"I suggest that the Cartesian paradigm should be reversed, and that the paradigmatic setting and circumstance of intellectual thought is not the solitary meditation by the stove but the public argument for and against some claim made: the supposition is that we learn to transfer, by a kind of mimicry, the adversarial pattern of public and interpersonal life onto a silent stage called the mind."
— Hampshire, Stuart (1914-2004)
Work Title
Place of Publication
Princeton
Publisher
Princeton University Press
Date
2000
Metaphor
"I suggest that the Cartesian paradigm should be reversed, and that the paradigmatic setting and circumstance of intellectual thought is not the solitary meditation by the stove but the public argument for and against some claim made: the supposition is that we learn to transfer, by a kind of mimicry, the adversarial pattern of public and interpersonal life onto a silent stage called the mind."
Metaphor in Context
[...] With literary artistry and a sense of drama, Descartes presented the paradigm of thought as a process in the inner consciousness of the solitary thinker, sitting beside his stove.
I suggest that the Cartesian paradigm should be reversed, and that the paradigmatic setting and circumstance of intellectual thought is not the solitary meditation by the stove but the public argument for and against some claim made: the supposition is that we learn to transfer, by a kind of mimicry, the adversarial pattern of public and interpersonal life onto a silent stage called the mind. The dialogues are internalized, but they still do not lose the marks of their origin in interpersonal adversarial argument. Viewed in this way, the mind is the unseen and imagined forum into which we learn to project the visible and audible social processes that we first encounter in childhood: practices of asserting, contradicting, deciding, predicting, recalling, approving and disapproving, admiring, blaming, rejecting and accepting, and many more. A child observes the family scenes, the conflicts in which the adults around him discuss and decide, assert and contradict each other, and he soon finds no difficulty in a solitary imitation of these exchanges. Any person hears the different kinds of dialogue as regular forms of behavior and quickly recognizes both the subtle and the gross differences among the types of public dialogue occuring in typical social situtations.
(11-12)
I suggest that the Cartesian paradigm should be reversed, and that the paradigmatic setting and circumstance of intellectual thought is not the solitary meditation by the stove but the public argument for and against some claim made: the supposition is that we learn to transfer, by a kind of mimicry, the adversarial pattern of public and interpersonal life onto a silent stage called the mind. The dialogues are internalized, but they still do not lose the marks of their origin in interpersonal adversarial argument. Viewed in this way, the mind is the unseen and imagined forum into which we learn to project the visible and audible social processes that we first encounter in childhood: practices of asserting, contradicting, deciding, predicting, recalling, approving and disapproving, admiring, blaming, rejecting and accepting, and many more. A child observes the family scenes, the conflicts in which the adults around him discuss and decide, assert and contradict each other, and he soon finds no difficulty in a solitary imitation of these exchanges. Any person hears the different kinds of dialogue as regular forms of behavior and quickly recognizes both the subtle and the gross differences among the types of public dialogue occuring in typical social situtations.
(11-12)
Categories
Provenance
Reading Derek Melser's The Act of Thinking (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 50.
Citation
Stuart Hampshire, Justice is Conflict (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2000).
Theme
Theater of Mind
Date of Entry
04/17/2014
