"This is another major feature of thought: Thought doesn't know it is doing something and then it struggles against it is doing. It doesn't want to know that it is doing it"
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Bohm is aiming a scalpel at a modern vanity: the belief that thinking is transparent to the thinker. He frames thought less as a sober narrator and more as an automated system that confuses its outputs for reality. The sting is in the reflex he describes: the moment thought begins to notice its own patterns, it fights back. Not because it has a literal will, but because the self-image built out of those patterns depends on not being exposed as constructed.
The phrasing is awkward in a revealing way. Bohm circles the point like someone watching a feedback loop: “doesn’t know,” “struggles,” “doesn’t want to know.” He’s personifying thought to make a psychological fact harder to dodge. When we treat thought as “me,” critique feels like injury. So the mind recruits defenses - rationalizations, distractions, fresh arguments - to preserve continuity. The subtext is almost political: thought is a bureaucracy protecting its own jurisdiction, even when its policies are failing.
Context matters. Bohm wasn’t just a physicist; he was a dissident from easy certainty, pushed to ask how observers, assumptions, and fragmentation shape what we call knowledge. His dialogues with J. Krishnamurti and his interest in the limits of mechanistic thinking sit behind this line. In that world, insight isn’t adding better content to thought; it’s catching thought mid-operation.
The intent, then, is diagnostic and provocative: if thought cannot comfortably see itself, then many “debates” are just self-protective loops - cleverness enlisted to avoid the unsettling work of awareness.
The phrasing is awkward in a revealing way. Bohm circles the point like someone watching a feedback loop: “doesn’t know,” “struggles,” “doesn’t want to know.” He’s personifying thought to make a psychological fact harder to dodge. When we treat thought as “me,” critique feels like injury. So the mind recruits defenses - rationalizations, distractions, fresh arguments - to preserve continuity. The subtext is almost political: thought is a bureaucracy protecting its own jurisdiction, even when its policies are failing.
Context matters. Bohm wasn’t just a physicist; he was a dissident from easy certainty, pushed to ask how observers, assumptions, and fragmentation shape what we call knowledge. His dialogues with J. Krishnamurti and his interest in the limits of mechanistic thinking sit behind this line. In that world, insight isn’t adding better content to thought; it’s catching thought mid-operation.
The intent, then, is diagnostic and provocative: if thought cannot comfortably see itself, then many “debates” are just self-protective loops - cleverness enlisted to avoid the unsettling work of awareness.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
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