René Descartes is arguably our most prized philosopher. His phrase "Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am)" is a compelling thesis statement. By virtue of his methods of doubt and analysis, his position is highly defensible.
But Descartes is wrong. He built a mighty verbal fortress to defend the "I." For all his efforts to place "I" on a solid foundation of the presence of thought, he failed to define thought in the first place. As philosophy is primarily a game of representing experience symbolically, through words, he has tacitly omitted a definition of thought. He has built a fortress around a phantom.
But, you argue, "Thought is clear and distinct. Aha, I've got you, Karl!"
Nice try. You have offered me a symbol for a feeling; you've put "thought" on a platter. But your symbol is only that, not a concrete thing or event. It is just as weak as any other verbal symbol, such as love, bitterness, blue, or hot. What is hot for you is hot for you alone.
At this point no person, philosopher or otherwise, has properly thumb-tacked thought to a cork board for thorough analysis. Nobody knows how we do it or what we're doing. We feel like it's happening, but we haven't defined it. We can't point to it and say "eureka!"
Thought is a universal con act. Notice that in order to identify any "thing," you must first identify a "non-thing" against which to contrast the "thing." Thought is a devilishly clever phantom in this regard. To point to thinking, you must first identify non-thinking. As thinking is a first-person subjective event, you cannot verify its presence without crawling inside another being and linking up to that being's experiences. You may guess that a rock does not think, but you must become a rock to verify the notion.
A rock...
...not to be confused with rock music
I feel it is my responsibility as Karl to propose the following. Until we find an acceptable definition of thought, we must set aside René Descartes' "Cogito ergo sum," and instead use the working thesis "Cogito ergo dumb." The latter phrase will suffice in the interim, and it is just as philosophically useful as any other item in the philosophical canon.
Not cannon, dumbass. Canon. Sigh.
