Fecal thoughts

I'll just take a moment to address the way you think I envision thought (as fecal matter, sitting in the bowels of the brain and waiting to be discharged). I certainly don't recognize myself in this description. You say I have a kind of fuzzy notion of what thought is, and this is fair enough, though I think it is far too simple to believe thought = words. How can you believe that there is no thought prior to language? If a pre-linguistic child didn't think, how could it come to recognize the function of language or the meaning of words? Do you really think there's no work of sifting, sorting and analyzing feelings and sense impressions prior to having definite ideas about them? Can't you have a strange sense of something having meaning, being familiar, etc. before you can put into words why or even the fact that it seems to have some significance? I never said that thoughts were inert things, and I most often probably ought to use the word 'thinking' instead of 'thought' to make it clear that I'm thinking of a process and not the separate individual products of that thought. Thought can only be recognized by its contents, it can't do anything if it isn't given some sort of content to work with (a baby born deaf, dumb, blind, without taste or feeling of any sort not receiving any information at all from its own body would be incapable of thought - what could it possibly think?), and yet, to some extent, as a process, as a way of dealing with information it has to already be there as a capacity, a potential or what-have-you, even if the process changes and develops according to experience and training. I'm sure this all sounds rather trite, and possibly without value - though I'll inevitably bump up against it again and again. Yes, what this structure or process is can only be vaguely described (by me at least) and I can't have more than a very rough notion of what it consists of, but to me it is nonetheless important that, however closely related the development of thought and language are, the two things are not identical. There is also a lot of knowledge that really can't be put into words - little signs you pick up on in someone's facial expression that tell you a lot about the way they are feeling or thinking - with two many details and subtle clues for you to really express how you know what you know - what led you to that conclusion. Of course there's knowledge about how to use your body to do certain things - in sports, playing an instrument, etc, acquired knowledge that you can't explain (and not necessarily autonomic since these are things you do intentionally and with thought). And besides saying that thought is more than just the words with which we express thought, one of the points that I kept making, which I think led to your though/feces description, is that creation and the expansion of language often works through the attempt to express a unique experience using conventional language (which, by definition, is not equipped to express what is unique). You are of course capable of having and recognizing unique experiences before you figure out how to express them, though I don't doubt that understanding is clearer and more can be done with them once you figure out how to communicate them.

This is going to be a long drawn out discussion, but I do feel you have been distorting the things I say about thought and language... I'll quickly mention three things that I'll address in my next posts (on Proust, on Freud and Baudelaire and on Nietzsche - and then eventually on Derrida, Rousseau, etc). In books I've just read on Proust and Nietzsche, I found interesting and almost diametrically opposed (or perhaps very similar) discussions of the 'subject', which ends up being very similar to what I'm describing using 'thought'. Proust and Nietzsche end up dealing with some similar issues concerning the subject, though Nietzsche generally attacks the idea of a continuous subject, while Proust, even when talking about the intermittencies and inconsistencies in the thoughts and feelings of a subject posits a unity recognizable through memory (voluntary and involuntary) as well as in style (which brings out structures and patterns unique to the individual, almost like a fingerprint). But, on the subject of Derrida (and Freud), everything I have been saying is rendered a little more problematic when we confront the fact that the words people use really do present a complete world and give us access to countless assumptions and pretty much everything we could want to know about another persons thoughts. I never questioned the fact that you should always approach thought through language, and only through language - just the idea that language is the ultimate origin of thought (which I considered a pretty unproblematic idea).

One last thing - as far as "a word at the tip of my tongue" goes... I stick to the fact that sometimes something unexpressed can be extremely valuable. Even just a feeling of irritation that something is missing or not quite right that keeps you going over something again and again until you find what it is that is bothering you, what doesn't add up or needs to be altered. Has it never happened to you that this sort of intuition or call it what you will has led to you substantially improving something or clarifying your ideas? When I think of Socrates' interlocutor saying to him (roughly from memory) "As often happens to people talking to you, I can't object to any specific point, but I find I'm not convinced"... of course, if he had the text in front of him and could carefully go over it, he would be able to put his finger on the forced analogy, the over-simplification or the root assumption that would undermine Socrates' argument...