"Thinking...is to a very large extent unconscious, in that it expresses the desire to know, and this desire is that which cannot be adequately expressed in language, simply because it is that which sustains language." (Rosi Braidotti, "Toward a New Nomadism")
"One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man's judgement of value follow directly his wishes for happiness -- that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusion with arguments." Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, penultimate and last page. For Georg Simmel, "our mind has a remarkable ability to think of contents as being independent of the act of thinking, he observes that "In desiring what we do not yet own or enjoy, we place the content of our desire outselves....When the subject is constituted by separation from the world, representation becomes the dominant mode of thinking and knowing.
If there were a verb "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative. -- Ludwig Wittgenstein.
can the nature of thinking be uncovered by thinking alone? (cf consciousness) "My dialectical method is, in its foundations, not only different from the Hegelian, but exactly opposite to it. For Hegel, the process of thinking, which he even transforms into an independent subject, under the name of 'the idea', is the creator of the real world, and the real world is only the external appearance of the idea. With me, the reverse is true: the ideal is nothing but the material world reflected in the mind of man, and translated into forms of thought." Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1,Preface to the Second Edition. (p.102) (see ideal / real )
For Aristotle, thinking is the one specific activity of the human soul which is capable of separate and independent existence from any connection to the body. A Strenuous counterargument has been made, precisely for body thinking. For Deleuze and Guattari, "becoming animal" and "becoming intense" are modes of resistance to abstract thinking.
Alain Badiou follows Aristotle in using thinking to define the specifically human, as opposed to interest. For Badiou, "the capacity which is specifically human is that of thought, and thought is nothing other than that by which the path of a truth seizes and traverses the human animal." (Infinite Thought, p. 71)
In his essay "Does Consciousness Exist?", William James pointed out that consciousness is a process, and not a substance. (unlike Descartes, who claimed the existence of a res cogitans.) In The Principles of Psychology, James described five properties of what he called "thought." Every thought, he wrote, tends to be part of personal consciousness. Thought is always changing, is sensibly continuous, and appears to deal with objects independent of itself. In addition, thought focuses on some objects to the exclusion of others. In other words, it involves attention. Alfred North Whitehead claimed that, with this inquiry, James was to the twentieth century what Descartes was to the seventeenth.
Louis Sullivan describes "real thinking," thinking in the present tense, as organic thought. "It is in the present, only, that you really live, therefore it is in the present, only that you can really think. And in this sense you think organically. Pseudo-thinking is inorganic. The one is living, the other dead. The present is the organic moment, the living moment." (Kindergarten Chats, "Thought.")
Is thinking a form of computation?