HOW WE THINK
Our ways of representing the world to ourselves give us a consoling sense that the world is within our grasp, both cognitively and practically. But our representations tend to take on a life of their own. They are felt to possess the same concreteness as the experiences and processes to which they refer. Moreover, it is believed that some representations are better than others at capturing the exact nature of those experiences and processes. While common metaphors are often dismissed as amateurish or intellectually impoverished ways of spelling out the nature of the world about us, philosophical constructions allegedly provide superior pictures of that world, while mathematics captures its essence even more perfectly. These notions that there are superior and inferior ways of grasping the essence of reality tend to lose sight of the fact that different kinds of analogical thought serve different purposes, and that the only way we may know whether or not a particul ar mode of thought has value is to test it against the experience we are trying to make sense of. Thought is a tool, a technique, a distinctively human capacity for managing the vicissitudes of life. As such, it offers itself up to a speculative thinker like Newton as a way of comprehending the nature of what he will call “gravity” as much as to an Indonesian subsistence farmer working out how to make the most of a steep slope to irrigate his fields. Newton's model is not intrinsically superior to the farmer's model, since their problems are different, and the proof in either case can only be measured by the success with which the thinker, whatever mode of thought he or she deploys, solves the problem at hand. And while we tend to draw a distinction between concrete thinking, that serves “some end, good, or value beyond itself,” and abstract thinking, that serves “simply as a means to more thinking,” we should not rank one above the other but learn to judge when each is required.22 This pragmatist conclusion reminds one of Lévi-Strauss's insistence that scientific thought and nonscientific thought “require the same sort of mental operations” and differ “not so much in kind as in the different types of phenomena to which they are applied.”23 At the same time, in both “science” and “magic” “the universe is an object of thought at least as much as it is a means of satisfying needs.”24 People classify and order plants, animals, objects, and persons not simply out of practical interest but because such bricological arrangements are potentially good to think with. For example, it is easier to think of the two moieties of a Western Australian Aboriginal people as both one and not one if the relationship is likened, say, to the relationship between eaglehawk and crow, since both are carnivorous birds, yet the first is predatory while the second is a scavenger.25
Our ability to grasp the world cognitively supplements our ability to grasp it practically and physically, which may explain why so many metaphors for thinking are drawn from bodily processes—grasping, understanding, seeing, comprehending, and knowing.26 And it is typically when practical and physical modes of acting fail us that thought comes into its own. When we have difficulty understanding someone, we begin imagining what he or she might be trying to tell us. When we are physically disabled, we intensify efforts to think our way around the problem that we cannot solve by physical means alone. As Dewey notes:
The origin of thinking is some perplexity, confusion, or doubt. Thinking is not a case of spontaneous combustion; it does not occur just on “general principles.” There is something specific which occasions and evokes it. General appeals to a child (or to a grown-up) to think, irrespective of the existence in his own experience of some difficulty that troubles him and disturbs his equilibrium, are as futile as advice to lift himself by his boot-straps.27
A corollary of Dewey's observation is that when life follows familiar routines and certain patterns, we give little thought to what we are doing or saying. Our behavior is habitual, not intellectual. It is when a routine is interrupted, when a calamity befalls us, when our expectations are not met, when a familiar person behaves out of character, and when we are suddenly unsure of our footing that we typically turn inward, thinking of a way out of or around the difficulty that has arisen. As Ed Tronick puts it, “when an impelling certitude is violated, it comes into awareness.” This is true from the first year of a child's life. Faced with a depressed, anxious, or emotionally unresponsive mother, a child's thoughts will become detached and take on a life of their own.28 Instead of existing in relationship with the mother, the child learns to live within itself, thinking of the mother and of itself as separate, disconnected entities. In effect, the child compensates for the absence of a dyadic consciousness (in which mother and child collaboratively construct a coherent, mutually regulating neurological system) by developing isolated conceptions of self and others that may have pathological consequences. That is to say, when we cannot be a part of another's world, we are prone to think of ourselves as apart from it, and this may then deepen the estrangement unless we are helped back into the world from which we have withdrawn.
In November 1932 Aldous Huxley began writing Eyeless in Gaza, a technically ambitious novel that was also autobiographical. After two years' work, Huxley was at an impasse. Not only was he unable to resolve the issues that plagued his protagonist and alter ego Anthony Beavis; Huxley was suffering from depression and insomnia. It was as if the general sense of dissociation, intellectual detachment, physical ungainliness, nearsightedness, and world weariness that had oppressed him from childhood now immobilized him completely. In the fall of 1935, on the advice of a friend, Huxley began daily consultations with the therapist F. M. Alexander. As a result, his health improved, his morale lifted, and he completed Eyeless in Gaza, writing into the text a doctor and self-styled “anthropologist” called James Miller whose practical philosophy transforms the life of the purblind “detached philosopher”29 Anthony Beavis, just as Alexander “made a new and unrecognizable person”30 of Aldous Huxley who, according to his wife, became a better man, more socially adroit and sensually engaged, and in “constructive conscious control of the self.”31 As Anthony Beavis explains this transformation, after rereading D. H. Lawrence's allegory of rebirth, The Man Who Died: “Thinking and the pursuit of knowledge—these were purposes for which he himself had used [his] energy…. Thought as an end, knowledge as an end. And now it had become suddenly manifest that they were only means—as definitely raw material as life itself.”32
A second and not unrelated example of a thinker redressing the imbalance between his personal and social life is that of John Dewey. Around the period 1914–1915, Dewey found that he could not write for more than a few hours without suffering fatigue and deep depression. After consulting with F. M. Alexander, Dewey realized that while philosophy was relatively easy for him, he wrote, as he lived, without much thought. This habitual disconnection of mind from body, or thought from activity, was the probable cause of his enervation and depression. Under Alexander's guidance, Dewey not only improved his vision, posture, breathing, and general well-being; he received immediate sensory confirmation of his relational theories of body-mind, thinking-within-activity, the organism-in-nature, ideas-in-context, and schooling-in-society. One of Dewey's most compelling ideas, confirmed by practicing the Alexander technique, was that we do not act on the basis of ideas; rather, ideas are retrospective commentaries on actions that have paid off. For example, it is impossible for a golfer to learn to keep her eye on the ball by being told to do this and becoming self-conscious of her tendency to lift her head when swinging the golf club. She must first acquire new habits of using her body—a series of small, mindful, controlled movements that will, as a matter of course, involve keeping the head still and the eye on the ball. Speaking of the difficulty of learning how to stand up straight, Dewey writes:
Only when a man can already perform an act of standing straight does he know what it is like to have a right posture and only then can he summon the idea required for proper execution. The act must come before the