263.
Order and disorder in thought
With babies, thought is erratic, incoherent, in what
the philosopher William James called ‘a blooming, buzzing confusion’. As they
develop coordinated movement, in focused action, thoughts mirror this in some
coherence, in neural configuration. Then comes the miracle of language to
further form and order thought.
Montaigne withdrew from public life to his castle,
disenchanted by the hypocrisy, cowardice, mediocrity, and inanity there. He
withdrew into himself and to his dismay found his thoughts flying off in all
directions. He found that he had to discipline his thought in the order of
writing them down, addressing some indeterminate audience.
Wittgenstein argued against the possibility of a
private language. Meanings of words need to be stabilized in the order of
discourse.
In sum, one needs others to stabilize one’s thoughts.
Nietzsche was insane for the last ten years of his
life. One speculation about it is that his insanity was due to a syphilis that
purportedly he contracted from a whore, seemingly the only time he had sex in
his life. I offer an different possible speculation. Nietzsche argued for will
to power, sublimated in transcending the self, overcoming resistance of the
self to its transformation. Pain, suffering is an inevitable part of that, a
price to be paid. Nietzsche certainly had his share of pain and suffering.
Physical pain from a chronic migraine. Mental pain from loneliness and
isolation. His one friend, Paul Ree, with whom he had a triangular relationship
with Lou Salomé, was ultimately chosen by her over him. His earlier infatuation
with Wagner’s wife Cosima was dissolved in his break with Wagner. Nietzsche
ostensibly believed in self-transformation, in lifting himself from the swamp
by his own bootstraps. I wonder: could this have contributed to his insanity?
As I argued extensively in this blog, one needs
opposition from others to correct and develop oneself. To order one’s thoughts
it helps to write them down, as Montaigne discovered. It may help even more to
call in the discipline of logic, or mathematics, if possible, to get a grip.
But response from others, rejoinder in debate, yields a more powerful boost.
One needs that to get out of rigidities, ruts, vicious
circles of thought. In this blog (item 49) I argued that it contributes to the
highest level of freedom: freedom from one’s prejudices.
However, perhaps discourse, harnessed in language, is still
too structured, too limited in its scope of variety. Perhaps one also needs more
random sources of disturbance. The role of randomness for learning is shown in
so-called genetic algorithms in computer science, inspired by the evolutionary logic
of random mutations of genes and
cross-over of parental chromosomes to generate new forms of life. Earlier in
this blog (item 35) I referred to the ‘neural Darwinism’ developed by Gerald
Edelman, which applies such evolutionary logic to the brain.
And how about dreaming? And mind-blowing drugs like
LSD? I recently read in a newspaper
article that MRI scans of the brain show that patterns from LSD are similar to
those of sleep and of babies.
Perhaps thought requires an alternation of order and
disorder: order of language and logic, minor disorder of shifts from discourse
and debate, and more radical leaps of disorder in dreaming. Perhaps this
entails the same logic as the one for invention that I developed before, which
also included a dialectic of order and disorder, in assimilation and
accommodation, in exploitation and exploration, with convergence and divergence
(see item 35).
In item 137 of this blog I suggested that this may be
linked to the dialectic of Yin and Yang in Taoist philosophy.