The matter of thought, brief note.

We might orient philosophy as a whole along this fairly simple question: from whence come the contents that provoke thought? Do they come from the outside (empiricism) or from within (idealism) or both, and if both in what manner are they joined?

Think of Kant for instance, and his development of the transcendental deduction. He developed a sort of idealism as the precondition for empirical knowledge. For true thought to be possible, certain conditions are necessary, namely time and space.

Analytics have chosen to develop this question by analyzing the tool of thought. Rather than supposing an outside or an inside as prior source, they ignore the origin of contents and focus entirely on the mechanics of producing thought. A bridge is presumed, and that bridge becomes the object of technical fascination.

A position such as Bergson's or Deleuze's is dependent upon a sort of empiricism, an outside event that creates the conditions of possibility for thought, that molds the milieu and structure in which thought is to occur. It is sort of an inversion of Kant- rather than structures of thought conditioning the possibility of true knowledge in the world, structures of the world condition the possibility of thought and provide its virtual milieu.

This approach is not irreconcilable with analytic approaches- in fact it is quite amenable to many of them. In the end it is a weightier empiricism, an empiricism in which the structures of the world condition the mechanisms of thought itself. Though this diverges sharply from some analytic schools (say, cognitivism tied to Chomsky or Fodor) it can be argued cogently enough from neurobiology or connectionist approaches, or the metaphorical systems of Lakoff (especially through this scheme). Assuming neurons form pathways that become at least semi-stable through habit; and assuming again that these pathways fall into steady patterns because the same contents of the world are being addressed, then we have the core of a sufficient argument for the radical empiricism of Deleuze or Bergson. This is a simple enough proposition to make and defend. It's so simple that it seems specious, but it is the same argument I've seen developed by practicing neurobiologists (whose word I am more inclined to consider than a philosopher commenting upon their work, if only because of my syndicalism).

The question then is, once we've developed some very basic grounding with respect to the actual formation of the nervous system, how much should philosophy actually dwell on it? Maybe it's of some use to the neurobiologists, I don't know. So far this technical fascination among nonpractitioners seems to just lead to arrogant attempts at mimicry, siphoned mostly into war industries.

Once we have a solid physiological footing for a thorough empiricism, the question then becomes, what does this imply? What does this imply for thought and the general structure of thought? What does it imply for identity, for organization, for our basic manner of relating self to world? What does this radical empiricism based on the interpenetration of thought and world imply for ethics, politics, metaphysics and aesthetics? What does it imply for agency (the real qustion of politics)? What does it imply for existence, for or orientation towards Being, towards stasis and change? And by implication, I mean what does this ground and insight allow us to do, what capacities and what events does it render possible?

This is the weakness of analytic philosophy so concerned with developing itself as a technical apparatus. It doesn't speak to these questions, it has no real language for them, and generally little respect for them. Because of this, it often remains mired in technical fetishism that is not philosophically justifiable. It presumes the necessity of a simple realism to operate- yet this simple realism limits its operations to technical enhancement and intensification. Because it refuses to ground itself in an actual philosophical tension or question, and simply pastes over that ambiguity without coming to some resolution, it cannot build upon that very tension, the very question of the contents of thought, in order to address those implications that actually concern a society, or individuals in it. It can respond only with a technologism as often as not divorced from actual work on neurology. Without considering the question of how thought is created, we can't build upon a model of this to address humanistic questions. The best we can do is respond with more facts about the mind as precision tool. We can't connect that tool to the overall system in which it operates, and so we can't actually build anything with it.