38 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
might mean has been much disputed. But it can be mean-
ingful only under one condition. The simplest statement
that I can make about a thing is that itis, that it exists. I
cannot immediately say how the existence of anything en-
tering the horizon of my experience might be character-
ized more precisely. To determine in what sense an object
can be described as existent, it would have to be examined
in relation to others. An experienced event can be a series
of perceptions, but it can also be a dream, a hallucination,
and so forth. In brief, I cannot say in what sense an object
exists. I cannot derive its existence from the experienced
event itself, but I can learn it when I consider the event in
relation to other things. But there, too, I cannot knowmore
than how it stands in relation to those things. My search
finds firm ground only when I find an object the meaning
of whose existence I can draw out of itself. As a thinker, I
am myself such an object. I endow my existence with the
definite, self-reposing content of thinking activity. From
there, I can now proceed to ask whether other things exist
in the same or in a different sense.
When we make thinking into an object of observation,
we add to the rest of the observed world-content some-
thing that normally escapes our attention, but we do not
change the way in which we relate to it, which is the same
as to other things. We increase the number of the objects
of our observation, but not our method of observing. As
we observe other things, a process that is overlooked in-
termingles in world events (in which I now include the act
of observation itself). Something is present that differs
from all other events, and is not taken into consideration.
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