are children. In such cases we ourselves need to be very intent — notice the recurrence of tend that we can, if such is our own tendency, hear in that word intent — upon our goal, which is that of clearing the way for the other, especially the child, to tend to her own needs and desires.  Our intention to help the child would go astray if we, perhaps in exasperation at the child’s slowness to understand, were just to take over doing the task for her.

Thereby, even with the best, most loving intentions in the world we would be lacking in the skillful means we need to implement those intentions. Despite our good intentions, we would thus rob the child of an opportunity to learn how to take care of it herself.  What is more, we would thereby also rob ourselves of our own goal, the fulfillment of our own intention really to help the child. 

If we are to avoid such derailing both of the child and of ourselves, then we must keep focused.  We must not let anything distract us from the very purpose of our interaction with the child.  We must, in that sense, be insistent on making our point, tenaciously sticking to it.  In so doing, we not only appear to be, but also truly are, tendentious, in the non-colloquial sense I am trying to articulate, a sense in which there is at least a thin connection not only between the various senses of tend, but also between all of them and the very word thin itself.

Thin and tendentious as that connection may be, it is nevertheless surprisingly strong and bright.  In his book Truth and Method Hans-Georg Gadamer struggles to restore to the term prejudice an original positive sense that our ordinary pejorative way of using that term masks. In the same way, we all should struggle to stretch our own thought so thin that it will cover, at one and the same time, all the varied senses of tend as well as those of thin.

Redeeming tendentious from its plight at the hands of our common usage is just like converting an old, worn coin into a shiny new one at a currency exchange. Thus, too, do we redeem ourselves from the wear and tear of our own thoughtlessness.

NOTE TO READERS: This post is a shortened, reworked version of the first section of “Thinking Thin, or, The Conversion of Philosophy,” Chapter 9 in my 2013 book God, Prayer, Suicide, and Philosophy: Reflections on Some of the Issues of Life, available in the “Shop” above the post.