Of thinking, thoughts and poo-metaphors

I wasn't going to write again until tomorrow, but sometimes it is hard not to respond to challenges. The best I can do is to write as little and as quickly as possible until tomorrow, when I'll have more Locke to discuss.

Well, my last post, talking as it did of 'ideas' (one could have as easily said 'thoughts' ) in animals, though determined by Locke, will, no doubt, add fuel to the poo-metaphor discussion. The relationship between thinking in thought will be a long, drawn-out discussion throughout the fall at least, imagine. You seem to acknowledge that something happens in the mind that isn't necessarily consciousness speaking English, French or German, but to radically deny that we should use a word to describe this or refer to it in any way. I never imagined that 'thoughts' sat there as pre-formed concretions, but it is interesting to think of thought in terms of digestive metaphors... rumination, digesting information, data being processed like food, another way of transforming that which has been taken in from outside the body and transforming it into something useful, breaking it into its constitutive parts and making it part of us. Anyway, the point of me trying to switch from the noun 'thought' to the gerund 'thinking' was to indicate that I was not talking about a 'thing', but about this 'what goes on'. You talk about behaviorism, and I respect the desire not to project something into the heads of children and animals and then take your own projections as observable truth. Because something seems plausible (that an infant acts for the reasons I attribute to it or views the world as I imagine it might) has no necessary truth (and this is what Proust is talking about in condemning the formal logic of the philosophers as opposed to the necessary truths revealed by desire). I tried to get a course of my own design to teach for next summer and entitled the course 'savages, noble and otherwise', making it about a continuing fascination with the state of nature, particularly as a speculative access to our own Id, as an impossible attempt to separate what is innate in us from what is acquired (they chose to go with someone else's class on monsters instead). I bring this up only because I can't pretend that what goes on in my own mind is as alien to me as what goes on in the head of an infant or an animal. We all know what is meant when someone talks about the 'mood' or the 'atmosphere' of something, and clearly there are lots of different moods and atmospheres, beyond a couple of words like 'dark' or 'sinister', the specifics of mood haven't been pinned down. We can recognize and enjoy a mood, but it's extremely difficult to talk about it. Does the fact that this is a non-verbal experience mean it isn't worth analyzing our own experience of mood and attempting to explain it? Should it be treated as non-existent, and covered over prudishly like something that shouldn't be displayed in public? Is the general atmospheric feeling I get from Dostoyevsky as opposed to Kafka like a an excrement that should be released in a private place and buried or flushed away? Think how hard it is to explain your reaction to music, or the paucity of our vocabulary in talking about scents. Should dwelling on experiences of this sort not count as thinking? Or only so far as we specifically refer to it as "that indescribable odor I noticed when I walked past a certain place that seemed somehow familiar and whose origin I couldn't quite place"? Because in our thoughts, we don't constantly have to spell things out for ourselves like that, and it isn't language that we use if we start searching through our memories trying to find another context for that smell so as to be able to figure out what it is and why it is so familiar (and perhaps why the sense of recognition gives us pleasure - now that I seem to be slipping into Proust again).

Perhaps we can know of the world only what we can be accessed through our experience, and it makes no sense for metaphysics to speculate on God, essences, or anything purely transcendent. Perhaps we can no nothing of our own thought processes what we are actually conscious of, and speculating about an unconscious mind (other the observable biological autonomic system) is creating another internal transcendent space and opening the door to a new metaphysics of mist and air. But can we know nothing of our own experience only what has already been inscribed in language? We didn't create the world, we didn't create the conscious mind, but, though we have inherited language and it has largely shaped who we are, it IS something created by us and something we continue to create. Unlike platonic essences or the working of our unconscious, experiences we haven't yet given an adequate linguistic expression to are directly accessible to us and we can express them.

As to Derrida, I'm beginning to feel you read him as much as I do, and all I can say is I agree with you. I sometimes read other people's discussion of a Derrida I don't recognize who seems to want to destroy any possibility for rational discourse or meaning of any sort, and at times these descriptions seem bound to a wider reading of Derrida than I can lay claim to and to make use of quotes I don't remember from texts I have read. Nietzsche sometimes receives this treatment as well, though not to the same extent. It will be interesting to bring this up again when looking back over 'otobiographies: the ear of the other', which is largely about Nietzsche's reception, including his being co-opted by Nazi sympathizers. Hopefully we'll get around to both reading and writing enough by Derrida in the coming year to be able to with more justice figure out what portrayal of Derrida does him justice, whether he is a reasonable and attentive observer of necessary ambiguities and the role of language and metaphor in though or whether he is the nihilistic debunker of reason of any sort. I still think that his falling out with Foucault over Descartes, and the fact that he distrusts Foucault's fondness for madness as much as he does Rousseau's fondness for the state of nature points to someone who is deeply attached rational discourse - though his love for Mallarme and Blanchot might suggest someone who enjoys obfuscation as much as clarification.