a very quick note

on Gary Norris' comments on Nick Piombino's remark that "the final thought of thought / is freedom from thought." Gary's challenging and multi-faceted entry deserves much more attention than this, but I want to bring up a question that's been nagging me since I read it. What do we gain by inserting a separation between thought and language, by describing language as the "clothing" of thought, or saying something like "we use language as tool to express out thoughts"? Perhaps thought isn't "clothed" at all, but actually is, for lack of a better way of putting it, the activity of language generating, organizing, reorganizing itself. To my admittedly limited view, this seems a simpler yet entirely sufficient description of the phenomenon of "expression", and I wonder whether the insistence that language expresses pre-existing thoughts is a theological one. (I'm reminded of a debate I had with a photographer friend who preached the gospel of digital photography. I insisted that an image on film is something "special" in way that a digitized image can never be. Film, I argued, literally imprints reality itself. Light touches the film and permanently alters its chemical composition, whereas digital photography produces a mere representation of reality by analyzing it, encoding the results of its analysis, then re-producing an image of reality based on the encoded information. My friend said my argument had no practical currency and was at best, a theological point.) Yet even if we intend to make a "place" for the soul by insisting on the possibility of a non-linguistic thought, couldn't we frame an analogous debate in terms thought and the "soul itself"? That is, couldn't we insist that the soul isn't reducible to thought, that thoughts are tools for expressing the soul? If so, couldn't we maintain the identity of language and thought without squeezing the soul out of our description?

In a related but somewhat tangential question, aren't we dealing with something of a third-man argument whenever we try to model expression as emanating from a subjective in-itself? In other words, even if we assert an identity of thought and "soul", can't we then say "well, there's clearly a 'core' soul and a part of the soul which expresses what goes on in this 'core' soul, and this expressive part of the soul is what we call 'thought'" . . . ?