Thoughts occur in a successive or temporal relationship; while some thoughts
interweave in simultaneity, there is, between pairs of other thoughts, a gap which we can
call time. Among the many phenomena of time there are the relationships between
thoughts which share a connected or related theme. As a simplification of this we can
consider two situations: 'thought from' and 'thought to'.
Thought from names a collection of such questions as the origins or causes of a thought or theme of thoughts. Thought to refers to the future thoughts which can somehow be derived, at least in part, from an occurring thought. Thought from opens a mystery which I would prefer to leave to psychology. Thought to can be examined here in the light of intent. Here is a simple example of thought to: suppose that I have a thought whose content contains the intent of thinking about fixing my bicycle and that this intent is fulfilled by succeeding thoughts about fixing my bicycle; here we are going with intent from a thought to other thoughts.
Why would we want to know about thought from? Of course simple curiosity is a
reasonable motive but toward some other motives which might lead us to examine thought
from I look askance. Often the roots and origins of situations are investigated in order to
gain control of similar situations, but this control so gained operates from behind the back,
so to speak, of reality; it grounds the future in the past, which strikes me, since the past is
after all past, gone, no longer present, as rather akin to sympathetic magic, as trying to
control reality secretly rather than standing forth directly in the light of being. Conversely,
thought to attempts to direct the progression of thought from the present and its degree of
success or failure depends rather upon our focus and intent than upon some invisible agent
or ether of control, some dark power which we attempt to placate by imitation.
One common kind of thought is the inner monologue, although it is in fact more
complicated than the word monologue may imply, for there is not only a speaker but a
listener present, a responsive listener who is also, which is why we call it monologue rather
than dialogue, the speaker. Words flow through thought and hearing those words in
thought modulates the choice of successor words. The words which are thought, plus
something else, together determine the following words; it is this something else which is
interesting. That something else surely includes the structure of the language to which the
words in thought belong; what else does it include? If there is a person there, the thinker
of the thought, then that person is also part of the something else. Did I just imply the
possibility of thought without a thinker? In a sense I did, not in any practical way to deny
that we as thinkers and selves are, but in the sense that the examination of thought herein
presented is intended to be based much more on the phenomena which thought presents
directly in thought, rather than on some more abstract metaphysics of personal identity,
self existence or mind as being.
We have broached the question of the thinker. In our normal metaphysics of
presence thought implies a thinker. Why do I have a problem with that? Perhaps because
the occurrence of thought does not necessarily imply the presence of a thinker, such would
be an example of thought from, thought from a thinker. If I look in a mirror I see
something which I have come to accept as my reflection, but why should I accept that? My
reflection is supposedly a subtly reversed, and having taught both mathematics and physics
as well as conducting original researches into symmetry, I guarantee you that it is subtle,
image of the photons reflected from my body. OK. This body implicit in its photon
reversal ought to be or at least represent me. Me what? The writer here writing? That
seems likely but subjectively I see animated and sometimes familiar flesh in the mirror and
only hints, in the expression of the eyebrows, in a certain quietude of the irises, of the
thinker who thinks these thoughts and directs the body to key these words.
Instead of beginning with perception perhaps we should start with an inner feeling
of being the thinker that thinks. When we introduced intent it was as a thought form. We
have already described emotion and proprioception as elements of thought; this feeling of
being a thinker seems to balance fairly well between the two.
In our examination of awareness we found that awareness itself is prior to the
distinction by which the self is distinguished. We have been examining thought herein as
an aspect of the content of awareness and without having made a prior introduction of the
concept of self. A conclusion agreed upon from both of the above directions is that it is not
necessary to think of thought as a subset of self, which leaves open the possibility of
thoughts occurring which are not of our self even though those thoughts may be part of the
content of that same awareness which our self inhabits. Thus it is at least conceivable that
thoughts occur in what we usually consider our own personal consciousness which in some
sense come from outside that consciousness. In so far as we have already observed the
questionableness of the practice of chasing down the origins of thought we are left with a
question as to what such an alternative or extra personal thought can mean and how it
could be determined or even suspected to be such. We should do so by observing aspects of
the thought, its form or theme, which strike us as having a different flavor than thoughts
which we commonly accept as our own. This leads to the question of what we can mean by
the flavor of thought. It is possible that thought has a different feeling, for which we use
the metaphor of different flavor, to different individuals. This may be difficult to
determine since we are ordinarily used only to the flavor of our own personal thought; it
would be a little like trying to describe the flavor of water without having tasted any other
liquid. When we have traveled we can perceive that in Upper Michigan water tastes of
iron, it New York it can taste weird and in Fort Collins it usually tastes clear and sweet. In
thought we also travel and visit and often revisit thought of different themes, of different
thought forms and genera of thought forms: mathematical thinking can be observed to
differ at times from memories of dragonflies darting above summer waters, tunnel thought
differs from consciously reflective thought and so many examples, which really deserve
finer discrimination, readily arise in thought as to make any further listing unnecessary.
We have looked at several structures which were found in, unless we prefer to say
imposed upon, thought and sets of thoughts. These structures of thoughts are themselves
thoughts both when they were thought before by the writer and when they are rethought as
the writing occurs and become thoughts again, not quite the same thoughts, as well as
when they are read by the reader or rethought by the writer, perhaps after reading them.
Between being thoughts before and thoughts after they occur as written words. We have
raised monsters in this paragraph: thoughts about thoughts and the relationship between
thought and language, and then of course there is a third of the connection of thought
between reader and writer and how that situation is connected to, a child of, the second
monster. And I was just intending to introduce a look at thoughts about thought or more
especially thoughts whose themes are structures about thought. When we leave the realm
of thought to enter into the wilderness of expression and communication, what webs we
find to unweave or leave!
Thoughts whose themes are the structures of thought forms, of these we have had
several of different genera, the genus which we will name as recalling tunnel thought and
its alternatives and that other genus which has thought from, thought to and thought of as
representative species. Is there some useful generalization by which we can find a
higher(?), more compelling or more penetrating genus? Do we break out of Husserlian
phenomena into Aristotelian categories? It is so tempting to do so, although Hegel rightly
points out that such abstractions thin near unto the nothingness of falsehood. Can thought
be abstracted and if so into what, what can be the result except another thought? There is
really no metaphysical problem here, what is required is to find a thought form, a thought,
which integrates and extends the two genera of thought structures we have thought. Let us
start with a name; we shall call it structural thought.
Structural thought. OK. Structural thought seems to act as, it has grammatically
become, an agent that collects thoughts into categories of thought forms having some
common aspect that relates more to the way the thought goes about the business of being a
thought than what the thought is thinking about, the theme. Tunnel thought dives deep
into impenetrable layers of what externally is passing time; tunnel thought takes no notice
of time passing, intrinsically timeless until it does so notice time, usually with a sudden start
of recognition, and cuspoidally reflects/refracts into a more temporal or reflective form of
thought. Tunnel thought is one species of one genus whose place in thought we are
attempting to locate, at least in the sense of finding, locating, specifying or describing a
supergenus, which we have already named structural thought, of which the two genera so
far described are species.
Such a long way to go about, just to describe a generalization of the structures of
thought which we have introduced, some new structure I preimagine. We have cast a net
into the unknown to see what we can collect, to see if we can collect some useful higher
structure of thoughts, sets of thoughts. The net is woven of thoughts and words and what
we seek to catch can appear as thoughts and words, always the interplay between thoughts
and words, thoughts which are partly composed of words, thoughts which direct the
writing of words, the words themselves if such an isolation could have meaning, the words
read, which is to say the thoughts which occur as the words are read. As we have almost
already written, language is such a superstructure as we have cast for. Language runs
through thought involving thought with the structures and beings of language.
Considering language as a species of superstructure, what other species can we discern?
What seems in practical reason to have some equivalence, if partial, to the wide
infiltrations of words and language among our thoughts? We could name another
superstructure 'perception' but I think the mismatch of logic, perception and language
being such different sorts of things, advises us to try another track. What about
mathematics? Mathematics is either a subspecies of language or another species of the
same genus. I have written some geometrical essays which did not use the language of
words at all but only presented sequences and fields of geometric forms and these essays do
not seem entirely without meaning; since mathematics can be written without what is
usually termed language, I venture that we can call it another species of the same genus. A
genus which contains language and mathematics might as well contain art; art can
certainly exist without language or mathematics but clearly has some genetic relationship
with them. Now we have found a genus which contains the species language, mathematics
and art.
We, or at least I, earlier rejected perception as a cospecies in a genus with language. It appears to me that perception is a species of another genus. What might the other species be which could validate such a genus? We still have emotion, dream, psyche, memory, knowledge, belief and magic, all of which might be possibly included, or are at least these words which can reasonably be suggested as representing aspects of thought. We have named species of a so far unnamed genus.
What is it that some thought can occasion the occurrence of another thought? This
is a link forward from the originating thought . If I think: 'I will think of 3', then I have
already thought of 3. More subtle examples are perhaps possible; I think: I will think a
prior thought, then I do think the verbal thought "I find myself at a loss.": This is, except
for the subtler precursors and watery fins of floating affiliate thoughts, what just
happened.
Frederick Joseph Staley