Cormac McCarthy asks an interesting question here, and gives the wrong answer, also interestingly. Along the way he manages to describe in simple language a fundamental problem of how our minds work, one that he rightly says, remains mysterious – though I think I have a clue.
McCarthy briefly retells the story of Kekulé, who struggled to understand the form of the benzene molecule. A dream of a lizard biting its own tale (like Ouroboros) prompted him to realise that the molecule was a ring. So we may conclude that Kekulé’s unconscious had done the work for him and found the solution. McCarthy rightly contends that most of our problem-solving, our maths and so on, is done unconsciously. We can reason about things consciously using language and other symbols explicitly, but it is a very slow, clunky and ineffective business. In fact the main point of doing this explicit reasoning (writing out propositional calculus or hand-simulating the running of a computer program for example) is usually to drag into conscious, recordable form the logic or processes we would normally use unconsciously.
The problem posed by McCarthy is: why didn’t Kekulé’s unconscious just tell him the answer, instead of sending it as an esoteric symbol in a dream? The unconscious understands language, he says, or it wouldn’t have understood the problem Kekulé was trying to answer in the first place (I don’t think that is clearly true). He concludes that the unconscious has been running our mental lives quite successfully for millions of years before language came along: it therefore distrusts and dislikes language and prefers other ways.
That isn’t right. Part of the problem here is too strong a separation between conscious and unconscious, which are really just the silent and the talky bits of the same process. Kekulé’s unconscious could not speak to him in words because any mental content that is in the form of language is automatically part of consciousness. Or to put it another way, his unconscious did tell him the answer in words, the words (let’s say) ‘By golly, benzene is a ring!’ But those words appeared as thoughts of Kekulé’s own, necessarily conscious thoughts. They were certainly put together by unconscious processes: as McCarthy recognises, all of our conscious verbal thoughts and utterances are constructed by unconscious processes – or we should get involved in an infinite regress.
How does the unconscious pull all this off? I have claimed before that our conscious thoughts and much of our higher cognition is grounded in recognition. The recognition of larger entities from smaller ones (and back down elsewhere) allows us to leap from present stimuli to distant, future or hypothetical ones, and finally into the realm of abstraction where we can recognise even the pure forms of mathematics. When we think about a problem, we do not typically do computations or talk to ourselves (though we might do that too). We hold the problem in mind and wait for our faculties of recognition to identify something that makes sense. I’m sure that’s what happened in Kekulé’s mind.
The same processes ultimately ground our use of language. As I have suggested, the grunt emitted when digging the dry riverbed can be recognised as part of the digging process, another part of which may be the desirable item of water. The grunt can therefore become an invitation to dig: and I think invitations and commands probably came before names.
Anyway, though I have a somewhat different answer, I think McCarthy is, as it were, digging in the right place with the right tools..