i am negative existence. meeshk.
I believe I do, She is the object of the majortiy of meditation of occultism; She’s that which brings out and feeds the inner child. Jesus said ‘No one shall come through the Father except through the Mother.’
In Yoga, she is the Kundalini, in gnosticism the Holy Ghost. In poets she is the Muse and in philosophers she is Sophia. It is she who possesses the shaman.
Her threefold aspect; the maiden, the mother and the witch, Persephone, Demeter and Hekate; the phases of the moon. In the Tree of Life, she is represented as Binah, the primordial form or Marah the great black sea from which all rises and which absorbs all again. To love her is to be on a path with with no way back and only one end;
- Little Essays Towards Truth, Chastity.
The path is the circle, the center the end.
" The Beloved is all; the lover just a veil. The Beloved is living; the lover a dead thing " - Rumi, Mathnawi I
Like what?
This is an important question. According to Nietzsche, “We cease to think when we refuse to do so under the constraint of language” [The Will to Power, section 522]. And what is language? According to Wikipedia;
“A language is a system of signals, such as voice sounds, gestures or written symbols, that encode or decode information.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language
And what is thought? According to Wikipedia;
“Thought or thinking is a mental process which allows beings to model the world, and so to deal with it effectively according to their goals, plans, ends and desires.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought
And what is the world? We cannot rely on Wikipedia here. We must turn to Harry Neumann:
“[S]cience is the simple realization that whatever is experienced – a self, a world, the law of contradiction, a god, or anything else – is nothing apart from its being experienced. When students complain of “identity crises,†I tell them not to worry, since neither they nor anyone else has an identity about which to have a crisis! For science, genuine knowledge of reality, reveals a world of nothing but empty experiences, impressions as Hume called them.”
[Harry Neumann, Politics or Nothing!]
We can model the world, which is the sum of all our impressions, by representing these impressions, by themselves or in bundles, by signals. If we model it by these impressions themselves, if we do not encode the information, if our impressions represent themselves, our model is the world. “Thought beyond language”, therefore, is simply another way of saying “direct experience of the world”. And as our direct experience is the world, it is simply another way of saying nothing.
[edited]
Finally, a thought provoking post.
In your light indeed it does seem to be futile. I had to ponder this one; let me first say that t’s self-evident that one cannot prove there is thought beyond language by means of language. To refute your argument I have to introduce the Gestalt. More on this later, I’d Like. Anyway,
You instinctively said it was an important question at the top of your post, but rationally ended with concluding it was literally meaningless. I think here’s what happened. You reduced the question to elements, making it into pieces of a whole. But in this case the whole is, or rather suggests, more than the pieces combined - I mean to present ‘thought beyond language’ as a Gestalt, not as a logical induction. I’ll give you an example of an argument parallel to this one in a simpler form; If the question would have been ‘Are all regular triangles trianguar?’ You have argued that there are, because a triangular riangle consists of three equally long lines, which can be arranged otherwise.
As this parallel doesn’t hold since triangular is derived from triangle and thought not from language, at least not according to archaeological approach to history, I feel I should repeat that it’s self-evident that one cannot prove there is thought beyond language by means of language. Unless someone invents a language beyond thought. And that, come to think of it, is Qabbalah.
I still find the question important, and did not say so instinctively. I find it important because the answer, in my opinion, is “no”, and I find it important that this be realised.
I think saying nothing is a pretty “Zen” thing. Is not Zen itself this thought beyond language? This direct experience of the world? Which is another way of saying “Being”?
I find the idea of the world as a model quite fascinating.
not too bad, then.
many philosophers (the most major of which, certainly in recent times, has been wittgenstein - ‘the limits of my language are the limits of my world’) have claimed that language entirely shapes and determines our thoughts - and, as the posts here have shown, the types of argument they use can often be quite convincing; i’m thinking in particular of the not-proving-thought-before-language-using-language argument.
however, to my mind there are various responses to this. do babies not think, then, before they learn to use language? did primitive, language-less peoples or animals not think? do we not (frequently, in the cases of some) experience moments in which we know what we want to say but cannot find the right word or words with which to say it?
i concede that language may help us to think in the advanced and complex way we are used to; at a fundamental level, though, it seems to me that thought comes first.
Nope. They do experience, but in order to think they need a language - be it baby-language.
I think I shall stress here that language need not be word language. Animals and primitive peoples have many wordless ways for communication, as do we, being still in many ways animals and primitive people.
If you can’t find the right words, you don’t know what to say. Perhaps you know what you want to express; but not how you might express it. I.e., you know what you want to communicate - your experience -, but not how to model this experience, what signals to use to let others know what it is you experience. I think experiences cannot be shared; but others may imagine what you experience. In communication, it is always a faith that you understand, that you are understood. You cannot know for sure that someone else understands you exactly, you can only believe you know. In fact, you can be sure you are not understood exactly, that the other does not have the same experience you have, but a similar experience at best. Consider the following:
“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. […] Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.
Most island universes are sufficiently like one another to permit of inferential understanding or even mutual empathy or ‘feeling into.’ […] But in certain cases communication between universes is incomplete or even non-existent. The mind is its own place, and the places inhabited by the insane or the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience.”
[Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception.]
This is especially true of psychedelic experiences. People who are not on psychedelics do not understand and cannot be made to understand. But there may be empathy between people who are both on psychedelics. But this is a question of faith, of believing that you understand one another, that you know what the other person means, sees, experiences. And this is true for all empathy. It is a kind of faith. And this faith may bring redemption, redemption from the feeling of isolation - but never from the isolation itself.
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i actually think this particular issue (about babies) confuses the matter, because, whether or not it is possible for thought to come before language, babies’ brains might simply not be developed enough to process what we call ‘thought’ anyway. i’m no neuropsychologist, but that’s my guess. my bad for introducing this point.
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a fair point. i think it would be easiest at this point if you stated what kind of behaviour you would not classify as ‘communication’ so we can work from there.
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this is exactly my point. you know what you want to express, that is, your thoughts, but not how you might express it, that is, you do not know how to utilize language to express it.
Maybe. But that’s debatable. Consider a pregnant mother. Not only is she herself and carrying a baby, another seperate entity, but the baby and herself are still implicitly ONE. 1+1=2 and also 1+1=1.
That doesn’t make sense to me - if the baby and the mother are one, then there is no 1+1, only 1.
Both Zen and Kabbalah have their supreme state of awareness and origin in nothingness. But is describing nothingness the same as saying nothing?
The point you’ve made as I see it is that language is imperfect as a means to communicate thought. Isn’t the logical consequence of this that thought must be beyond language?
When we regard the mother as a unit, it is we who have distinguished her from the womb that is society. We can do the same for the child. Now consider we regard the mother as 1: does she remain 1 when she eats, or when she excretes, or when she loses a limb? Does she have a distinct, imperishable essence that is 1?
We may call the universe 1, or the galaxy, or the stellar system, or the planet, or the ecosystem, or the organism, or the organ, or the cell, or the molecule, or the quantum. It’s completely arbitrary.
I think we can only say, rationally, not empirically, that the All is 1, and that it is the only thing of its kind, so there is no 1+1. Within the All, we may define units, but we can never define identical units, so there is no 1+1 there, either.
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I think it was a good thing to introduce, and my reply a good one, if I may say so myself.
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Good one. I have to ponder on this.
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It has now become necessary to define what we mean by “thought” and “thoughts”. I have already referred to Wikipedia for this. If you think you have better definitions, please share them.
“Thought or thinking is a mental process which allows beings to model the world, and so to deal with it effectively according to their goals, plans, ends and desires.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking
“Thought is a mental process which allows beings to be conscious, make decisions, imagine and, in general, operate on symbols in a rational or irrational manner. It is an element/instance of thinking and is used as its synonym.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_(disambiguation)
“In philosophy, thought is also a synonym for idea”
[ibid.]
“An idea (Greek: ἰδέα) is an image existing or formed in the mind.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea
So, according to these definitions, thoughts are ideas. The Online Etymology Dictionary has the following entry for “think”:
"O.E. þencan “conceive in the mind, think, consider, intend” (past tense þohte, p.p. geþoht), probably originally “cause to appear to oneself”
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=think
“Idea” also has this sense of “appearance”:
“1430, “figure, image, symbol,” from L. idea “idea,” and in Platonic philosophy “archetype,” from Gk. idea “ideal prototype,” lit. “look, form,” from idein “to see,” from PIE *wid-es-ya-, suffixed form of base *weid- “to see” (see vision). Sense of “result of thinking” first recorded 1645.”
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=idea
So you may experience things in the mind, and we may even consider whether not all experience is in the mind, but you cannot express these things before you have separated them into distinct “things” and symbolised these by symbols. But in order to think, that is, communicate to yourself, you need to do this; before you do, what you experience in the mind are not thoughts, not ideas, but just impressions.
Not in nothingness, in no-thingness. No-thingness is the absence of “things”, of separation; nothingness is the absence of both “things” and no-thingness (Being, phusis, Becoming).
Not thought, but experience. But if thought be thought of as an experience, than it is beyond thought, too: thought about experience is beyond thought about thought about experience, etc. It is a model of a model. But if we think about direct experience as a form of thought, if we think of the world as a model, than there must be something beyond it. The question is what. As we do not know, as we do not experience that, we cannot follow this train of thought.
My question to you is: what do you mean by “thought”? Can you define it?
sauwelios,
let’s go with wikipedia, for clarity’s sake:
‘thought or thinking is a mental process which allows beings to model the world, and so to deal with it effectively according to their goals, plans, ends and desires.’
what you seem to be saying is that in order to think, that is, in order to engage in a mental process which allows us to model the world, we must represent the world to ourselves, if not to others, in symbols.
so:
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can you prove that babies communicate to themselves using symbols?
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thought does not have to be complex or drawn-out; it can be short and simple, right? if my boyfriend asks me where my cigarettes are, and i engage in a modelling process over the space of a second, and answer him that they are in the bedroom, i have not communicated to myself (prior to answering him) using a string of symbols that ‘the cigarettes are in the bedroom’, surely? this is a trivial example, but you get my drift.
lastly: where do you draw the line between thought and experience?
I can prove that they “talk” in themselves, and not to anyone else in particular, using baby language.
You will have used lots of archaic, unconscious expressions to yourself. It is like the reasoning you use in dreams, but, as you are not sleeping, you are not conscious of that. Also, you will visualise your bedroom and the pack of cigarettes, symbolising them by images. The image in your mind is itself a symbol of the impression the actual pack of cigarettes has made on you.
In the modelling. Experience is unmodelled. Thinking is the modelling, the working with a model of, experience.
Sauwelios: I do not agree with the wikipedia’s definition of thought. I’ve thought it through in the light of my posts on kabbalah in this thread, in which I explain the basis for the model of consciousness I work with.
The key to the difference between language and thought is the division of all being, including consciousness, between force and form.
Very simply: language is form, (obviously, as it consists of symbols or gestures, which are both forms) and thought is not, or at the very least not confined to the form aspect. Thought originates as force, motion, and settles down into form, language - but then it is no longer thought.
Thought, as I experience it, (and thought is experienced, it is not separate from direct experience - thought is existence) is that which is between the forms of language. The closest to a definition of thought I have been able to get is ‘active consciousness’
Reason, and therefore language, is passive consciousness. This is evident when one thinks of an argument, an equation, a rationale allready in existence. It may when impressed on a mind activate thought by means of interpretation, but in itself it is passive, which is all too clearly indicated by the fact that all formulations can be interpreted by all people differently - and are therefore all imperfect representations of thought.
My answer to the initial question ‘is there thought beyond language?’ is that all thought is beyond language.
The intermediary state between thought and language, the equilibrium between force and form, is meditation. This is a fusion of thought and symbolism. I do not only so much wish to indicate with this word the state of transendent awareness we know from the East, but rather the state of formative consciousness in which the creative genius operates.
The Wikipedia definition of thought is clumsy, because it defines thought as a means to ‘deal with’ goals, plans, end and desires - things that should be included in the definition. It defines thought as something to deal with types of thought.
What is the difference between force and form?
Wikipedia gives an excellent clue towards the interpretation of your distinction:
“For practical purposes, Aristotle was the first to distinguish between [i]matter /i and form (morphe). To Aristotle matter is the undifferentiated primal element: it is rather that from which things develop than a thing in itself. The development of particular things from this germinal matter consists in differentiation, the acquiring of particular forms of which the knowable universe consists (cf. causation for the Aristotelian formal cause). The perfection of the form of a thing is its entelechy in virtue of which it attains its fullest realization of function (De anima, ii. 2). Thus the entelechy of the body is the soul.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form
As for the soul:
“Aristotle, following Plato, defined the soul as the core essence of a being, but argued against its having a separate existence. For instance, if a knife had a soul, the act of cutting would be that soul, because ‘cutting’ is the essence of what it is to be a knife. Unlike Plato and the religious traditions, Aristotle did not consider the soul as some kind of separate, ghostly occupant of the body (just as we cannot separate the activity of cutting from the knife). As the soul, in Aristotle’s view, is an activity of the body, it cannot be immortal (when a knife is destroyed, the cutting stops). More precisely, the soul is the “first activity” of a living body. This is a state, or a potential for actual, or ‘second’, activity. “The axe has an edge for cutting” was, for Aristotle, analogous to “humans have bodies for rational activity,” and the potential for rational activity thus constituted the essence of a human soul.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul#Aristotle
I think the knife and the axe are poor examples. Let us take as an example an analogy much used in Hinduism, that of the fire.
“Sauwelios defines the soul as the core essence of a being, but argues against its having a separate existence. For instance, if fire had a soul, the act of burning would be that soul, because ‘burning’ is the essence of what it is to be fire. Unlike Plato and the religious traditions, Sauwelios does not consider the soul as some kind of separate, ghostly occupant of the body (just as we cannot separate the activity of burning from the fire). As the soul, in Sauwelios’ view, is an activity of the body, it cannot be immortal (when a fire is extinguished, the burning stops).”
My question to you, Jakob, is: how can we know the fire from the burning?