Thursday 26 January 2012

Thought Jan 2012

Just going to quickly jot some thoughts down.
Thinking about the role of symbols in our thought. How images that we carry in our minds mold our subsequent cognition, how it is as if the form of the images/representations that we take of the world come to delimit what we are then able to see/think, or at least, to influence it, maybe to facilitate it. Our representations as symbols, because they facilitate a transition somehow, the transition of the thought process itself. The transition of inner mental experience mediated/mediating our experience of the outer world.
Saw this today:
http://www.ravenrow.org/current/asier_mendizabal/
And there was talk of collective symbolisation in objects and in political representation.
I am thinking too about constructing house like structures within our imagination in order to 'house' our thought - that place that makes the ingestion of our experiences possible. What would your house be made from?
The faculties, as in Kant's, need a certain imagination space in order to fantasize. The fantasy, our visions, are secreted by the experience of living life, both physically and cognitively. Those visions are related to the thinking and experiencing, and are necessary for true comprehension to occur.
In which case we need space to be imaginative.

2 comments:

  1. The difference between the symbolic and the intuitive is not well determined in Kant. Within the realm of Kantianism most things were of course settled by him. However a system of symbols began to be developed with a new rigour after him. including classification of symbols and in another direction a Platonism of sorts of sumbols.

    If I read your tweet about things in our minds which we think through along with the problem of symbols you are certainly not limiting yourself to any sort of traditional discussions on sumbols. The things with which we think and think through, for your specific questions (a house for thought(and of thought)), Kantian schema may not be sufficient. The simplicity of the formal circle enabling the apprehension of a circular pizza and such might be limited here, for such a question -- the house for thought. Husserl's text on Fantasy in fact is a good one, for this sort of questioning. You've read that already.

    But are you not really calling for a new line questioning??

    I think we'll tweet the rest :)

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  2. Hello anon.

    Not read Hussurl, so will look into that, thanks.

    I don't know which tradition I'm thinking in, except that the experience of living with certain mental tropes for a period of time, and those tropes changing, leaves me wondering how it is that we can 'allow' these tropes to have such power I.e. certain people in our lives feature in our mental lives as symbols of conscience or warmth etc. but some people 'frame' whole periods of our thought, like partners. The division between the actual person having a direct influence on us via their actions and our mental images of them serving our own psyche is a blurry one....

    Not sure where I'm going with this, except I could do with extending my questions further into something suitable for a phd on art/aesthetics/philosophy.

    Thanks for your comment.

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