Consciousness, thought and language

In France, I see that it is normal to think that everything begins with thought. What is thinking?

As I understand it, thinking is directly linked to our ability to articulate meaning using language.

In my view, there is an essential, implicit confusion in the minds of most of my contemporaries: thought equals consciousness. Consciousness would therefore emerge from meaning articulated by words. Yet, quite early on, my own experience contradicted this idea. I remember a philosophy class when I was 18. The professor was commenting on a text by Saussure, arguing that there is no thought without language, and in his way of formulating it, I understood that there was no, for him, consciousness without thought.

This is a thesis known to some analytical and structuralist philosophers of the 20th century, such as Wittgenstein, who says "the limits of my language are the limits of my world" (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus ).

But Merleau-Ponty already criticized this reductive vision, by affirming that "speech does not translate thought, it accomplishes it" ( Phenomenology of Perception ), thus recognizing the existence of a bodily, perceptive pre-language.

Yet I myself spent a lot of time contemplating the world, dancing between my imagination and my sensory perceptions for periods of a few minutes to several hours, without a single word being uttered by my consciousness, except sometimes for repetitions of phrases heard elsewhere, in films for example. It certainly unfolded numerous images, sensations, powerful emotions... but no words to create meaning. For me, thought comes from the observer in oneself, who comments and seeks to be able to be understood by another subject (another consciousness) by means of language.

In my view, there is even an entire universe prior to language, and the few tens of thousands of words that humans have created barely describe a tiny fraction of the conscious experience—to say nothing of reality as a whole. This is an insight shared by Krishnamurti, for whom the word is never the thing. And as Alan Watts said: “ Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.” (The Wisdom of Insecurity ).

Language appears to me as the means of communication of thought, itself produced by a part of me that observes, analyzes, interprets, and comments. If I did not know how to formulate what passes through me with words, I would be no less alive and conscious. Language is even, in this sense, very limited. Just as thought is. Descartes' "I think therefore I am" is for me equivalent to saying "I walk, therefore I am my feet."

He was not wrong to emphasize existence in the thought experiment, but Spinoza already expanded consciousness to a totality where "mind and body are one and the same thing" ( Ethics , II).

Antonio Damasio, a contemporary neuroscientist, goes further by showing that feeling precedes conscious thought ( Descartes' Error ).

Yet our culture pushes us to focus our entire attention on our thoughts, to the detriment of everything else we are. To the detriment of the rest of ourselves, of what places us among the living. By wanting to make our singularity compared to other animals our main point of attention, we have forgotten that we are still animals, and we have even made a moral judgment about the fact of being animals. As if the form of consciousness of other mammals had an intrinsic value inferior to ours because they are not endowed with the same capacity for thought as we are...let alone other classes of animals.

This is where authors like Donna Haraway and Vinciane Despret invite us to reconsider our relationships with non-humans. They speak of the ecology of relationships , where intelligence and consciousness are not human monopolies.

Yet, what many spiritualities teach us is that practicing our "animality", putting our attention on what, in our experience, is common with other living things, tends to make us calmer, more satisfied, more balanced, happier, than the majority of activities resulting from our rational thinking alone.

This is something paramount in most Eastern wisdom —Zen, in particular—where shikantaza (“simply sitting”) reveals an awareness without thought, a state of effortless unity. The Tibetan master Chögyam Trungpa speaks of “resting in direct perception,” and Eckhart Tolle writes in The Power of Now : “You are awareness, not your thoughts.”

If you practice paying attention to what is, without judgment, without naming, without thinking; if you do it like you practice an instrument: little by little, then more and more, until it becomes automatic, your awareness of the world, of what we are, will change by itself. And it is very likely that you will love what you find there.

In other words: we have entrusted our intellect with the mission of giving meaning to existence with its concepts and words, but the intellect is incompetent for producing meaning when it comes to a vital, felt need for us: It is expert at creating, having fun, at articulating complex concepts.

Not to get better, not to feel united, not to feel that life has a deep meaning in all of one's being.

This critique is central to Iain McGilchrist's work, which in The Master and His Emissary distinguishes between the functions of the "left brain" (analytical, verbal) and the "right brain" (global, embodied). He shows how our civilization has allowed the emissary (the intellect) to take power, to the detriment of the master (the integrated perception of reality).

In the rest of who you are, there are things far more competent for this, and experience shows us that they lie in what we have in common with non-humans. Breathe, move, eat, doing nothing else, just paying attention to what is there, without judging, without naming. Practice every day, badly at first, too quickly, and then better and better... you will see your entire world transform. You will no longer need compensation, no longer need to anxiously chase concepts, no longer need to seek the attention and admiration of others with the most complicated arguments. Everything will be provided for you to feel united, whole, part of the cosmos.

Because it is a basic function of living beings, which our illusion of mental control has made us forget.

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