Thinking in the Service of Understanding the World 37But for everyone who has the capacity to observe
thinking—and, with good will, every normally constitut-
ed human being has this capacity—the observation of
thinking is the most important observation that can be
made. For in thinking we observe something of which we
ourselves are the producers. We find ourselves facing
something that to begin with is not foreign to us, but our
own activity. We know how the thing we are observing
comes about. We see through the relationships and the
connections. A secure point has been won, from which
we can reasonably hope to seek an explanation of the
other world phenomena.
The feeling of having such a secure point caused the
founder of modern philosophy, René Descartes, to base
the whole of human knowledge on the sentence, “I think,
therefore I am.”^3 All other things, all other events, exist
without me, but whether as truth or as fantasy and dream,
I cannot say. I am absolutely certain of only one thing, for
I myself bring it to its secure existence: my thinking. It
might have another source for its existence. It might come
from God or somewhere else. But that it exists in the sense
that I bring it forth myself—of that, I am certain. Descartes
initially had no justification to ascribe a different meaning
to his sentence. He could only claim that, in thinking, I lay
hold of myself in the activity that is, of all the world’ s con-
tent, the most my own. What the tacked-ontherefore I am
- René Descartes (1596–1650). French philosopher and mathemati-
cian. Author of the famousDiscourse on Method (1637). See also
Rudolf Steiner, The Riddles of Philosophy.