IVIV (1) Thinks He's Hallucinating

[alice wellintown]

>   "'Thinks he's hallucinating.'" (IV, Ch. 1, p. 1)

Is she talking to us? No, Alice, silly girl, it's the way people talk.
But, my dear Humpty, it's as if she has walked on stage and now
provides an authorial comment on another player, in this case, Doc.

And suppose he does think he's hallucinating?

Suppose we change the sentence from the vernacular, add the subject
pronoun,  so,   "HE" thinks he is hallucinating.

He Thinks,  He is.
 "He thinks, therefore He is"
"He is thinking, therefore He exists"

"Cogito, ergo sum" (Usually translated in English as: "I think,
therefore I am", but can be less ambiguously translated as "I am
thinking, therefore I exist" or "I am thinking, on the account of
being"), sometimes misquoted as Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum
(English: "I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am"), is a
philosophical statement in Latin used by René Descartes, which became
a foundational element of Western philosophy. The simple meaning of
the phrase is that if someone is wondering whether or not they exist,
that is in and of itself proof that they do exist (because, at the
very least, there is an "I" who is doing the thinking).

(fr. WIKI)


Descartes, recall, seeks in his own individual existence a truth that
is independent of that existence. After much study and travel, He
makes himself the object of his study. From his famous statement above
it DOES NOT follow that YOU or ME or ALICE or anyone else exists. Each
thinker must follow the process that Descartes went through, founded
on his own "Cognito," in order to establish for him or her self the
truths that Descartes established for Descartes.

The roots of this Turn inward in Western thought,  can be traced to
Protagoras (Man is the measure of all things) and to Xenophanes who
writes:

The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black,
While the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair.
Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw,
And could sculpt like men, then the horses would draw their gods
Like horses, and cattle like cattle; and each they would shape
Bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of their own.

And is evident in Montaigne's essays, in William James, in
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Walt Whitman, Dostoyevsky, others.