Let’s take a simple hypothesis, and explore its implications:
Writing is the mirror of thought.
It seems on the face of it a compelling idea. After all, we probably wouldn’t even think about thinking absent a vast history of written philosophy. It’s not easy to imagine the concept of “thought” (as we think of it) arising in a purely oral culture. Even Socrates, that flamboyant enemy of the pen, is known to us only through the writings of others.
So if writing is the mirror of thought, what does thought look like? Let’s allow our answers to be quite naïve. Take a page of text, any text, and squint your eyes. There’s “thought” right in front of you. What’s immediately striking is how uniform it is. Linear, certainly, but not only linear. Everything looks like everything else. (The experiment is easiest if you look at a language you don’t speak.). All the words are the same height, and their difference in length is minimal: cat, dog, winter, remorse, Paris, life, ineptitude…
The message of writing is clear: thought is remarkably homogenous. It is all one and the same stuff.
Suppose this mirror is lying to us? Suppose thought is massively varied in scale, color, texture, weight, velocity and tone? Suppose thought is not only “non-linear” (a popular phrase these days) but also multi-dimensional? Suppose different thoughts erupt on totally different planes of reality? Looking at a page of writing, one would never know this.
The first step to thinking about thinking may be to pull our heads away from the page (or the screen) and allow the experience of thinking to show up as wild, multiplicitous and indescribable as it probably was when we were very small children.