Can I Learn to Think?
Zvi Szir
And Adam knew Eve his wife;
and she conceived, and bare Cain,
and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord.
Genesis 4:1; King James Bible
You can blow out a candle
But you can’t blow out a fire
Once the flames begin to catch
The wind will blow it higher
From “Biko“ by Peter Gabriel, 1980
Acknowledgement and Gratitude
I owe the creation of this work to my unsystematic study ofmany thinkers from three millennia. Philosophers, mystics, teachers and founders of religion from modern times or late modern or antiquity, be it from the West or the East, have enabled my thinking to become itself and to invitingly open adoor to it for others. I am grateful to all these people and spirits from the depths of my heart. Even so, their names are hardly mentioned in the book. I have consciously foregone the use of citations, locations and other references to the history of thought.
There are two main reasons for this. First, because the present text is in essence a workbook, I did not want to disturb the flow of thought with bibliographical notes and historical digressions. Second, I want to leave the full responsibility of what is written and thought to myself and my readers so that in writing, readingand thinking no “higher authority” should be called upon to confirm the recognition of truth.
My gratitude for these great teachers is placed in the text in another hidden, subtle form. I have permitted myself to concealin the text certain parables or interpretations of them that others before me have used or which are directly called to mind. For the unacquainted reader they form an integral part of this writing. For those in the know they also weave like a friendly greeting from the thoughts of others. Thinking is a sharedproject everyone accomplishes individually. This is because during the act of thinking we step out of ourselves and find ourselves in thinking united with others in a shared space. Thusthe exploration of another thinker’s thoughts is in a way like“living with them”; it is a friendship forming deed or at least a promise of possible community occurring in the solitude of knowing.
Without harming the intimacy of this friendship through the anonymity of listing and indexing all their names, I would like to thank at the beginning of this work all thinkers who have participated in the growth of my own thinking. I bow in humbleness and gratitude to their monumental achievements,without which this small book could not have been written. They have accompanied me, and still do, on the long path away from and beyond myself.
A special and specific “thank you” goes out to those who made it possible for this work to be completed and published. Without the help and encouragement of Natasha Neisecke, I would never have begun to write this book in German. She took it upon herself to work through my German text so that it indeed sounds relatively German. To Philipp Tok and Fabian Roschka who took on, developed and executed the graphical work. Avner Hameiri, Kurt Meier, Julitta Krebs and Gabriela Neuwirth who read through and commented on the manuscript, and Gilda Bartel, who was responsible for the linguistic editing of the text.
In the act of translation (from German into English) the text was born anew. Through the labor of language I, as author, experienced the joys and pains of renewal. It lies in the reality of thinking – again and again it strives to bring out different formulations from itself, and yet this knowledge did not save me from the drama inherent in the event. In this sense translators are midwives, and it is a joyful gift when a thinker finds such assisting translators as Jannebeth Röell and James Lee: I am indebted to you, your ability and devotion. In gratitude, I thank you.
Special thanks go to my wife Irit, who heard these thoughts in their evolving form for more than 20 years and contributed with her questions to their clarification and growth. I thank my students in the “Neuekunstschule Basel” and the participants in many lectures and seminars who unknowingly, through their listening and questions, became part of this booklet. It is their questions that made this writing necessary.
Because this work, perhaps every work, is oriented toward the future, the foremost impulse of all creation is the child and as representative of all children, your own. I thank my children without whom thinking would have been much less fun.
Thinking is not a line, but a rope wrought from many fibers, the strength of which is determined by the number of fibers, its weight by its bearing capacity.
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Can I Learn to Think?
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1. The most common response to this question is “no”. This is to be expected. We learn everything possible – painting, drawing, sewing, sports, history, handicrafts, physics – but when it comes to thinking, one of the most complex human activities, we say its mastery is a “natural” or given capacity. We all reckon we can do it or not, better or not so good. We have the tendency to assume “it is as it is”. Those who like to do it study philosophy, mathematics or science. Others become “practitioners” or believe more in “feeling”. Almost no one wants to believe that something like a “school of thinking” is possible or necessary.
2. We usually think the way we cook. Here and there we collect experiences, either at home or with friends or with “professional thinkers” or follow recipes that we collect from newspapers, media or cookbooks. Those who become professional cooks are talented from birth. It is the same with philosophers.
3. But indeed, because thinking is an activity, it can also be learned. We can practice and develop it and, what is mostessential, we can learn “how to do it”. Certainly there are some who are “more gifted” and others who are “less gifted”. But I don’t need to be a player on a national teamto enjoy a good soccer game. I just have to know the rulesand practice by playing the game.
4. And yet “the case of thinking” is not so simple. I must qualify these given analogies. On the one hand, there are no recipes and no hard rules for the activity of thinking, although there are certain forms and laws that it sometimesfollows. On the other hand, we carry a deep mistrust and resistance towards learning to think. This resistance is a categorical problem:
5. In thinking, I depart from myself. I go out of myself. I leave the house and experience the fear of getting lost, of “no longer being able to find the way back to myself”. Thinking is a departure into the unfamiliar. When I think,I place myself into the world as it is and not as I mean orwish it to be. Even when I think about myself, I must get out of myself so that I repeatedly discover “I am not what I had in mind”.
6. In thinking we ask for the truth. Its manifestation and language depends on what we are, but truth exists independently. Thinking pulls us from the subject we areout into a world that is as it is. The aversion to thinking is the unconscious fear of the subject abandoned by the thinker in the act of thinking.
7. Once the thinker returns to the state of being a subject – to use its language and experience as a medium of concept and understanding – then it is at least partially newly formulated by the imprint of knowledge that has beenacquired. To the extent that what has been grasped in thinking is more comprehensive than it was before, the subject is also comprehended anew. Thus, to a certain degree, the experience of thinking brings about an end to the subject as it was formulated and known to itself. Both this temporary elimination of the subject through thought, as well as the new formulation of who I am as subject through the world I experienced in thinking, are the foundation for the aversion to thinking.
8. While we are stepping out of ourselves, while we inquireinto what distinguishes us from what we are, thinking has no recipe and no rule, nothing predetermined by us, and no guidelines despite containing lawfulness and form. The guidelines, rules and recipes that I carry in myself and know belong to me as the subject, are how I formulated myself before I ventured out in thinking.
9. Here we must not confuse “thinking” and “logical thinking”. The latter is only one possible form of the former. It seems to determine the rules of logic in advance and thereby to form an exception. But on closer examination this proves to be a mistake. To the extent that we think logically and do not imagine logic, we must always think its laws anew. A logical machine or a thinking mechanism can imitate thinking but does not think itself.
10. If I want to know the reality outside of the subject, I must allow my thinking to be formed and formulated anew by the things that I think about. If my thoughts about the world are true, then the laws and rules to be found in the things and facts must determine the content and form of my thinking. Thinking contains the content and form of what I strive to know. The newly recognized reorganizes me assubject. In thinking, it is reality that is authoritative and definitive, rather than the subject. So I let myself be guided and formed by what I am thinking about.
11. Just as when I’m learning to dance I’m not defensive as a subject because I am learning the steps from another, in the same way I can attempt in thought to “dance” following the being of the other and knowingly take in their form and laws. If we are confident to take this step, then we can learn the craft of thinking.
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Beginning
1. The goal of thinking is the truth. Through thinking we want to know what something is. The truth or the path to the truth presents us with a series of questions: Does truth exist? How do I know something is true? Am I sure? Is it only words? What is the connection between truth, reality and the concepts describing them? (To mention but a few.) When we describe thinking as the human activity having the meaning, task and goal of knowing the truth, a multitude of questions arise that bring with them the doubtof thinking and truth.
2. If I want to learn to think, it will be my first task to make clear what thinking is and is capable of: What belongs to it? What can it achieve and what can it not? If I am capable to recognize what the conditions of knowing are, meaninghow and under what conditions I may know something, then I free my consciousness of the burden of a dull, blurred content that makes my orientation in thinking difficult, similar to the way fog on a highway makes driving difficult. The challenges of thinking contain many riddles that make it into an adventure without needing any artificial ambiguities.
3. The difficulty lies in the following paradox. I must think about thinking to clarify and grasp its content and framework, to obtain clarity about what belongs to thinking. The fact that I acknowledge this problem and face it in thinking shows me that I have started to think, even when I do not have a clear grasp of it.
4. This is a phenomenon that I know well from other realms of life. I began to walk while I was learning to walk. Here and there, reaching for support, I moved myself between the furniture and at times walked independently for short stretches, then again with support.
5. If I make the meaning of this paradox clear to myself, then I have the first necessary knowledge: thinking never starts from zero. I am already in the process of thinking when I begin to think and as I question my thinking in thinking. Every word that I learned at some time, even as a young child, contains thoughts and is something I was already working on.
6. Speaking, imagining, having an opinion and asking questions contain thought activity in an unclear form, a “muddled thinking”. As such they form the condition and foundation of my thinking, even though they should not be confused with clear thinking.
7. When imagining, I relate to my memories. I use what wasas a possible explanation or representation of what is or what will be.
8. Opinion always confirms that I do not know, that the truth remains hidden from me and at this moment I am not searching for it. If in thought I am in search of truth, then “having an opinion” means to renounce the truth. My opinion is the summary of my previous thoughts, meaning that my thinking was insufficient: “I have an opinion and thus I do not know”.
9. For me as a thinker it is essential to recognize that I never start from the beginning. Every word with which I express my thoughts is already occupied. Not by one meaning, butbecause the word contains a multiplicity of opinions and ideas as well as associations and feelings.
10. These ideas, opinions, associations and feelings express my relation to the world based on my previous experiences;therefore they are not how the world is but how I experience it. Because they are always found in advance, they serve as ground and starting point from which thinking begins to grow.
11. If I am tempted to ignore these roots of thought in experience and language, I will certainly go astray. I lose the capacity to discern between the world as it is and my relationship with it. The illusion that words have fixedconceptual values and have original and clear meaning, is just as misleading as confusing my subjective ideas with knowledge of the truth.
12. Every attempt to first understand concepts and words andafterwards “be able to think” is also an illusion. When clarifying the language, we are already thinking. A starting point for thinking outside of thinking does not exist. (It should be clear that each point with which a line begins is always part of the line. When we deal with a point that does not belong to a line, it is not the initial point.)
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Elementary Relations Between Thinking and Language
1. It is meaningful that the same thought can be expressed in different languages. For example, I can formulate the simple thought “the door is closed” also as “die Tür ist zu”. The change from English to German has not altered the content of this simple, acknowledged fact. Someone comes to me and says “bitte mache die Tür zu”. I respond “sorry, but I don’t understand German”. Then the response is “would you please close the door?” I close the door. Different languages, same thought.
2. It can become more difficult to express a thought in different languages or to translate it when its content becomes more complex. It can also be that certain thoughts are particularly clear when formulated within the framework of a language, or that a certain way of thinkingis so closely interwoven with a language that it seems untranslatable. All of these relationships and ways of relating – of thinking and thinking in relation to the language, and more – do not contradict the fact that we recognize in the first, simple example that thinking cultivates a certain unbound relationship to language.
3. I need language to formulate thoughts, but thoughts and language are in no way the same: even the formulated thought is different from its content (therefore, we have two different words for them that are not synonyms).
4. Language gives form to thinking and defines a mediating realm: the realm of thinking that we can express verbally or write down. The difficulty we have to formulate a thought points to the same. We pour an activity (thinking) into a vessel (the language). This vessel, which has or is its own form and activity, can be in the service of thinking, can besubordinate to thinking. Seeking for the right form, we“often have difficulty” formulating our thoughts, meaningto coordinate thinking and language.
5. Language is a medium for thought.
6. Like every medium, it has a determining effect on athought’s appearance. At the same time, language is formed by thought and filled with meaning and content. To mistake language for thinking, word for thought or to subordinate one to the other, is a gross error in thought. It is equivalent to an attempt to say that paints are the painting or to mistake music for its instruments. Oil paintsare not the painting, they are the medium with which one can paint. Colors as material have their own beauty, but nobody mistakes medium and image. The same goes formusical instruments: cellos, violins and trumpets are wonderful “tools”, but they are not the music.
7. Apart from missing the truth, another temptation lies in equating the two. Everyone likes an elegant, aesthetic sentence. But wise and well-formulated words easily lead to the confusion of meaning and image.
8. Language no less determines thinking, than thinking does language. We deal here with a complex, reciprocal service in which one is a medium that serves the other to make the appearance of thinking possible. A language without meaning is as unsatisfactory as meaning without language.
9. (In the truth-seeking activity of thinking, language serves the meaning and is subordinate to it. In poetry, in the activity of verse, thinking and meaning are subordinate to language so that the meaning is subordinate to the poetic experience in which truth can only be the medium.)
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Elementary Relationships of Truth and History
1. Language leads an historical existence. Words change their sense and meaning. Times and places allow for certain experiences and events and these enliven the sense of language and give structures and words new meaning. They open the language to new meanings that were previously unfamiliar. The relationship between word and sense as well as word and meaning, is not only different in each sentence, but also new in different moments and places, thus in a given historical context. If the sense was a vast landscape, then language would not exist there as a well-built city, but instead like a nomadic tent that isalways set up in different places, frequently returning to the same area but never to the exact same place. In the conglomerate of sense and language I am dealing with a fluid, mercurial, intangible reality in a constantly changingrelationship.
2. That is why the formulation and manifestation of my thinking is always conditioned by history. I think and formulate in a medium through which my thoughts appear (in my own consciousness as well as in that of others). This has a history, is history. It is always subject to the conditions of a given language as well as my inventive imagination. I always think in a certain moment and at a certain place. The activity of thinking takes place within the fabric of biography and history. Here “taking place” must be understood literally as “finding a place” or as“happening at a specific time”.
3. This disposition, this fabric of history, culture and biography, which is the foundation of any recognition and its formulations, should not be confused with thoughts and knowledge. Once a truth is known, the knowledge is unconditioned and thus independent of its formulation. The various possible formulations of the same truth andthe fact that we discover a larger meaning of certaininsights only decades after its formulation, that we become conscious of what is implied by the truth over the course of a longer period, makes it clear that truth is, unlike its medium of appearance, not historical and does not belong to this or any other moment. The thought, and the thoughtformulated in language which we often describe as “concept”, never quite coincide. They contain a categorical and permanent difference.
4. (To avoid the illusion of a definitive “meaning” or a definitive “sense”, I have decided to use “word” and “concept” and even the everyday use of the word-concept “idea” in such a way that instead of defining, plays loosely with the flowing differences.)
5. The truth of knowledge can never be reduced to a formulation within the framework of a given disposition.
6. The relationship between the “how” and the “what” of an expression of truth is one of essential difference. The written, spoken, formulated truth always differs from itself. Wording and meaning always point to an excess; or rather,to something left unspoken or to a surplus of the too broad or too wordy. If I am faced with a statement, I ask for what wants to be said and not for the meaning of the words that are part of the statement. The meaning and sense of wordshelp me; they create for me a crutch but never completely cover the sense of the statement.
7. Knowing really means to bring the truth into relation with formulation, with the medium of knowledge. Thus knowledge is composed of language and truth. This non-commitment, this loose bond and unconnectedness becomes clear in the fact that the same words can be used to explain different findings and concepts.
8. Every formulated truth is categorically different from itself and is “not only so, but also different”. Unique in the realm of thought is Mathematics (or formal logic). Because it is only form without content, it contains no differences. The formulation is equal to itself without surplus: 2 x 2 is exactly two times two and says nothing more than “two times two” or “four”. (Both forms, 2 × 2 and 4, are interchangeable according to need, without significant difference.) If mathematics is applied – to two sheep and two rams – then the difference in thinking immediately appears. It is not only four. If I use mathematics as an example of thinking, I just use the special case as an example of the case itself. By this means I avoid the complex relationship between thinking and the world and allow for complete clarity. This, however, as with any clarity, hides the risk of being empty and containing nothing other than transparency.
9. (Mathematics and geometry can serve as the clearest representations of certain aspects of reality. On one level they are the most sublime picture. But if we forget that we are only dealing with the expression of reality through the means of clarity, that we are dealing with a representation, then we confuse sense and image. We take the image as reality. Because the image also contains a range of arbitrary possibilities, it may be mathematically correctwhile not corresponding with reality. This is how conflicting mathematical and physical theories come about that are mathematically correct while at the same time not representing reality. If one of these theories is a true representation, then the other must be false.)
10. Because every formulated truth differs categorically from itself, because it cannot be equated with the associatedconcepts, because it can be described in more than one way, each formulation of the truth and each concept points to a sequence of formulations and to a sequence of concepts. Like a musical scale in which the differences can be heard as the interval and meaning of the music, thissequence calls forth a truth which reveals a dynamic character through the activation of different conceptual possibilities. In other words, through the sequence of concepts the dynamic character of the truth is unlocked. The truth is experienced as a streaming event, not as something one can hold on to. It is revealed through various concepts similar to the way streaming water is recognized in new forms when it repeatedly bangs against rocks and stones.
11. The diversity of concepts that make up a truth not only indicates numerous points of view, but also indicates the mobility and coloring that form the blurring character of language as a medium for the truth. The concepts as images relate to the truth as many pictures of a mountain relate to the mountain. (“The truth in painting” that Cézanne promises Emile Bernard in his letter of October 23, 1905, is never one masterpiece or statement, but a lifelong repetition of difference, such as the numerous paintings of the mountain “Mont Sainte-Victoire” painted by Cézanne.)
12. The manifestation of truth as the dynamic contrastbetween diverse formulations is experienced in the differences between different thinkers as well as in the thoughts of each individual.
13. Categorically we never have to deal with a finalformulation because language is conditioned by history andcan serve as a medium precisely because of its relative meaning, while the character of the truth remainsunconditional.
14. It is the relativity of language that makes it possible forwords to be carriers of different meanings. It is precisely because the appearance of sense in a word depends on other words and the construction of the sentence that the same language is a possible medium for manifesting diverse truths. These qualities are precisely what makes it impossible to come to a “final definition” or definitecomprehension of the word.
15. Just as the same colors can be used to represent a variety of things, it is also the flexible and flowing identity of words that make them suitable carriers of the diversity ofone truth. This shifting character, this varying potential makes the concept unstable, shifting, always striving for the next formulation.
16. The formulations of truth, the differing formulations of truth are the medium by which the truth expresses itself through periodic differences that can be heard, tasted, experienced and questioned. Each specific formulationdiverges from the truth, which has a general, comprehensive character. Their demarcation by a specific language medium makes this clear. This is precisely how every truth emerges in its dissimilarity from its concepts. On the one hand, truth differs from each and every conceptthat describes it. On the other hand, these concepts differ from each other. (It is again mathematics, or rather its logic, that is the exception. Because it is only language, like a formulation without content, mathematics can be applied to portray all content in the world. Althoughmathematics has its origin in experienced reality, it isuseful to us because we separated it from its origin, emptied it and thereby gave it its majestic position amongthe sciences.)
17. The creative existence of truth, its incessant production of different variations in the way it is formulated, is preciselyits life-giving power and a constant source of renewal.
18. One who imagines the truth as a static, always the same, eternal, never renewing “thing”, carries a picture of eternity as a warehouse in which a stationary object gathers ever more dust. It is this kind of subliminal idea that spoils our desire for the truth and repeatedly makes thinking seemdistasteful. Truth is not something one can find because it is not stored anywhere. Truth is activated by thinking and actively experienced through thinking, which doesn’t lead to the finding of concepts, but to their creation and production.
19. A truth that comes about through thinking behaves like a creative principle. It distinguishes itself because it is enriched and renewed through its formulation. Thus it leads repeatedly to new experiences without ceasing to be identical with itself.
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Thinking and a Dynamic Concept of Truth
1. The truth can only be grasped in the act of bringing it forth. This is what we call thinking. It comes to light in the way it is worded, which at the same time is reality. That is to say, it comes to light in its ceaseless shaping on the way from unity to multiplicity and also in the act in which I, thinking it anew, formulate the truth differently from whatit was before.
2. Thus truth can be experienced on two interwoven levels: in its new formulation and in its difference from the previous forms of truth.
3. In other words, truth is the way through which one forming activity constantly expresses itself in diverse ways. It is a creative principle that cannot be understood without its creative act (because that is what it is). Or, in different words, again: lawfulness that is not a law of something does not implement itself, does not exist, cannot be recognized as truth. Thus, truth works as a formative activity and as such shapes reality. This dynamic character of lawfulness, the bringing forth of something singular, can also be found in the form of truth that relates to the concept as a law of nature relates to phenomena.
4. Compared to the truth experienced in thinking, my ideas are only fixed images, static formulations that I hold as the truth, but which are only a temporary, limited expression of “perpetual motion”.
5. What something is can only mean how it is acting and what it is doing, effecting.
6. As we know, an action presupposes a person who acts, someone who does something and behaves in a certain manner. That is why we must speak of “behavior”. The truth we seek through thinking, what something really is, means how and what something does, how it behaves. Therefore truth is knowing the behavior of a thing. Or formulated better and differently: the being and essence of a thing, what makes it what it is, its identity, is its behavior.
7. We call the formulation of behavior through thinking thegrasping of its lawfulness. This is a repetitive model of behavior that is extracted from events.
8. The lawfulness represents the working thought to the extent that its behavior repeats itself. It does not contain the differences between the various actual events of similar behavior, but collects the similarity, that which repeats itself.
9. (“The difference between the various actual events of similar behavior…” cannot be explained through combinations of different lawfulness. It is always a surplus, a uniqueness. The beauty of a single sunrise or the smell of a rose early in the morning can never be grasped as the sum of natural law. Uniqueness is not the sum of generalities, but something radically different.)
10. The formulating thinking changes unique behavior into generalities. It abstracts the specificity from the repetitiveprocess to grasp its unity and to formulate it in conceptual language.
11. When I try to determine the truth, to set clear boundaries around its lawfulness, to “make an end to it” (“to define it”), I obtain concepts that may be easier to use, but which have in fact lost their reality, their productive character. I then have abstract concepts that are lifeless, but possibly useful. We withdraw the creative potential from the truth and define this as it was instead of what it can be, what it is becoming.
12. Without its creative aspect, without being thought of asbecoming, the truth is a concept without world, without effect and reality: it is coherent in itself, but only valuable in relation to other concepts, hence it is only mathematical-geometrical-logical. Meta-concepts are created that onlyrelate to other concepts and words as a sort of grammar or, better said, more like a grammar machine that relates concepts and words to each other without having anyrelation to actions and behavior in the world.
13. It is the task of thinking to keep the recognized truth from the illusion of being definitive without losing the recognition of its eternal effectiveness.
14. The truth does not behave like black and white – except in the mathematical-binary case – but like color: it is not really measurable, it is qualitative, changing in different lights, while there is no such thing as “the final correct” light. The light of thought, which makes visible the color of truth, reveals it “in an ever new light”, sees it and shows it in new colors and tones. This doesn’t mean that there cannot also be fog, darkness and false light.
15. A thinking that aims for concepts is unifying and immutable. But this always moves me into generality, thus into a truth that moves in a direction away from reality. If thinking strives to grasp truth as a changing, metamorphosing experience – after what I will sum up as a “dynamic concept of truth” – then endless differences contained and brought forth in a concept unfold in thinking.Now the truth moves in the direction of reality, opens in its center, thinks its potential, its coming possibilities.
16. If I now return to the concept, I can understand: if I recognize truth as that which makes something into what it is, then at the same time I point to the fact that truth as an activity brings things forth so that it must also be perceived as creative. Thought of in this way, the concept is a retrospective formulation of the behavior.
17. Thinking that is oriented to the productive, creative character of truth, concept and being, will have the character of will.
18. A thought or concept is therefore a unit of knowledge that can bring forth many differences without losing its specificity as a defined concept.
19. In other words: both knowledge and being are that which exists in the world so that it differs endlessly from itself without ceasing to be identical with itself.
20. We can think about the essence of knowing and formulating dynamic concepts and lawfulness as an analogy to jazz music. In a jazz piece there is a motif. It can, for example, be a popular song. It can be played in numerous different variations; forward, backward and in many improvised and planned variations. What is essential, the original motif which is always present or the numerous possible variations that make a good jazz piece out of it?
21. (If I begin to understand truth as a dynamic event, then I begin to grasp in a new dimension the formulation of Paul Klee “becoming is superior to being”. Also, the observation of Gilles Deleuzes that “the philosopher is anartist who forms concepts” appears rooted in the nature of truth and knowing.)
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Truth and Causality
1. If truth is always becoming, it is taking place and never given. To think the becoming means that we turn our attention from understanding truth as an identity (what something is) to truth as reality (how something is, and how it develops).
2. If being is a behavior, then truth is essentially the form and manner of action.
3. Truth actively working is reality; it is that which works when something is in the process of becoming and makes it into what it is. In this sense truth is the direction of unfolding and development; the defining objective. To the extent that truth is becoming, it becomes more meaningful, more true.
3.5. Becoming is the essence of truth.
4. Truth as an existing identity is an abstraction. It becomes something apart from its “taking place and behavior”, that is a theoretical, momentary stagnation. Being true is only real as a self-transforming activity, thus true. Real thinking will always seek for the active power of truth in the living relation between a theoretical-provisional identity and transformation.
5. The truth of something is grasped in the way being and thing constantly differentiate from themselves. This difference is the real identity of truth which doesn’t let itself be captured any more than the special sound of a trumpet player. The unique sound of a gifted musician isthe way in which her or his singular play is always changing. Although the musician always plays something different, I can hear through the music her or his “sound”constantly differing from the piece on the one hand and, on the other, from itself.
6. With this experience of change, I connect my thinking with the experience of time.
7. That which takes place sequentially is an event in time and as such, confronts me with the question of causality. To what extent does a fact have its cause in something else? Conversely, what do I mean when I say that this happened because of that?
8. The questions “what and how something is” and “why is it so” are separate questions indicating two different kinds of truth. “Why did it take place?” “Because this and that was so and so”. We accept causality as an explanation, as knowing how it is, without perceiving that it only answers the “why” but not “how” it is. If we explain why it is cold, it doesn’t explain to us what coldness is, what “being cold”is.
9. In cause-and-effect thinking, we shift the explanation of a phenomenon to a previous one. In contrast to logical thinking in which a closed unity is assumed (if X = 0.5Ythen 2X = Y, and also its inverse), causal thinking forms an open sequence that seems to continually distance itself from the question.
10. Cause-and-effect are arranged in a sequence in which the meaning of each part is always to be found in the previous fact. I cannot derive a logical truth from it, but can only determine it by observation. That is why causality should be described as a type of empirical thinking. (In thinking,the logical behaves like a circle, the empirical like a straight line.)
11. This type of practical reasoning is justified to the extent itdeals with relative causes. We reach the limit of causal explanation when we look for the absolute or first cause. The causes are then traced back to a cause-free first causeand this does not have a causal explanation. It is then only in a general sense relevant for the initial question and forms in itself a different, noncausal type of question.
12. In the same way that logical thinking is a radicalpossibility of thinking that completely encloses itself in a circular and tautological manner, ignoring reality, so is causal thinking a form of thinking that is completely opento transformation from the outside. In a linear and serial way, one change follows the next without pointing to a common essential direction. Meaning and cause are moving away from each other with each step in the sequence. With each step, the causes have less significance. With distance, the “result” we look for loses its reasonable relationship to the cause.
13. If we want to free the causality from its relativity, meaning to question the truth of things, then we must first follow the causes back to their source, where they were free of cause. If we are unsuccessful, then we should give upstriving for something that is unconditional and declare truth to be relative.
14. (We can illustrate the relative causality of truth as follows: “water boils because it was heated to 212°F. It was heated because I pushed a button. I pushed it because I want a cup of coffee. I want coffee because I want to write a text…,etc. So the water boils because I want to write a text”.)
15. To begin with, we will clarify what we mean by causality. Causal thinking means that everything has a reason or that nothing is without cause.
16. So everything is explained by a previous cause. “What is happening now happens because of what previously took place”.
17. Every cause seems to have its own cause that has again its cause. How does it begin? What is the first cause, the first reason?
18. Upon more accurate reflection, a beginning has three categorical possibilities:
18.1 There is a first reason, an original cause. Because everything has a cause, the first cause must have the cause in itself.
18.2 Reality is a circle in which cause-and-effect are turning around. If there is a “final action”, then that would be the cause of the “first action”, etc.
18.3 The sequence of causes extends into infinity. We can always take a step backwards and find a “previous cause”.
19. The first thought is empty: if something is the reason foritself, it cannot be the reason for “what” or “how” something is because the cause is integral to what it is. Soit has no cause. It simply is what it is. If this is true, then not everything has a reason.
20. If reality is cycling in a repetitive circle of cause-and-effect, we arrive at the eternal recurrence of the same. In this case everything or event is the cause of itself and there is no cause, no reason (as I described in the previous paragraph).
21. When the series extends itself into infinity, meaning there are infinite previous causes (as in the third possibility), then the reason is always another, a previous one and thus not the reason itself, and therefore is not the cause. An infinite regressive “shift” of the reason devalues the cause. “It is still not the root cause”. So there isn’t an ultimate cause, no ground, no reason.
22. If this is the case, then all three possible relationships to the cause are impossible and we must determine that the idea that “nothing is without reason” (“nihil est sine ratione”) is a mistake, an unproven fixed statement, an axiom that cannot pass the test of thinking or reality.
23. The meaning of this realization is that something can take place, can exist without cause, without reason.
24. It is difficult to find that which is free of cause or even to trust our thinking at this point. We have the tendency to interpret the cause as an explanation or reason, as the most important clarification of what is essential. Something without reason or cause seems to have no meaning and is difficult or even impossible to name. That which has no reason seems to us to lack being.
25. Simply put, we usually confuse cause and sense as well asreason and being. Most of the time our thinking ispractical. Here, however, we are forced by thinking to give up this habit.
26. We describe that which has no cause, “that which does not happen because of this or that”, as unconditional. As suchwe know it to be a kind of love – love that is unconditional and needs nothing, which is free of desire and asymmetrical. (I love and my love is not determined by feelings or by the behavior of the other.) This overused word, love, describes here a responsibility that is not anchored in duty, guilt or gain.
27. This kind of love has no reason, no cause, no meaning. You cannot love in this way to attain something because you want it. If you want something, then it is desire. If oneloves because of something, then it is “love on probation” and is subject to rules, is conditioned by satisfaction and is not what is to be understood by the love described above.
28. So: love in this way has no cause, no necessity, no reason.
29. That which is groundless and free from reason and cause acts as the root cause of everything. It is itself unconditional and stands first in the “chain of things”, in the sequence of causes.
30. This “groundlessness” alone can be the cause and the source of all that is conditioned. It is the primal condition.
31. When I think, I know love to be the cause and source of all things. Love is thereby also the cause and foundation of hatred and evil.
32. The possibilities of evil, good and freedom are related tothe beginning of the cause. Good and evil are possibilities that have love as their root cause.
33. Only at the transition from the groundless depth of cause-free love – which is infinitely deep because it is groundless – to well-founded causal activity, is the possibility createdfor evil and the good that arises from it. Consequently, the question of freedom arises.
34. It is the distance between action and the unconditional cause-free reason, along the chain of causes, that determines the degree of unconditionality and free behavior.
35. Love in this sense as an unconditional interest and responsibility, as unconditional connectedness, is the end orbeginning of the chain of causes. While thinking it guides us from causal to essential thinking.
36. As a primal cause it is also naturally the foundation of thinking, its cause and reason.
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Thinking and Love
1. In what sense is thinking anchored in love so we can say love is its cause?
2. Only in retrospect, after we have thought for a while, can we ask about thinking (see chapter 2). It is through thinking that I think about the being of thinking, searching for its truth, thus for the behavior of thinking.
3. Thinking always begins at the other, with something I think about, with something different, something outside of myself. Even when I think about my own thinking, when I ask myself “how do I think?”, I cannot think about the present act of thinking while I am doing it. I must think about it as if it is separated from myself by turning toanother act of thinking.
4. Thinking always leads me out of myself, beyond myself to something that is initially separated or excluded from me. When I think about “my hand”, “my heart”, “my feeling”,or even “my thoughts”, they are “mine”. They are at first something that I (in the midst of thinking) am not, but areseparate as my possessions while I am thinking.
5. The same is valid for everything around me. I can think about it because, at least in my consciousness, it is grasped as apart from me, not as me, but as something other, as world, environment, nature.
6. The fact that I can think myself as one with the world,anchored in the world, inseparable from it, is irrelevant here. In my conscious understanding the world is at first unknown, something other. Thinking always presupposes something that is unknown or unfamiliar.
7. In this sense, thinking is an activity by which I can bridge the gap to things so that I know in thought how they are. It allows me to understand the behavior of the other, to comprehensively reconstruct it.
8. In other words, while I am thinking I can cross the distancebetween me and the other in such a way that I can followits behavior, insofar as I am able to recognize it in my consciousness. I can see through it so that it’s clear to me.
9. But what does “learning” or “knowing” mean? What do I imply when I say that I recognize something?
10. When I recognize how to tie a double knot, then I can do it myself. To the degree that I recognize how to dance salsa, I can do it myself. When I recognize how to multiply, I can do arithmetic. To the degree that I recognize how others think, I can think their thoughts myself.
11. It is possible that while my hands are paralyzed I still recognize how to tie a double knot, but I can only follow it with my eyes or in my mind. I cannot do it myself. It is the same for all activities that are outside of my consciousness.
12. However, I have only understood arithmetic or the thoughts of another in so far as I can carry them out myself. Saying “I understand how to multiply, but I cannot do it myself”, means I do not know it yet. When I say “I understand you but I cannot follow your thoughts and give them back in my own words”, I mean that I do notcompletely know.
13. I have only understood what lives within my own or another’s consciousness, that which concerns thinkingwhen I can do it myself, when I can copy it, imitate it, comprehend it.
14. Recognizing what is outside consciousness, in action or in nature, is the capacity to follow the same with consciousness, imitate it through the means and medium of thinking, first of all through language. My capacity and the possibility I have to carry this out beyond thinking is dependent on the constitution I have at my disposal. Someone with paralyzed hands can know how to tie a knot and explain to someone else how it is done, even though they are unable to.
15. Recognizing means to become conscious of how something takes place, how it is done, behaves, being able to do it in thought, to carry it out.
16. How the other feels, how the planets turn, how a plant grows, I carry out in thought and inscribe in language. That is the medium which manifests the activity mirrored in my consciousness. I can experience my thinking reflected in language, communicate it, know it.
17. Like any mirror, language is not transparent; I must grasp the meaning of what is said in thought. Formulation allows thinking to become conscious of itself. When I speak or write I “see and hear” what I think. (This requires some caution. Mirrors, as we all know, invert things and sometimes seem “wrong”).
18. Mirrored in language I experience what my thinking has formed, what I have experienced and reconstructed from the world and the other. How do I experience this source of forming impulses (the other) that formulate my thoughts through thinking? How do I get out of myself?
19. If I only use my senses, then reality would always appear as things appear to me from my point of view – physicallyas a point of view and mentally as attraction and repulsion. I would never have known the world as it is, but only as it is for me (which happens often enough whenever I perceive and imagine it without actively thinking).
20. When thinking leads beyond myself, then I must give up my point of view, my being as a subject. I do not formthoughts as I am, but how the thing is that I want to know. I make its behavior, its position in the world, its point of view into my own. I immerse myself in it.
21. In this case “immerse” also means waking up. I wake up in the other. The content of my consciousness is no longer I, but the other. I must, if even for a moment, “renounce”myself as a subject and make “what concerns them” into “my concern”. For a short moment of cognition I am, at least concerning my consciousness, you, the other that is to be known. I abandon myself while remaining completely active, conscious of myself as the activity of one separate from me, a stranger.
22. In thinking I am a stranger. (I think, therefore I am, but not myself.)
23. The capacity to put myself unconditionally and completely into the service of the other, to pull myself out of myself and make the other’s will into my own, see and act from its perspective, no longer to exclude it, but to experience myself as included in it, this is a capacity that can be known as the primal condition of thinking which we call love.
24. Love is the only impulse that from its unconditional state can lead to unconditional knowledge.
25. When thinking is seeking for the truth and asks how the world is, then love is the only force that can be at the foundation of knowing. As thinking, it becomes the force to leave oneself behind, essentially to wander out so that I can wake up in the other.
Epilogue
Having worked through this text, you know from itscontent that it must be categorically rewritten, that the formulation of thinking is only a formulation that shouldproduce the next. It is therefore urgent to formulate these thoughts anew. And at the same time, it is completely superfluous. Reading is precisely the activity in which language and ideas give away their character as raw material and invite us, in each reading, to form a new and different comprehension.
Yes, the formulation of thought in this text is far from exhaustive and is naturally, as with all formulation, not final. Yes, it should be rewritten and, no, it does not have to be. Where the writing failed, the reading should be successful.
Editors
Gilda Bartel
Natascha Neisecke
Translators – German to English
Jannebeth Röell
James Lee