30 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
understanding and the most complicated scientific inves-
tigations rest on these two pillars of our spirit. Philoso-
phers have proceeded from various primal oppositions—
such as idea and reality, subject and object, appearance
and thing-in-itself, I and Not-I, idea and will, concept
and matter, force and substance, conscious and uncon-
scious—but it can easily be shown that the contrast be-
tweenobservation andthinking precedes all of these as
the most important antithesis for human beings.
No matter what principle we wish to establish, we must
either show that we have observed it somewhere or we
must express it in the form of a clear thought that anyone
can rethink. When philosophers begin to speak about
their first principles, they must put things in conceptual
form and therefore they must make use of thinking. Thus,
indirectly, they admit that their activity presupposes
thinking. Nothing is being said yet about whether think-
ing or something else is the chief element of world evolu-
tion. But it is clear from the start that, without thinking,
philosophers can gain no knowledge of such an element.
Thinking might play a minor role in the origin of world
phenomena, but in the origin of a view of those phenom-
ena, it surely plays a major role.
As for observation, we need it because of the way we
are organized. Our thinking about a horse and the object
horse are two things that arise separately for us. And the
object is accessible to us only through observation. Mere-
ly staring at a horse does not enable us to produce the con-
cepthorse, and neither will mere thinking bring forth the
corresponding object.
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