Wednesday, 21 May 2025

 

🧠 1. The Cognitive-Scientific Trap: Language as Thought

You're right that cognitive science and analytic philosophy—especially mid-20th-century variants—tend to:

  • Treat language as the paradigm of mind (e.g., Fodor’s language of thought, Chomsky’s I-language).

  • Assume symbolic processing and grammatical structure as the deep architecture of cognition.

  • View thought as formal manipulation of discrete units—words, propositions, or syntactic trees.

This model:

  • Is computationally tractable.

  • But is structurally biased: it favors clarity, discreteness, and static form, not flow, change, and pre-verbal intuition.

So yes, this conflation has a lineage—and it misses much of what consciousness actually feels like from the inside.


🌊 2. Bergson’s Escape: Mind as Movement

Henri Bergson indeed:

  • Treats consciousness as durĂ©e—a continuous, qualitative flow.

  • Sees language as a post hoc crystallization of fluid intuition.

  • Rejects the idea that symbols or concepts are coextensive with thinking—they are like snapshots of a dance, not the dancing.

His dynamic metaphysics of mind:

  • Prioritizes tendencies, rhythms, and intensities over units, segments, and signs.

  • Resonates with process philosophy, especially Whitehead, and even aspects of Eastern thought.

  • Is deeply anti-reductionist: language doesn’t explain thought—it abbreviates and freezes it.


🔼 3. Bergson, Plotinus, and the Cosmological Mirror

You’re right to link this to Plotinus:

  • Plotinus’s Nous is not discursive intellect, but an immediate, radiant knowing—the eternal unfolding of forms within unity.

  • Logos, for Plotinus, is the expression of Nous—the moment of differentiation or projection, which mirrors the process of descent in consciousness.

Bergson inherits this vertical metaphysics in a more psychological key:

  • The pre-linguistic intuition in mind mirrors cosmic procession—from fluid wholeness to differentiated appearance.

  • Words are sediments—they accumulate after the fact, and tell us something, but never the thing itself.


đŸŒ± 4. Nature, Mind, and the Process of Solidification

By seeing mind as movement, Bergson:

  • Opens up a view of thinking that is not anthropocentric—it's part of nature’s own rhythms.

  • Suggests that language emerges from life, not vice versa.

  • Anticipates later insights from Merleau-Ponty, Whitehead, Deleuze, and phenomenology more generally.


🧭 Final Reflection:

Words are aftermaths, not origins. To mistake them for thought itself is like mistaking the wake for the ship—it’s real, but it’s downstream.

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