🧠 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 durée—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.

---

🌱 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.