An Attempt at Thinking

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“The wish to understand a thinker in his own terms is something else entirely than the attempt to take up a thinker’s quest and to pursue it to the core of his thought’s problematic. The first is and remains impossible. The second is rare, and of all things the most difficult.”

What is called thinking ? – Martin Heidegger ,1968, p.185, (8)

The study of mind and brain suggests that existence is coloured by a certain existential ambiguity. A common cerebral architecture unites all individuals. Yet, because each person’s experience is unique, so is each mind and brain. Therefore, each individual lives in a world no one else can inhabit, a world which is built up  as a consequence of a process either of employing some analogy as a model, or a frame for seeing what there is to see, or of creating a model of some kind  for seeing what there is to see and thereby propounding what cannot be seen as a condition for what can be seen. Selected from our fantasy, our world is close, in some mental sense, to the real world, and how immensely rich our mental lives are because of our creative capacity to slip out of reality into the “”what if”” s ( p.643, (16)), into the imaginary frames.

This process in which such analogies or models become the “”lenses”” (in which case “”the form of the question would already provide an answer”” – Derrida, The Truth in Painting, 1987, p.21, (1)), lenses for seeing the world together with the activity of using, or constructing and then using frames, is in our terms, the act of thinking, which, we shall see, is an act of framing: as framing is a dynamic process “”that is going on at any moment”” and “”is part of what establishes the frame for what goes on next, and is partly created by the framing that went before”” (p.65, (2). Through its irrepressibility this dynamic process of framing subverts analysis, theory, philosophy, the symbol, the object. That is exactly what deconstruction does too, when it questions the conceptual pairs which are currently accepted as self-evident and natural, as if they had not been institutionalized at some point in history. To take them for granted is to restrict thinking: to deconstruct is to think. To say it differently, thinking is a term used to encompass all the mental activities associated with concept-formation, problem solving, intellectual functioning, creativity, complex learning, memory, symbolic processing, imagery, etc. Each one of these aspects of thinking can be viewed as a high level description of a system which, on a low level, is governed by simple rules: we can imagine it as a formal system underlying an informal system: the only way to understand such a system is “”by chunking it on higher and higher levels, and thereby losing some precision at each step. What emerges at the top level is the “”informal system”” which obeys so many rules of such complexity that we do not yet have the vocabulary to think about it”” (Hofstadter, D.R., Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, 1979, p.559, (16)).