Earlier in this text we suggested that a goal for philosophy is to find out which
thoughts to think and perhaps to learn to think them; that could matter either because of
the intrinsic or the derivative value of thinking good thoughts; intrinsically good thoughts
would be those of which the thinking is an end in itself. Derivatively good thoughts would
be those of which the thinking would serve some good end or at least a good in passing or
in transition. Although we are concerned herein explicitly with thought and only implicitly
with the good itself we need to look at how thought could connect to good; concerning
derivative value one mode of possibility is action directed by thought, at least this is part of
a common presumption about thought. Is action directed by thought? Thought is not
necessarily the neural impulses which generate muscular contractions, which even in their
origins are less commonly part of consciousness than not. However, at some remove from
the actual motion, it does appear, or at least is commonly thought, that there are sets of
muscular activity, such as typing these good words, answering a knock on the door, or
planting a spring garden, which have thought somewhere in their ancestry. As we prefer
tracing forwards to tracing backwards let us consider how thought might direct good
action; first let us suppose that a set of thoughts is distinguished and that out of that set of
thoughts we may distinguish a subset or possibly a single thought whose aim, intent or
teleos is to direct action of the body in that space of phenomena known as the external
world.
There is also another case in which the directing thought moves the body in its own
spaces, for reasons of the body itself, intrinsically and directly experienced, as in dance or
exercise.
If any action is directed by thought then there must be some thought which includes
the intent of performing the action, whether the eventual action really performed is the
same as the intended action or not. If we tried to search out the original thought from
which the action derived we would probably only rarely find some explicit thought of
which we could accurately write that that thought was the source for that action, if only
because any thought which occurs in the flux of thought has itself predecessors or sources
in other thoughts, the sort of difficulty we have seen before when attempting to describe
feats of thought from.
If we redirect our attention towards thought to we begin at some thought which
intends action and progress from that thought to other thoughts, as the case may be, and
eventually our subjective experience transforms from thought into action. This approach is
useful and dynamic and goes with, rather than against, the flux of thought and what is
often called time.
Recapitulating our recent discussion we see that while it is doubtful to research
which thought or thoughts may have causally preceded some given action, conversely it is
useful and valid to begin with a thought and attempt to transform that thought, perhaps
through a succession of further thoughts, into action.
So again we return to the questions of which thoughts we think, since the thoughts
we think influence subsequent thoughts and, as it may be, action. In this section called
teleos it might be appropriate to look at the idea of some thoughts as goal, or targets of
desire, thoughts of magnetic effect leading us toward some end, thoughts which seem to
induce a generation of a sequence of thoughts leading somewhere. Perhaps we can think
our way clearly to a teleos without Platonic metaghosts or action at a distance. According
to our realistic principle of thought to we should begin with a thought; this thought may be
the thought of or thought to, enclosing and directed toward some more or less distant goal,
but note that this thought, even if its theme is of a distant goal, is itself present and
accounted for in subjective experience as it is thought, as it is experienced in thought, as it
is thought in experience. Out of this original, arbitrarily chosen as original, thought, arises,
comes into being (This always happens.) as subjective experience, a sequence of thoughts.
Recall the form of channel thought, where awareness is mostly focused upon an almost
automatic sequence of sequential thought but there is also occurring a, usually lighter,
string of guide thought; this is the sort of thing I have in mind; we have thought channeled
by the beginning thought envisioning another end to the channel, which might naturally be
either understanding or action; the teleos is in the original thought that begins the channel.
For an example of a teleos or channel of thought, one that in this case is primarily
directed toward an understanding, we might consider a mathematical proof. In order to
keep this text broadly accessible we shall choose a simple proof and explain its terms. We
shall prove the unendingness, sometimes called the infinity, of the prime numbers.
Prime numbers are positive integers that can not be divided by any other prime
(number) without having a (non zero) remainder. The first prime, by definition, is 2. The
smallest prime numbers, listed in ascending order, are: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23 etc. It
might be conceivable that after some last prime number N every succeeding integer is not
prime, there are no larger primes than N. We shall prove that this is not the case. Suppose
there is such a largest prime, N; then there are a finite number of primes; form the product
by multiplying them all together: 2*3*5*7*11*...*N; this number, call it M, certainly is not
prime because it is divisible by every one of the primes; now add 1 to M, forming the
number M+1; if we try to divide M+1 by any prime up to N we get the remainder 1;
therefore M+1 is either prime or divisible by a new prime larger than N, which contradicts
our assumption that N was the largest prime. Therefore, no matter how large a prime we
might imagine to be the largest, there can come to be, in our later thought, our subsequent
experience, another prime which is larger than that prime which we imagined to be the
largest, or, simply, we never run out of primes.
Thus we have come to the end of that channel of thought, that channel having as its
prestated teleos the proving of the unendingness of the prime numbers; although closer to
reality what has occurred has been the reading (perhaps an action) of the words which
were written (definitely an action) in order to express that proof; or rather, since the proof
itself is elementary and anciently known; to adduce that proof in text as an example of
teleos channeled out of the beginning thought to.
Frederick Joseph Staley