Read Online The Ghost in the Machine by Arthur Koestler - Free Book Online
Authors: Arthur Koestler
Tags: General, Philosophy
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unpick the threads in
order to explain them one at a time? Here the problem of temporal order
begins to intrude, although his mind may still be functioning in the
partly or wholly non-verbal regions of images and intimations.
At last he arrives at a tentative arrangement of his material, under a
series of headings and sub-headings, which he shuffles about as if they
were compact building blocks. They are probably each represented by a
mere jotted key-word. This again sounds simple enough, but the longer
you think about it the more puzzling the nature of these building blocks
appears to be. William James expressed this puzzlement in a memorable
passage (his italics):
. . . And has the reader never asked himself what kind of a mental
fact is his intention of saying a thing before he has said
it? It is an entirely definite intention, distinct from all other
intentions, an absolutely distinct state of consciousness, therefore;
and yet how much of it consists of definite sensorial images, either
of words or of things? Hardly anything! . . . Yet what can we say
about it without using words that belong to the later mental facts
that replace it? The intention to say so and so is the only
name it can receive. One may admit that a good third of our psychic
life consists in these rapid premonitory perspective views of schemes
of thought not yet articulate. [12]
But now the time has come for these intentional seeds to start growing
into saplings which will branch out into sections, subsections, and so
on: the selection of evidence to be quoted, of illustrations, comment and
anecdotes, each of them necessitating further strategic choices. At each
node -- branching point -- of the growing tree, more details are filled
in, until at last the syntactic level is reached, the phrase-generating
machine takes over, the individual words are lined up-some effortlessly,
some after a painful search, and are finally transformed into patterns
of contractions of finger muscles guiding a pen: the logos has become
incarnate.
But of course the process is never quite as neat and orderly as that;
trees do not grow in this rigidly symmetrical way. In our schematised
account, the selection of the actual words occurs only at an advanced
stage of the process, after the general plan and the ordering of the
material have been decided on, and the buds of the tree are ready to burst
open in their proper left-to-right order. In reality, however, one branch
somewhere in the middle might blossom into words, while others have as yet
hardly started to grow. And while it is true that the idea or 'intention
of saying a thing' precedes the actual process of verbalisation, it is
also true that ideas are often airy nothings until they crystallise into
verbal concepts and acquire tangible shape. Therein, of course, lies the
incomparable superiority of language over more primitive forms of mental
activity; but that does not justify the fallacy of identifying language
with thought and of denying the importance of non-verbal images and
symbols, particularly in the creative thinking of artists and scientists
( Chapter XIII ). Thus our lecturer sometimes
knows what he means, but cannot formulate it; whereas at other times
he can only find out what exactly he means by explicit, precise verbal
formulations. When Alice in Wonderland was admonished to think carefully
before speaking, she explained: 'How can I know what I think till I
see what I say?' Often some promising intuition is nipped in the bud by
prematurely exposing it to the acid bath of verbal definitions; others
may never develop without such verbal exposure.
Thus we have to amend our over-simplified schema: instead of the
symmetrically growing tree, with branches steadily progressing
downward, wehave irregular growth and constant oscillations between
levels. Transforming thought into language is not a one-way process; the
sap flows in both directions, up and down the branches of the
order to explain them one at a time? Here the problem of temporal order
begins to intrude, although his mind may still be functioning in the
partly or wholly non-verbal regions of images and intimations.
At last he arrives at a tentative arrangement of his material, under a
series of headings and sub-headings, which he shuffles about as if they
were compact building blocks. They are probably each represented by a
mere jotted key-word. This again sounds simple enough, but the longer
you think about it the more puzzling the nature of these building blocks
appears to be. William James expressed this puzzlement in a memorable
passage (his italics):
. . . And has the reader never asked himself what kind of a mental
fact is his intention of saying a thing before he has said
it? It is an entirely definite intention, distinct from all other
intentions, an absolutely distinct state of consciousness, therefore;
and yet how much of it consists of definite sensorial images, either
of words or of things? Hardly anything! . . . Yet what can we say
about it without using words that belong to the later mental facts
that replace it? The intention to say so and so is the only
name it can receive. One may admit that a good third of our psychic
life consists in these rapid premonitory perspective views of schemes
of thought not yet articulate. [12]
But now the time has come for these intentional seeds to start growing
into saplings which will branch out into sections, subsections, and so
on: the selection of evidence to be quoted, of illustrations, comment and
anecdotes, each of them necessitating further strategic choices. At each
node -- branching point -- of the growing tree, more details are filled
in, until at last the syntactic level is reached, the phrase-generating
machine takes over, the individual words are lined up-some effortlessly,
some after a painful search, and are finally transformed into patterns
of contractions of finger muscles guiding a pen: the logos has become
incarnate.
But of course the process is never quite as neat and orderly as that;
trees do not grow in this rigidly symmetrical way. In our schematised
account, the selection of the actual words occurs only at an advanced
stage of the process, after the general plan and the ordering of the
material have been decided on, and the buds of the tree are ready to burst
open in their proper left-to-right order. In reality, however, one branch
somewhere in the middle might blossom into words, while others have as yet
hardly started to grow. And while it is true that the idea or 'intention
of saying a thing' precedes the actual process of verbalisation, it is
also true that ideas are often airy nothings until they crystallise into
verbal concepts and acquire tangible shape. Therein, of course, lies the
incomparable superiority of language over more primitive forms of mental
activity; but that does not justify the fallacy of identifying language
with thought and of denying the importance of non-verbal images and
symbols, particularly in the creative thinking of artists and scientists
( Chapter XIII ). Thus our lecturer sometimes
knows what he means, but cannot formulate it; whereas at other times
he can only find out what exactly he means by explicit, precise verbal
formulations. When Alice in Wonderland was admonished to think carefully
before speaking, she explained: 'How can I know what I think till I
see what I say?' Often some promising intuition is nipped in the bud by
prematurely exposing it to the acid bath of verbal definitions; others
may never develop without such verbal exposure.
Thus we have to amend our over-simplified schema: instead of the
symmetrically growing tree, with branches steadily progressing
downward, wehave irregular growth and constant oscillations between
levels. Transforming thought into language is not a one-way process; the
sap flows in both directions, up and down the branches of the
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