Thought As Self-Conversation
“And do you define thought as I do?”
Through conversation, the charismatic communicate profound truths (or untruths), move the masses, and found religions. Talk’s power is not for them alone. We have this power over ourselves too. Self-conversation is an incredibly uplifting and destructive force. We can persuade ourselves to virtue, achievement, mediocrity, madness, or obliteration. Perhaps this is why Crates warned the young man who was “communing with himself” to “take good head; you are communing with a bad man!”1
That remark brings color to the Stoic Hecato’s line:
What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself.2
In order to befriend oneself, one must master the art of self-talk, and by doing that, one must think well. The ability to reason well returns us to the theme of conversation’s power over others. This must be why Seneca remarks that the man who is a friend to himself is “a friend to all mankind.”
Arguably, thinking itself just is self-conversation.
This idea illuminates the Stoic emphasis on language, their idea of the Daemon, and the nature of memory.
It’s an ancient one too, here’s Socrates in the Theaetetus:
Socrates
“And do you define thought as I do?”
Theaetetus
“How do you define it?”
Socrates
“As the talk which the soul has with itself about any subjects which it considers. You must not suppose that I know this that I am declaring to you. But the soul, as the image presents itself to me, when it thinks, is merely conversing with itself, asking itself questions and answering.”3
If thought is inner speech, then it requires language. As such infants and animals cannot think, unless we dilute the meaning of language. For the ancient Stoics children don’t become fully human until the age of seven – when they are able to wield language with sufficient skill. Apparently some Stoics thought that the actual age was later. Regardless of the date, because thought is self-conversation, it requires language.
Self-talk brings self-judgment and responsibility into being. To put this in Stoic terms, thought summons the Daemon, the inner spirit, that can serve as a conscience and guide. As Epictetus writes:
[Zeus] has placed by every man a guardian, every man's Daemon, to whom he has committed the care of the man, a guardian who never sleeps, is never deceived…When then you have shut the doors and made darkness within, remember never to say that you are alone, for you are not; but God is within, and your Daemon is within, and what need have they of light to see what you are doing?4
When Epictetus says that Zeus has given us each a guardian he means that through our power to speak and listen to ourselves we summon an inner judge and model for us to embody. Just as we judge the impressions the world gives us, we judge our judgments themselves.
For the Stoics, we live harmoniously when we live in accord with nature and our decisions follow the guidance of our Daemon. When we’re thinking well, we’re thinking rationally and aligned with reason. There’s a powerful alignment between Nature, the Daemon, and ourselves. Reason is active at each scale.
When we’re thinking poorly, we’re disordered. In order to maintain our self-image, we can either change what our conscience requires from us or lie to ourselves. If we distort our values to justify vice, our Daemon takes on a lower character. If we keep high standards, we lie to ourselves about how well we live up to them. In my experience, vice makes use of both strategies.
Consider how we transform our memories. We have the power to overcome difficult pasts by changing their meanings – or deceive ourselves and remember (and forget) things in a convenient fashion. Rewriting history can take us closer or further from the truth.
Everything, including memory, is in flux. Some think of memories like files we look up or photos we sift through. Memory is a snapshot of the past and that snapshot has the same character whenever we bring it to mind. But this is not so.
If thought is self-conversation, every time we remember – that is, speak and listen to our self-talk about the past – we construct it. Memories are not files that keep their character when we bring them to mind; they change each time we touch them.
This explains why we remember what we return to repeatedly, why memories that involve intense positive or negative judgments stay, and why their character mutates dramatically over time. Here the analogy of two people in conversation is instructive. How we speak about the past shapes it.
The way I typically introduce Stoic psychology may make it seem like a simple input-output process: we receive an impression, reflect on it, and then make a decision. This is a simple model and it’s not necessarily incorrect, but it leaves out the dynamic character of thought. The process of thought is like a Heraclitean river: just as you can’t step into the same river twice, you cannot think the same thought twice.5 The very act of reflecting involves change, which is then cemented in decision, only to be transformed again and again.
Our outer and inner conversations are in constant flux, but the best ones have an underlying logic. How we think and speak matters. It determines the past, present, and future.6
Seneca, Moral Letters 10
Seneca, Moral Letters 6
Plato, Theaetetus 189
Epictetus, Handbook 1.14
Technically, for the Stoics, the activity of thought may be like a Heraclitean river, but it is closer to the Heraclitean fire.
These thoughts were brought to mind by Thomas Szasz’s 1996 book, The Meaning of Mind.