I said Derek's recent response to Mando's citing painters, sculptors.
hummer-whistlers, dancers, musicians, as people who are clearly harboring
thoughts
without words, is so objectionable it deserves its own posting. Here it is.
Derek responded to Mando:
"But those are other ways of expressing thoughts. The idea of a thought
minus any form of expressing it seems unthinkable to me. What would the
thought
be about? One would have no way of saying. So it would be a thought without
content? Is there such a thing? A thought about nothing - a
'nothing-thought'. Perhaps in the higher reaches of Zen or something, but I
leave that to the
aficionados."
This is an unacknowledged flat reversal of his assertion earlier:
"How do we know what the thing is until we have found words to describe it?
Are there wordless thoughts? I don't think so."
Right up till his responding to Mando's good observation, Derek had
maintained that WORDS were necessary for thought. Now, under irresistible
pressure, he
changes his position. Yes, there can be thoughts without words if there is
another way of expressing the thoughts.
Notice he begins with the word 'But' as if to suggest it is MANDO who has
overlooked something.
Moreover, everything he says in his response assumes the very point at issue
-- which WAS that words are necessary to thought, but which he's now changed
to a "form of expressing it" is necessary. Exactly what he has badly failed to
support is his notion there can be no thought without words. He ridicules the
notion of a writer's having a thought before he finds his words to express it
as "thought without content". No. The writer's thought has loads of
thought-content. It is a notion. Once he has the notion, the writer's job is to
find the
words to convey it.
The writer is not "minus any form of expressing his thought". He has a FORM
"of expressing it": language. He may struggle for a long time to find the
right language -- while the idea is already there. Derek continues to confuse
THOUGHT with the EXPRESSION of the thought. Until that happens he would call it
"a thought about nothing - a 'nothing-thought'." Which is again to insist that
the thought and its expression are inseparable. Which can't be right because
we know many thoughts precede our finding the words to express them.
(A throw-away argument: A woman in agony cries, "There's no way to express
this pain!" Derek says, "Well, if there's no way to express it, it's without
content. Thank goodness we don't have to worry!")
Mando has Derek. Derek's position -- "Are there wordless thoughts? I don't
think so." -- is untenable. Why does he cling to it?
I submit from this and his long history with us that Derek cannot bring
himself to accept he's put forth an idea that is mistaken. Similarly
unacceptable
is that someone is saying something he might learn from -- which would entail
the implication that someone had an idea he hadn't thought of. As I've said,
I recognize that generic personality, because I saw flashes of it in myself in
my late teens and early twenties.
I outgrew it, though not graciously, not in public. I don't know what Derek
thinks when he's offline, but I had an unshakeable habit of reviewing in
solitude arguments I'd "won" -- by which scare-quotes I mean arguments I'd lost
but
could not concede at the time. If the other guy had been right, I had an
uncomfortable but irresistible (and lucky) way of finally admitting it to
myself --
in solitude. When I had this happen enough, it began to slow me down in party
confrontations.
The other "mellowing" influence on me was finally achieving something in
life, and sustaining it. Of course, "achievement" was what got me in trouble in
the first place. I'd always been the class smarty-pants, and in a narrow
juvenile way I came to feel that was "who I am". So if I made mistakes, that
was damn
bad news for my psyche. What I achieved later was finally earning my keep,
becoming a good "provider" for those who depended on me, which included
employees. The sustaining was critical, because if you managed it long enough
you came
to see you didn't have to be right every single time -- merely enough of the
time. In fact I eventually found that admitting to my colleagues things I'd
blown was a good idea because it allowed them to admit things too, not hide
them.
So here I am, admitting like crazy, still in hopes of influencing.
**************
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