Harold Carr

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Sat, 29 Jul 2006

Steiner's Sad Thought

Ten (Possible) Reasons for the Sadness of Thought

George Steiner

My brother-in-law, Guillermo Antonio Cerviņo-Wood, recommended George Steiner’s Ten (Possible) Reasons for the Sadness of Thought. I found his essay of that title (originally published in Salmagundi) here and here.

I can’t say I like Steiner’s writing. It seems unnecessarily convoluted. Plus, all his points were made earlier by Bataille and Bataille’s writing is much better, even in English translation. He even uses some of Bataille’s phrases (e.g., “sadness unto death,” “laid bare”).

But I did take the time to read and summarize the article.

  • Introduction
  • 1 — Infinite thought cannot think everything that exists.
  • 2 — We can’t control thought for long, and even if we could, it might be dangerous to our health.
  • 3 — Thinking is private but common and repetitive.
  • 4 — No absolute truth (language is inherently ambiguous).
  • 5 — Thinking is wasteful.
  • 6 — You can’t do everthing you think.
  • 7 — Thought veils as much as it reveals.
  • 8 — The veil makes it impossible to know what others are thinking.
  • 9 — The fact that few are capable of great thought (“creativity”) conflicts with the ideal of social justice.
  • 10 — We know (and try to escape) death.

Introduction

Schelling: Thought is inseparable from a “profound, indestructible melancholy.” Intellect experiences this melancholy and has the capacity to overcome it.

Biblical: Thought is guilt: passage from innocence to knowledge is sad.

We don’t what “thought” is. Nothing has taken us beyond Parmenides’ identification of thought with being—the wellspring and boundary of western philosophy.

Like breathing, thinking is resistant to interruption.

St. John of the Cross: suspension of mundane thought is brimful of the presence of God.

Cessation of thought is death.

Gnostic suggestion: only God can detach Himself from His own thinking in a hiatus essential to the act of creation.

1 — Infinite thought cannot think everything that exists.

Thought is limitless. What lies outside thought is unthinkable.

Counterfactuals (encoded in grammar via if clauses, wishes [optatives], and conjectures [subjunctives]) is incommensurable. We can “unsay” anything. Thought-experiments, of which poetry and scientific hypotheses are eminently representative, know no boundaries.

The infinity of thought is a crucial marker of human eminence (Pascal’s “thinking reeds”).

So why the inescapable sadness?

The infinity of thought is an “incomplete infinity.” It has an unresolvable internal contradiction: we will never know if our thought comes close to the sum of reality. We do not know whether our seemingly infinite thought is actually narrow and beside the point.

We have no conclusive answers for life’s big questions: “how did the cosmos come into being,” “is there any purpose to our lives,” “does God exist?”.

This contradiction (aporia) is inherent in all acts of thought.

At the center of thought—doubt, frustration.

2 — We can’t control thought for long, and even if we could, it might be dangerous to our health.

One cannot stop breathing and thinking.

The incapacity to arrest thought is a terrifying constraint.

Thought is uncontrolled.

It can originate at somatic and psycho-somatic depths far beyond the reach of introspection.

It is possibly a prelinguistic phenomenon, a thrust of psychic energies prior to any executive articulation.

Trapped in language, we arrive at no plausible/translatable notion of what unspoken, unspeakable thinking could be like.

It is conceivable that the unspoken meaningfulness of music (somatic in key components) provides some analogy.

Psychology falls short of reaching the depth.

Even at the surface, there is only intermittent control.

At every moment thought is subject to intrusion.

Perpetual discontinuities—inherent drift.

Soliloquies of concealed or unwanted thought go their anarchic ways underneath articulate, cognitively apprehended speech.

Is it possible to think straight—laser-like?

Monotone: needs trained, disciplined concentration and abstention from diversion. Accessible to few, and span is brief.

Occurs at the summits of human excellence (e.g., Spinoza’s methods)

It may be that the powers of ultimate concentration can burn out at a fairly young age (e.g., first order pure mathematics and theoretical physics are the prerogative of the young). Suggests that the means involved are in some vital regard neuro-physiological or “muscular.”

Perhaps concentration carries risk of temporary exhaustion and/or long-range mental collapse (lasers can burn).

Hypothesis: involuntary common thought is a safe-guard. Enables us to respond to the spontaneous, shapeless demands and stimuli of the everyday.

Most often, ordinary thinking is a messy, amateurish enterprise.

3 — Thinking is private but common and repetitive.

private:

Thinking (and physical sensation) makes us present to ourselves. Thinking of ourselves is the main constituent of personal identity. Cessation of though is the cessation of the ego.

No one or thing can verifiably penetrate my thoughts.

No other human being can think my thoughts (or die) for me.

Thoughts are our sole assured possession.

They make up our our at-homeness or estrangement from the self.

I breathe therefore I think.

No closeness (e.g, biological, emotional, sexual) will enable us to decipher the thoughts of another.

Truthfulness/transparency of thought belongs to the animal kingdom. Human’s endure by disguise. But the mask is worn underneath the skin.

common:

Paradox. The inaccessible core of our singularity is also commonplace—our thoughts are common. They have been, are, will be thought, millions of times by others. They are endlessly banal and shop-worn. Used goods.

An inescapable consequence of language—historically inherited and communally shared.

The dictionary inventories the near-totality of actual and potential thought. Our thought is made up of combinatorial assemblages of and selections from pre-fabricated counters.

Grammatical rules may pre-determine or constraint the majority of our thought—infinite but bounded, repetitive potentiality.

True originality of thought—thinking of a thought for the first time (and how would we know?)—is exceedingly rare.

Verbal form gives impression of novelty—not the content. The performative shock may be intense, but there is absolutely no way of knowing that that very thought has never been emitted before. Such innovations are significance, but how many are “original”?

Where verbal modes are new, who is to understand them?

4 — No absolute truth (language is inherently ambiguous).

No final verification for the truth/error, sincerity/falsehood of subjective thought (point 1 above).

What of objective truths (public, systematic thinking)?

The values attached to the word “truth” are historical, ideological and psychological.

Truths of science are underwritten by theoretical, philosophical pre-suppositions (“paradigms” susceptible of revision or discard).

Dialectical circularity: “truth,” even in formal systems, is relative to its axioms and rules.

The history of truth (a concept which negates any absolute status—the absolute has no history) ranges from dogmatic, “revealed” fables to skepticism and the modernist move—“anything goes.”

Thought can only postulate its attainment of truth solely where the result is a formal equivalence, as in symbolic logic.

All other statements of truths (doctrinal, philosophic, historical or scientific) are subject to error, falsifiability, revision and erasure.

“Truths” vibrate in manifold dimensions inaccessible to any final proof.

Thought cannot “break through” to any truth. Yet it is this realm which revealed creeds, metaphysics (e.g, Plato, Plotinus or Spinoza) promise and labor to attain.

Abstract thought contains a latent ground bass of nostalgia, an edenic myth of lost certitudes.

To think is to fall short.

Language is inimical to the monochrome ideal of truth. It is saturated with ambiguity.

Thought limited to logical propositions would be madness.

Human creativity depends on thinking counter-factually.

Pure concentration is contrary to natural language.

5 — Thinking is wasteful.

Thought processes are generally diffuse, aimless, dispersed, scattered and unaccounted for.

(Suggests a society in which thinking is rationed to certain hours/day and distributed according to individual mental capacities. A waste of thought would be regarded as vandalism or worse. But efforts to ration thinking, to constrict it within permitted, circumscribed channels, are at the very heart of tyranny. Anarchic, playful, wasteful thought is that which totalitarian regimes fear most.)

Significant thinkers invest in a seminal thought-act or observation, exploiting its full potential. They “grab a hold” and press on to performative realization.

How many recognitions go to waste in the indifferent deluge of unattended-to thinking?

6 — You can’t do everthing you think.

Thought is immediate only to itself. It makes nothing happen directly.

Thinking has incommensurable consequences, but cannot be shown to be directly causal.

Only God experiences no hiatus between thought and consequence. That which He thinks is.

We possess no model of the chain of generative phenomena, of the translation of concepts into neuro-physiological and muscular accomplishment.

The shadows which fall between thinking and doing are diverse.

Sentiment, intuition, intellectual or psychological illumination, crowd at the inner edge of language but cannot “break through” to complete articulation (but a great writer somehow works closer to that edge—to the pulses of the pre-linguistic—than do less privileged minds).

Energies of metaphoric lightning vibrate just out of reach.

Incessant thought is only fragmentarily recuperable.

Coming to the surface via the simplifying constraints of language, of coercive logic, this generative force is always inhibited and deflected.

Thought is “bodied forth” (Shakespeare) imperfectly—partially.

The concept of perfection is an unfulfilled dream of thought, a conceptual abstraction.

Thought carries within it a potential of disappointment.

Our only certainty is death.

A sadness of satiety follows on fulfilled desires. The cigarette after orgasm measures the void between anticipation and substance.

Human eros is a close kin to a sadness unto death.

Failed correlations between thought and realization, between the conceived and the actualities of experience.

7 — Thought veils as much as it reveals.

Two epistemological categories:

  • Window: our consciousness of the world is that of perception through a window. It authorizes a belief in an objective world.
  • Mirror: postulates experience whose only verifiable source is that of thinking itself.

But the glass (window or mirror) is never immaculate. There are scratches on it, blind spots, curvatures. It stands between ourselves and the world we inhabit.

Theories of cognition struggle to situate a point of unpremeditated immediacy, a point at which the self meets with the world without any presuppositions, without any interference by psychological, corporeal, cultural or dogmatic presumptions.

The identity of the “thinking reed,” the obscuring ubiquity of thought-processes acts as a screen. Experience, where it would be naked and Adamic, is filtered and essentially compromised.

Are there bounds to human reason?

Do the axioms and rules of logic externalize the architecture of our cortex?

We all experience frustrations of awareness—barriers to understanding. We “run up,” often viscerally, against impalpable but unyielding walls of language.

8 — The veil makes it impossible to know what others are thinking.

Hence the unsettled relations between thought and love.

Hence love between thinking beings is a somewhat miraculous grace.

The lover cannot embrace the thoughts of the beloved.

The closest, most honest of human beings remain strangers.

Everyone uses an “idiolect,”—a personalized selection out of available language with private, references.

Ambiguity is native to the word.

Thought is most legible, least covert during bursts of unchained, compacted energy—as in fear and hatred.

Animals show us that our fears emit a scent. Perhaps there is a smell to hatred.

Hatred is stronger, more cohesive than love.

The veil is also torn apart in laughter—when mentality is laid bare.

But this tearing apart is brief and involuntary.

No final light, no empathy in love, discloses the labyrinth of another human being’s inwardness.

9 — The fact that few are capable of great thought (“creativity”) conflicts with the ideal of social justice.

As noted above, we think and waste thoughts thought before. They disseminate inward and outward—only a fraction survive and bear fruit.

Only a restricted portion of the species provides evidence of knowing how to think.

The capacity to think is universal. But the capacity to think thoughts worth thinking, let alone expressing and worth preserving is comparatively rare.

Light-years of difference between the background noise of rumination common to all human existence and the miraculous complexity and strengths of first-class thinking.

A culture can be defined by the extent to which incorporates first-order thought into communal values and practices. Does seminal thought enter schooling and the general climate of recognition? Or are authentic thinking and its receptive valuation impeded or destroyed (e.g., Socrates).

What mechanism of subconscious envy fuels the brutality of the media which have made the very word “intellectual” derisive?

Clear thought is perpetually in exile.

When it becomes too visible (where it cannot shelter behind specialization and hermetic encoding) intellectual passion provokes hatred and mockery.

Top-gear thinking be taught/learned.

But there is no pedagogic key to creativity (novel configurations of meaning and mappings).

10 — We know (and try to escape) death.

French and German grammar allow us to elide the preposition between the verb “to think” and its object. We are not constrained to think “about” an object. We can “think it” immediately: Das Leben denken (“to think life”); penser le destin (“to think destiny”).

As above (see 7): does grammatical immediacy point to the supposition that the objects of thought are the dependent product of the act of thinking (e.g., mirror—or Kant)? Or does the elision mean that the object of thought has autonomy (glass)?

The difference between these two possibilities marks the alternative paths which philosophy has taken in the West (idealism/realism).

English usage internalizes empiricism—the world is “thought about,” not “thought.”

Possibility of symbiosis.

Heidegger: the essential task of thought is “to think (about) being”?

Why is there not nothing (Leibniz)?

Can we conceptualize nothingness (contra Parmenides)?

Can we “think death”?

Zero, our being made a vacuum, is “unthinkable.”

Human thought seems to abhor emptiness. Instead, it generates archetypally more or less consoling fictions of survival.

We labor to avoid the black hole of nothingness.

Existence and death, as these pertain to “God,” are the perennial objects of human thought.

We are (“ergo sum”) in so far as we endeavor to “think being,” “non-being” (death) and the relation of these polarities to the presence or absence, to the anthropomorphically phrased life or death of God.

A tolerant agnosticism demands ironic maturities, “negative capabilities” (Keats).

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Harold Carr

Harold Carr