When will academic philosophers and their concealed priesthood accept that the brain functions as a material unity and philosophise about thought in all its material forms – as it reflects the world?
For Hegel, the high-priest of ‘Reason’, we are always thinking:
‘it is also inadequate to…(say) vaguely that it is only in the waking state that man thinks. For thought in general is so much inherent in the nature of man that he is always thinking, even in sleep. In every form of mind, in feeling, intuition, as in picture-thinking, thought remains the basis.’
G.W.F.Hegel Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, Part Three of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), Trans., William Wallace, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1971, 69
Who has questioned how this assertion bears on Hegel’s philosophy (and on academic philosophy generally)? What is the relationship between ‘reason’ and dreaming?
A slice of the discussion now:
James Pagel (University of Colorado School of Medicine): ‘we use our dreams in creative process, we use our dreams in art, we use our dreams in understanding in ways that we don’t attain with conscious thought. These appear to be mind-based correlates that we can see within a dream. Now, most dreams may not show those. Most dreams are reflections of our waking life. But some dreams can be very special.’
Ilana Laps (Psychotherapist): ‘One particular dream I remember. I was considering moving to another country to study their work on trauma, and while I was there doing research I had a dream. It was a very sunny dream and I was at a conference for nurses, and it all seemed very positive until suddenly one by one all the nurses’ eyes became black and haunted, and the earth started to give way beneath me. So there was a real twist in the plot, which is one of the things that we look for in dreams. And when I woke up and I did the dream work, I felt very strongly that it was a warning dream, letting me know that that would not be a healing place for me to work. So I changed my plans. (my italics) …In general terms the logical, linear, rational part of our brain is powered down when we’re dreaming, but everything to do with our emotional life and our motivation and our memory banks are actually wide awake. So what we have is access to an uncensored landscape of memory and emotion. And of course that’s the promised land of therapy.’
ABC Radio National/All in The Mind/Dreams – windows to the mind 26.10.14
materialism, mysticism and art 
Excellent. We must be on the same wavelength – I just posted a Jung quote about dreams earlier this week. Synchronicity!
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Hello Robert, I remember ‘liking’ it. Congratulations! Scientific developments in the whole area of non-linguistic thought (dreaming, intuition and even more ‘primitive’ or ancient forms) is posing an increasing problem for academic philosophy. It is interesting that given the decline of that stage of capitalist ideology known as ‘postmodernism’, the teaching of mysticism is creeping in the most cowardly fashion towards the ‘hallowed halls’ of academe – ‘cowardly fashion’ because mysticism has the potential to blow the lid off academic philosophy. So many philosophers, assorted charlatans and ‘great thinkers’ (not to mention people in other areas [see William Franke’s 2 vol. anthology On What Cannot Be Said]) are and have been profoundly influenced by it, yet lie and have lied about that influence – all in the name of patriarchal ‘reason’, Western cultural domination and bloated egos. That is why I call mysticism the pornography of philosophy. Best wishes, Phil
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