Hannah Arendt, in THE LIFE OF THE MIND (1977), quotes Plato’s Socrates as saying that “thinking is the soundless dialogue between me and myself.” This prompts Arendt to talk about the “Two in One” aspect of the thinking ego, and quotes the curious observation of Cato: “Never am I less alone than when I am by myself, never am I more active than when I do nothing.” That is to say, when he is alone having a silent dialogue with himself. Thinking, even though it is “doing” nothing in the sensible world, is nonetheless understood as a kind of activity — a pure activity? –that emerges in the mind when we “stop and think” — when we suspend our bodily activity, become detached from the world of our sense experience, and immerse ourselves in thought.
Arendt also maintains, without detailed explanation, that we can only think in language — that language is the medium of thought. So these reflections — these words that reflect (L. “bend back”) a thought from the silence of thinking to the written or spoken language that we access through sense perception (seeing graphic symbols or hearing phonemes) — lead me back to the thinking activity and to expressing that activity in written language. The result of that activity lead me to ask a question: Must the dialogue between me and myself be silent? Reflecting of that question — that is, bending that question back from “me” to “myself” — the “I” of “myself” answers back to “me,” NO, THE DIALOGUE NEED NOT BE SILENT; IT CAN BE SOUNDED OUT IN LANGUAGE WHEN YOU TALK TO YOURSELF OUT LOUD.
When I am alone, or when I am walking with my dog out in the woods or fields, I often talk out loud, sometimes declaiming, but usually asking and answering a question. So, today, as Bella and I walked on a path through the woods of a nearby park and down a ravine towards a river, I sounded out aloud: “Why must the act of thinking — the dialogue between me and myself — be soundless?” And the answer came in the form of a question: “Are you not thinking now? And are you not having a dialogue expressed in spoken language?” And I answered that question thus: “Yes, I am thinking now, and I am expressing my thinking in auditory language; therefore, the act of thinking need not be silent.” And then the “me” that initiated this dialogue with a question responded thus: “So, in order to have a dialogue one must have two interlocutors, each of whom can speak and hear. When I speak aloud to myself, I hear myself speak and I attend to that speaking ‘thoughtfully’ that is, my listening is geared to responding in a rational way.” To which my dialogue partner, myself, responded thus: “So, the ‘two-in-one’ aspect of the thinking mind — the ‘dialogue between me and myself’ — need not be soundless. When I talk to myself, I speak and I listen at the same time. I listen to a question I pose to myself, I hear it, process its meaning, and then respond in speech that reflects my answer. Do you find that answer to your original question satisfactory?” To which I answer thus: “Yes. I am satisfied that what Socrates said about thinking being a ‘dialogue between me an myself’ need not be qualified as being a ‘soundless’ or ‘silent’ activity, for I can articulate that thinking process — not just the results of that process but the process itself — in spoken language when I talk to myself.”
Of course, for prudential reasons, I try to engage in such activity when I cannot be seen or heard by other humans. My dog, Bella, seems be undisturbed by this behavior. She apparently has other things on her mind.
RES PUBLICA 