On the phenomenality of thought – the nature of thinking and the corresponding physical pathways

Abstract

The article presents some ideas about the phenomenality of thoughts. We understand the phenomenal as the pure presence without symbolic (i.e., verbal) determination. In this respect, the phenomenal comprises the imaginary such as images, sounds, smells, tastes, touch and feelings as well as the felt atmosphere (i.e., one's feelings that fill a space beyond the boundary of the body). The phenomenal represents the earliest form of thinking. At this point, a distinction is made between matter (the biological side of thinking) and the ideal (the ideal side of the biological). The line between the two sides can only be conceptualized in an abstract and mathematical way (as a quantum structure). From this basic framework, philosophical and cultural references (e.g., to Nancy's ontology of the body and Claire Denis’ film work), as well as psychoanalytic references (e.g., to the function of the skin), are established.

Key words:

• Borromean knot
• phenomenality
• thought
• body
• consciousness

Acknowledgements

We thank Can Atli, Berlin, for his carefully philosophical reading of the first version of the text and plenty of valuable comments. Moreover, we also extend our gratitude to Sanjev Balakrishnan, London, for his support regarding the English version of the manuscript.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Notes

1 Jean Luc Nancy was born in Bordeaux on July 26, 1940, and died in Strasbourg on August 23, 2021. At the end of the 1980s, he had to undergo a heart transplant. Nancy is considered a thinker on the border, on the fringes and rims of philosophy, near the disruption (Shapiro, 1994, p. 53). Claire Denis' film L'Intrus marks an important stage in a dialogue between the philosopher and the filmmaker that lasted for years. Claire Denis, born in Paris in 1946 or 1948, reports that she read this essay overnight (Denis, 2005). While reading, she felt Nancy’s new heart inside her. Out of this experience, she made the film L'Intrus, together with her co-writer Jean-Pol Fargeau and the cinematographer Agnès Godard, with whom she had collaborated on her earlier works.

2 In the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ontology is defined as follows: “As a first approximation, ontology is the study of what there is. Some contest this formulation of what ontology is, so it's only a first approximation. Many classical philosophical problems are problems in ontology: the question of whether or not there is a god, or the problem of the existence of universals, etc.. These are all problems in ontology in the sense that they deal with whether or not a certain thing, or more broadly entity, exists” (Hofweber, 2023).

3 These Lacanian registers can be characterised as follows (see Evans, 1996; Lacan, 2012): (1) The real is something unspeakable, it cannot be imagined or represented, it lies as the intangible of the unrepresented beyond all appearances. It is the impossible. Its unruliness is the traumatic moment of the real (Evans 1996 p. 251); (2) With its pictorial dimension, the imaginary includes the world of phantasms, projections, and (projective) identifications, and therefore the principle of duality, ideality, and wholeness. The body image belongs also to the imaginary; (3) The symbolic is linguistic, and this implies something much more complex, namely that it is about the order of language, the (triadic) structure, discourse, logic, the formulae of mathematics, lack, and laws, i.e., about structures and functions that are made possible by language. The symbolic gives the imaginary a verbal meaning and structure (Evans, 1996, p. 298 ff.). Lacan describes these registers as rings that are intertwined in the "Borromean knot" (Lacan, 2012).

4 Especially traumatic aspects of the message, however, are sometimes not translatable. Therefore, real sensations can be representable as well as non-representable. Bion (1962, p. 51 ff.) distinguishes here between alpha and beta elements: Alpha elements are a transformative intermediate stage, they form the basis of pictorial ideas (I) and linguistically composed thoughts (S) (cf. Goetzmann, 2020). Beta elements (R) cannot be transformed. According to Bion (1962, p. 70), they accumulate on a "beta-screen.” In this respect, alpha and beta sensations are real, the former are representable, and the latter are non-representable. In the enclave of the real unconscious, alpha sensations are real, translatable and representable; beta sensations are real, non-translatable and non-representable. The beta sensations gather on Bion's beta-screen. But they can also be "returned" to the Other in the form of a projective identification or – as asymbolic symptoms – discharged into the body. In this respect, the unconscious communication with the Other, who serves as a container, among other things, is a thoroughly reciprocal one.

5 Panksepp (2010) wrote these emotions in capital letters to indicate that they are both ideational feelings and material brain functions.

6 In Lacanian logic, the Line can be read as a logical operator. In Seminar X, Lacan speaks of a “mirror operator” (Heimann, 2022). The operator designates the relationship between physical matter (or, better: the material multitude of the body, M) and its ideational side (RSI-A) in the shape of abstract symbolic structures. This abstraction can only be represented as mathematical (e.g., as a quantum-theoretical formula), as shown by Görnitz and Schomäcker (2012).

7 Solms and Panksepp (2012) argue that phenomenal consciousness is generated subcortically in the brainstem (i.e., in neural systems that exist from the eighth week of pregnancy). This would mean that unborn babies already have a phenomenal consciousness from the very first months of life (see also Janov, 2011).

8 Please note that Nancy does not differ between imaginary and symbolic thoughts. This difference, however, is implicit in his arguments that touch is thinking.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lutz Goetzmann

Lutz Goetzmann, MD, habilitated at the University of Zurich in psychosomatic aspects of organ transplantation. He is a professor at the University of Lübeck, Germany, and a director of the Institute for Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Cultural Studies in Berlin. From 2011 to 2020, he was head physician of the Clinic for Psychosomatic Medicine in Bad Segeberg, Germany. In 2020, he set up a psychoanalytic practice in Berlin. He is a member of the Swiss Society for Psychoanalysis and has published widely in the field of psychoanalytic psychosomatics and cultural theory.

Barbara Ruettner

Barbara Ruettner, MD, specialist in psychiatry and psychotherapy, university professor at MSH Medical School Hamburg for clinical psychology and analytical psychotherapy; Psychoanalytic training at the Freud Institute in Zurich; Psychoanalyst SGPsa/IPV. Supervisor of the postgraduate course psychoanalysis at the HIP HafenCity Institute for Psychotherapy, Hamburg. Main research focus: investigation of unconscious phenomena in interviews and images with the help of qualitative data analysis in different patient collectives (somatoform pain disorders, heart attack patients, patients after lung transplantation). Own psychoanalytic practice. Publications in the field of psychoimmunology and psychosomatics.

Adrian M. Siegel

Adrian M. Siegel is a Swiss clinical neurologist and neuroscientist. He is a professor of neurology at the University of Zurich and has published more than 200 scientific papers. His field of interest covers clinical epileptology, cognitive functions of the parietal lobe, and somatoform pain disorder.