Cormac McCarthy, Unfortuantely, Writes About The Unconscious But Doesn’t Know Much About thinking, Thought, Words even though He’s a Pulitzer Prize Winning Author.

This is to correct his unfortunate misconceptions about how people think. He begins by making the absurd claim that the unconscious is a machine for operating an animal. He somehow dismisses language as necessary for thought and instead jumps into the unconscious as a way to think hence his rather absurd idea that people are animals who think with their unconscious. Here’s the simple truth about how people think. We use words. Words represent Concepts. People are conceptual beings with brains that can operate by manipulating concepts. Even though words are concepts the meaning of a concept is a bit difficult to grasp. here’s is Ayn rands definition:

A concept is a mental integration of two or more units which are isolated by a process of abstraction and united by a specific definition. By organizing his perceptual material into concepts, and his concepts into wider and still wider concepts, man is able to grasp and retain, to identify and integrate an unlimited amount of knowledge, a knowledge extending beyond the immediate concretes of any given, immediate moment.

In any given moment, concepts enable man to hold in the focus of his conscious awareness much more than his purely perceptual capacity would permit. The range of man’s perceptual awareness—the number of percepts he can deal with at any one time—is limited. He may be able to visualize four or five units—as, for instance, five trees. He cannot visualize a hundred trees or a distance of ten light-years. It is only his conceptual faculty that makes it possible for him to deal with knowledge of that kind.

Man retains his concepts by means of language. With the exception of proper names, every word we use is a concept that stands for an unlimited number of concretes of a certain kind. A concept is like a mathematical series of specifically defined units, going off in both directions, open at both ends and including all units of that particular kind. For instance, the concept “man” includes all men who live at present, who have ever lived or will ever live—a number of men so great that one would not be able to perceive them all visually, let alone to study them or discover anything about them.

Concepts and, therefore, language are primarily a tool of cognition—not of communication, as is usually assumed. Communication is merely the consequence, not the cause nor the primary purpose of concept-formation—a crucial consequence, of invaluable importance to men, but still only a consequence. Cognition precedes communication; the necessary precondition of communication is that one have something to communicate

Cormac McCarthy apparently never got to the stage explained by Ayn Rand about Concepts or he would have written a completely different treatise about how the unconscious does not think so it does not think for us.

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