Unthought thought

Unthought as Cognitive Foundation of Global Civilization (Part #2)

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Phenomenology: The term "unthought thought" has acquired a degree of salience following the work of the phenomenological philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Phenomenology of Perception, 1945), notably in interpreting the insights of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger (Etienne Bimbenet, Merleau-Ponty: Penseur de l'impensé, ScienceHumaines.com). The term in German is das Ungedachte and in Spanish el in-pensado (impensado, or non-pensado). Merleau-Ponty borrows Heidegger's term of the "unthought thought" to depict his own relationship to Husserl. As noted by  Diane Louise Prosser (Transgressive Corporeality: the body, poststructuralism, and the theological imagination, 1995):

The "unthought thought" is commonly recognized as a wealth of latent meaning, indwelling someone's work, but not fully articulated or exploited by the author her/himself. One could regard this as the "remainder" or "supplement" of a work which subverts the original authorial intention and yet, in doing so, calls for further reflection. (p. 49)

Following from the efforts of Merleau-Ponty to articulate Husserl's thinking on the matter, notably in the latter's Fifth Meditation on intersubjectvity, one valuable insight into its nature is offered by Richard Doyle:

... as theorist Mark C. Taylor has pointed out, the unprecedented has the highest information content, and yet is unreadable. A truly singular, unprecedented phenomenon would in some sense make no sense -- we would lack the tools of signification necessary to read or interpret it. This marks out the way in which all communication is tied to unspoken precedent, an "unthought thought," a present absence for which there can be no algorithm, insofar as the algorithmic articulation of the necessary preconditions of communication would itself be unprecedented, unreadable. (On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences, 1997)

Philosophy: In his reflection on the fundamental conceptual challenges of physics -- the unification of the forces of nature and the evolution of the universe -- a phenomenological approach is taken by Steven M. Rosen (The Self-Evolving Cosmos: a phenomenological approach to nature's unity-in-diversity, 2008), arguing that Heidegger is quite explicit about the importance of light to phenomenological thought:

After acknowledging the contributions of Hegel and Husserl in surpassing the old mechanistic objectivism and making subjectivity "the matter of philosophy... Heidegger comments that -- in this thinking subjectivity into its own, "to its ultimate givenness... to its own presence"... something remains unthought:

What remains unthought in the matter of philosophy as well as in its method? [Hegel's] speculative dialectic is a mode in which the matter of philosophy [i.e. subjectivity] comes to appear of itself an for itself, and this becomes present. Such appearance necessarily occurs in light. Only by virtue of light, i.e. through brightness, can what shines show itself, that is radiate...

Evidently then, what remains unthought in the history of philosophy is the phenomenon of light, or what Heidegger later calls energia ("that which in itself and of itself radiates and brings itself to light") (p. 165)

With respect to the "overcoming of dialectics", Antonio T. de Nicolas remarks that it:

... simply lets the miracle of light be, it leaves room for the unsaid, the unthought and the unthinkable without despising the dialectical rules, or the place and the proper function of the logos... (Avatara: the humanization of philosophy through the Bhagavad Gita, 2003, p. xiii)

De Nicolas argues for an essay to make room for a special awareness:

... an awareness of the unsaid, of the unthought, of that reality which is impermeable to the logos, above all because any trans-lation would kill it outright. (p. xi)

History of ideas: In his critical study of the human sciences and thinking, Michel Foucault indicates:

As a matter of fact, the unconscious, and the forms of the unthought in general, have not been the reward granted to a positive knowledge of man. Man and the unthought are, at the archaeological level, contemporaries. Man has not been able to describe himself as a configuration in the episteme without thought at the same time discovering, both in itself and outside itself, at its borders yet also in its very warp and woof, an element of darkness, an apparently inert density in which it is embedded, an unthought which it contains entirely, yet in which its is also caught. The unthought (whatever name we give it) is not lodged in man like a shrivelled-up nature or a stratified history; it is, in relation to man, the Other: the Other that is not only a brother but a twin, born, not of man, nor in man, but beside him and in the same time, in an identical newness, in an unavoidable duality. This obscure space so readily interpreted as an abyssal region in man's nature, or as a uniquely impregnable fortress in his history, is linked to him in an entirely different way: it is both exterior to him and indispensable to him: in one sense, the shadow cast by man as he emerged in the field of knowledge,; in another, the blind stain by which it is possible to know him (The Order of Things: an archaeology of the human sciences, 2002, p. 355-6)

Psychoanalysis: This can be related to the unthought known as framed by Christopher Bollas (The Shadow of the Object: psychoanalysis of the unthought known, 1987). It represents those experiences in some way known to the individual, but about which it proves impossible to think. At its most compelling, the unthought known stands for those early schema for interpreting the object world that preconsciously determine our subsequent life expectations. In this sense, the unthought known refers to preverbal, unschematised early experience/trauma that may determine one's behaviour unconsciously, barred to conscious thought. For Michael Robbins (Embeddedness, Reflection, Mindfulness and the Unthought Known, Systems Centered News, 2008):

Basically it refers to what we "know" but for a variety of reasons may not be able to think about, have "forgotten", "act out", or have an "intuitive sense for" but cannot yet put into words. In psychoanalytic terms, it refers to the boundary between the "unconscious" and the "conscious" mind, i.e. the "preconscious mind." In systems-centered terms, it refers to the boundary between what we know apprehensively, without words, and what we know, or will allow ourselves to know, comprehensively with words. (In many ways, although the methods are very different, the psychoanalytic goal of "making the unconscious conscious" is equivalent to the systems-centered goal of making the boundary permeable between apprehensive and comprehensive knowledge)

Strategic unknowns: From a strategic perspective this recalls the "poem" regarding the known unknowns, given widespread publicity by Donald Rumsfeld, former US Secretary of Defense, during a 2002 press conference, as discussed separately (Unknown Undoing: challenge of incomprehensibility of systemic neglect, 2008). The psychoanalytic philosopher Slavoj iek has extrapolated from the distinctions highlighted by Rumsfeld to introduce a fourth, the unknown known, that which we intentionally refuse to acknowledge that we know:

If Rumsfeld thinks that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq were the "unknown unknowns," that is, the threats from Saddam whose nature we cannot even suspect, then the Abu Ghraib scandal shows that the main dangers lie in the "unknown knowns" - the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values. (What Rumsfeld Doesn't Know That He Knows About Abu Ghraib, In These Times, 21 May 2004 ).

iek also builds the ideas of known unknowns, and unknown knowns, into a lecture on The Reality of the Virtual.

Epistemological ruptures: Also of relevance is the proposal by Gaston Bachelard (The Formation of the Scientific Mind: a contribution to a psychoanalysis of objective knowledge, 1986) -- later used by Louis Althusser -- for recognition of epistemological rupture. This is the sense in which the history of science is replete with "epistemological obstacles"-- or unthought/unconscious structures immanent within the realm of the sciences. Consequently the history of science is to be recognized as consisting in the formation of these essentially unconscious epistemological obstacles, and then their subsequent removal.

Recalling Viktor Shklovsky's concern with strangeness, another insight is that of M. K. Bhatnagar (Encyclopaedia of Literature in English, 2001):

Like negative theology, both deconstruction and denegation are intended to emphasize the strangeness of the neither/nor unthought/thought.

Unthought of relevance to Middle East conflict: The nature of the unthought is the focus of a study by Mohammed Arkoun (The Unthought in Contemporary Islamic Thought, 2002),  as noted in  a review by Ameer U. Shaikh (The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 21, 1, pp. 100-102):

The idea of unthought is a creative encapsulation of those diseases that he believes are plaguing Islam. He defines unthought as the power employed by the traditional ulama and ideological Islamic states in order to guarantee that a deeply dogmatic and unapproachable version of Islam is protected from all intellectual and scientific analysis. Arkoun uses unthought to refer to "an Islam that is isolated from the most elementary historical reasoning, linguistic analysis or anthropological decoding" (p. 308)

Arkoun wants the preferred current mode of analytic evaluation in the social sciences - deconstruction, hermeneutics, and their various poststructuralist relatives - to be applied to Islamic studies. The Qu'ran, he argues, has become heavily loaded by "legalistic instrumentalization, and the ideological manipulations of contemporary political movements". (p. 45).

A concern with the unthought in Palestinian-Israeli relations is the theme of a paper to the International Studies Association by Sean McMahon (Excavating an Ontology of the Unthought: the discourse of Palestinian-Israeli relations, 2007). He argues and concludes:

The manner in which scholars speak and write about Palestinian-Israeli relations is governed by unconscious rules, or analytics, of truthful knowledge production. These analytics, together with practices, constitute the discourse of Palestinian-Israeli relations. My paper answers two questions. First, how do truthful statements come to be made about Palestinian-Israeli relations? And second, what are the non-discursive effects of these analytics, and what should be expected of them?...Initiatives such as the Performance-Based Roadmap to a Permanent Two-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, the Geneva Accord and Israel?s Disengagement Plan (both redeployment around the Gaza Strip and construction of the ?security fence?) are articulations, and material realizations, of these analytics and practices. They are, in fact, institutionalizations of these analytics and practices and as such should not reasonably be expected to produce peace between Palestinians and Israelis.

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