L'Unità del Pensiero

Manifesto for the Unity of Thought

The stasis of Thought

First of all, it must be clear and accepted honestly by all that creative Thought has been in a phase of stasis for a long period; once this has been clarified, the causes which have resulted in this immobility must be identified and brought to light. This type of identification must be based on the conviction that Man’s thought has not been depleted, but that it is having difficulty in developing.  I think that it is not enough to identify the causes in historic and social justifications, meaning in different periods and places (thought these too are important factors), nor can we allege philosophical reasons and impute this phase of stasis to the mysterious laws of the Spirit. What I believe is (based on my own personal theoretical principles) that this phenomenon results from an inadequacy of the human intellect which can no longer elaborate creative intuition according to ancient and outdated logical and cultural schemes.
The intellect must regenerate itself according to new and efficient methods, allowing it to cluster together around in all creative ideas, even though often these may be somewhat obscure. This gives ideas a logical and comprehensible form, thanks to reasoning. In short I am saying that the non-development of Thought in the speculative field is the result of the intellect’s inadequacy to rationalise creative intuition. Therefore intuitive and creative Thought cannot be embodied in ancient forms, but it needs different conditions and different modes of expression, which must also be more precise. Creative Thought must use the intellect, which is logically more genuine and also more critical; for this reason, the rational maturity of Man is today ready to accomplish this important and historical step. However, in order to succeed in this process the rules of Thought must be changed by means of a cultural revolution and all of us must give up all ingenious and improvised schemes of reasoning which today cannot be legitimised any longer.
Signs of this discomfort have already been apparent: Logical Positivism and the Philosophy of Language in general have easily and precisely identified the logical and semantic weaknesses of the Systems of Thought, even though after a precise critique a correct therapy came to lack: in fact it is not possible to force intuitive Thought into forms of scientific expression, since the latter is indeed only a consequence of Thought. Science is made up of an advanced phase of the process of rationalism of intuition, while the language used by the Thinkers is even more ancient and imbued with intuitive obscurity, and is still waiting to be clarified. The recent movement known as Hermeneutics has tried to find a solution to all this – the art of interpretation or rather, reading between the lines and trying to reveal “true” meanings. But even in this case, there are no certain and common rules which can be followed, and all proposed conclusions are very debatable and dubious.

How and what to change

First of all, Thought demands that its significant Unity be recognised, and it is this Unity which our Manifesto aims to promote against the chaos created by contrasting opinions, be they true or false. The Unity of Thought is the common objective of those who believe that Thought is unique and of those who believe that it is not possible to passively encourage the uninhibited development of “many truths”, a competition between wise men, revealing in this way a very embarrassing paradox. Those who sincerely believe that Thought is unique must be willing to overcome all that opposes this Unity. They respect the right and the utility of having different opinions and respect them, but consider them as being only transitory, like infantile illnesses from which children usually recover very quickly. However if in the past the paradox of having a number of truths was forgiven due to the deprivation of a unifying method, today this is no longer tolerated, since today it is theoretically possible to interpret and challenge  the systems of Thought, and to explain their similarities and their differences. However, criticising the Past does not mean rejecting it. The Past must be recreated to harmonise different opinions, while for the Future it is necessary that Mankind makes a greater effort and not perform the same errors of the Past, assuring that Thought is logically only one and represents the Truth, and that it’s dialectic is to reconcile and not to contradict, which has always resulted, especially in the last century, in pain and sorrow. New proposals and deontological rules must be set down to which all Thinkers must abide by: a new methodology of Thought on “how to think” rather than “what to think”.

Aim of the Theory

Thus in this manner a new interesting field of Thought is created with two precise branches: the first aims at analysing the ancient systems of Thought, with the task of recreating them according to an adequate methodology which can also determine the differences, and thus freeing these systems from the historic stagnation they had found themselves in; the second branch aims at the future, thanks to the examination of rules and the principles necessary to have a correct organisation both of intuition and of the different ways of reasoning, so that the errors of the Past are not repeated. In fact, pre-unity reasoning was diverging and represented the primitive phase of the human intellect, to which the convergence of Thought was completely unknown. The theory of the Unity of Thought can be applied to all disciplines which express themselves by means of language, and which do not utilise the formalism of the mathematical sciences: philosophy, sociology, politics, morality, law, aesthetics, psychology, pedagogy, etc: these disciplines are not insufficient when compared to Science, but are to it complementary, with a conceptual unitary vision.

Towards the Unity of Thought

The implementation of the programmes which this Manifesto proposes needs a primary condition, that of a psychological task which each one of us must accomplish on his/herself to achieve the level of maturity needed from our new task. We must be modest and declare that our Thoughts do not belong to us (and so we feel that me must defend them), but that they belong to a common heritage and to all Mankind. Thus let us leave behind us this primitive cult of the personality and all those who believe in it, because the intellect cannot be used as armour of vanity, neither can it acquire an intransigent originality created from economics measures or power.
Thus it is important to be reunited, and our availability towards others does not interfere at all with our personality and with our work, neither can intellectual auto criticism humiliate us more than unsustainable ideologies, often based on the remixing of one’s own ideas or those of others. Unitary Thought is basically collective, but it must be clear that the reconciliation of ideas does not absolutely mean that each one of us must contribute towards a unique and infinite Truth thanks to one’s own intuition, be it big or small, and there will be a place for all. Freedom of Thought is the legitimate point of departure, but cannot be the point of arrival. Let us now master all there is to know in this Science, and every one of us will be enriched thanks to a common knowledge.
There us one further psychological effort which we must accomplish. A cultural revolution does not take place simply by changing opinion, but must bury down to the same origins of our Thoughts, thus verifying the foundations of our Knowledge. Therefore, not “I think….” but “I think …. because….”, or rather we must give a reason for our own opinions in order to discover in an honest manner the principles governing these thoughts, whatever these may be. Whoever wants to adhere to the Manifesto must be ready to accomplish this new form of maieutics on his/herself, and thus discover one’s own basic roots: this is a logical and psychological task which I have defined as “protoanalysis”. At this stage we can understand that contrasting opinions are given life in a kind of knowledge which lacks its foundations; if a profound analysis of one’s own cognitive principles is completed, we will discover an extraordinary and unknown conceptual structure.

The method: the Past

The very first step leading to the Unity of Thought considers the Past and philosophical reconstruction, since the field of Philosophy is much more extensive in general. The history of Philosophy can be represented in the form of a gigantic mosaic, the pieces of which have been assembled not in a logical and unified interpretation, but divided in groups according to an unexpected historical development and separated only by an etiquette bearing the name of the Author. A complete design cannot be obtained if this arbitrary repartition is not violated, and is often made up of unsteady theories, because only the coherence of Mankind can lead to the Unity of Truth. This is a righteous reconstruction: why should we worry about disintegrating so many theories when we never bothered about the dismemberment of Thought, which we ourselves have so foolishly caused? Why should we keep Thought divided instead of a having a useless stage of Thinkers ?
Whenever we try and “shuffle the cards”, the first step is to demolish all personal systems and extract the concepts expressed, and create new anonymous groupings. But this distribution should follow a very precise method of examination, which can only be briefly outlined in this article. The systems created by the Authors must be analysed with care, both in their inner sector and also must be compared to the others, with the aim of identifying analogies, synonyms, identities, and other characteristic figures, apart from looking for the profound conceptual structure of the Author which has created his Thought, using these protoanalytic methods. Other factors must too be evaluated, such as at what degrees are irrationality (due to obscure intuitions) and rationality present. An idea of an Author can be “summed up” to that of another author, since it may be the case that certain ideas result weak or senseless if analysed individually, but acquire sense if examined as a whole. Some concepts are moved from one system to another, since it can also be the case that in a system 1 a weak text emerges very confusing meanings, while in a system 2 the same concept finds a better and more adaptable reference. Moreover, sometimes with a bit of luck, a particular theory can host affirmations and concepts which belong to other theories, explaining them as one, while previously they were two separate divergent and often in contradiction between themselves.
In brief, as can be seen, we can also make use of appropriate methodological rules which are free from the scientific rules. Up to now it has been unthinkable of having rules of thought, since the Unity of Thought was not in the objectives of the intellect, which was still in a primitive and un-reconciling stage. Only Eclecticism went close to these positions, but unfortunately its search for Truth in a number of theories resulted in the rejection of the parts it considered to be erroneous, and therefore the evaluations were completely personal and bore the Author’s signature.

 The method: the Future

The commitment to the future is linked to research, to the examination and application of a series of rules which have been reorganised to accomplish this objective. This is a new methodology which although it accepts all types of content, even if it is meaningful or meaningless, coherent or contradictory, however it regulates its use of “ideological values” in a discourse. This concept is created from the principle that each expression of Thought is considered as part of an itinerary completed by a creative idea starting from a state of intuition to that of a rational idea. It is also conceived from the ideological value of an expression which is represented in any type of aggregation, in a given moment and due to the rationalisation of the intellect. In other words, the ideological value represents the degree of intellectual maturity of a creative idea at a particular point.
In this manner what results is a “controlled” type of discourse where every Thinker declares the ideological value of his declarations. However, the following must be specified and clarified: if our expressions of Thought are only of an intuitive type or only of a rational type, or if they are a combination of both (in this case the prevailing type must be identified). On the other hand if the expression is an intellectual elaboration free from intuition, this must be specified in the same manner, in such a way that – even though these elaborations are culturally useful and common – no confusion is creating between analytic reasoning, intellectualism, synonymity, redundancies or other forms of this type, and creative expressions elaborated on intuition. In this Manifesto it is not possible to discuss all the other principles on which this new theory is founded, but I would like to mention the following two as an example:

-        The principle of the Unity of Thought, for which there is no place for contradiction if one is not ready to reconcile.

-        The principle of the antecedent, for which every affirmation logically derives from another one which implies it, and which is either known or should be considered only as a task hypothesis.

Conclusions

The Manifesto here comes to an end, after this brief and synthetic exposition (hopefully comprehensible) of a vast and ample theory which – I hope – will allow Thought to achieve its natural Unity, even though Mankind has done its best to avoid it, even if in good faith or to maintain intact its privileges. Certainly this theory is severe but the treatment is necessary, since the Science of Language could not live up to the severe criticism made by the formal sciences. For this reason our examination opens new research prospectives and a large number of areas of implementation and application – in such a way that Thought can be given the status of “Science”, which is a sad truth since it is Science which has been created from Thought. What’s more – the theory of reconciliation of ideas does not only possess a scientific valence, since its moral conclusions are also very important. If we manage to think in a correct manner, maybe those fundamental conditions through which we can achieve the so longed-for virtue in the heart of all Mankind: peace to avoid pain and sorrow.   

Rome, October 2002

                                                                                                   Giovanni Sansonetti