Thinking in the Service of Understanding the World 41[25]
[26]
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one Pascal^5 made to Descartes, claiming that one could
also say, “I go for a walk, therefore I am.” Certainly, I
must also go ahead and digest before I have studied the
physiological process of digestion. But this could only be
compared with the contemplation of thinking if afterward
I did not contemplate digestion in thinking, but wanted to
eat and digest it. It is, after all, not without reason that di-
gesting cannot become the object of digesting, but think-
ing can very well become the object of thinking.
Without a doubt: in thinking we hold a corner of the
world process where we must be present if anything is to
occur. And this is exactly the point at issue. This is exactly
why things stand over against me so puzzlingly: because I
am so uninvolved in their creation. I simply find them
present. But in the case of thinking, I know how it is done.
This is why, for the contemplation of the whole world-pro-
cess, there is no more primal starting point than thinking.
I will mention a widespread error regarding thinking. It
consists in saying that thinking, as it is in itself, is nowhere
given to us. The thinking that links the observations of our
experience, interweaving them with a conceptual network,
is said to be not at all the same as that which we afterward
scoop out of the objects and make into the object of our
contemplation. What we first weave unconsciously into
things is said to be something completely different from
what we then extract from them consciously.
Those who reason like this do not understand that they
- As a philosophical, mystical thinker he was the author of the
famousPenséesandLettres Provinciales.