Notes on Philosophical Thinking

Dedicated to Herbert Marcuse on his Seventieth Birthday¹

If one is obliged to say something about philosophical thinking, stopping in midstride as it were, and not wanting to slip into the arbitrary, then one should confine oneself to just a single aspect. Therefore I want only to recount a few things I believe I have observed in my own thinking, without going into the question of what thinking is in general or into the psychology of thought. In this regard it is useful to separate philosophical thinking from what is thought, from its contents. This brings me into conflict with Hegel’s unsurpassed insight into philosophical thinking. According to him, the fissure between what is thought and how it is thought constitutes precisely the error, that bad abstraction it is the task of philosophy to correct by its own means.² It is ironic that philosophy so easily arouses the fury of common sense* by being mistaken for the very abstractness it struggles against. It is certainly better—as in prephilosophical knowledge so in philosophy—not to proceed without a measure of autonomy of thought in relation to its subject matter. The logical apparatus owes its immeasurable improvement beyond primitive consciousness to this autonomy. It contains, intensified, at the level of content, the force of enlightenment that marks the historical development of philosophy.³ Yet as it became autonomous and developed into an apparatus, thinking also became the prey of reification and congealed into a high-handed method.⁴ Cybernetic machines are a crude example of this. They graphically demonstrate to people the nullity of formalized thinking abstracted from its contents insofar as such machines perform better than thinking subjects much of what used to be the proud achievement of the method of subjective reason. Should thinking subjects passionately transform themselves into the instruments of such formalization, then they virtually cease being subjects. They approach the machine in the guise of its imperfect replica. Philosophical thinking begins as soon as it ceases to content itself with cognitions that are predictable and from which nothing more emerges than what had been placed there beforehand. The humane significance of computers would be to unburden the thinking of living beings to the extent that thought would gain the freedom to attain a knowledge that is not already implicit.

In Kant thinking according to its narrow, subjective concept—that is, divorced from the objective rules of logical thought—appears under the name of spontaneity.⁵ According to him, thinking is first of all an activity, such as registered by naive consciousness when it distinguishes sensory intuitions—the impressions that seem to be granted to the individual without any exertion on his part—from the experience of the strenuous activity that is involved in thinking. However, Kant’s greatness, his ability to subject even his own so-called fundamental positions to a tenacious critique, proved true not least of all when, completely befitting the actual nature of thinking, he did not simply equate spontaneity, which for him is thinking, with conscious activity. The definitive, constitutive achievements of thinking were for him not the same as acts of thought within the already constituted world. Their fulfillment is hardly present to self-consciousness. The illusion of naive realism, the view that in experience one is dealing with things-in-themselves, is based, as one could read in Kant, also on the following: the acts through which consciousness in anticipation forms the sensible material are not yet conscious to it as acts: that is their “depth,” thoroughly passive.⁶ This idea is characterized system-immanently by the fact that the “I think, which must be able to accompany all of my representations,” the formula for defining spontaneity, signifies nothing more than that there exists a unity of subjective, indeed personal, consciousness; and thus that, with all the difficulties involved, it is “my” representation, which can be replaced by that of no other. No one can reproduce the pain of another in one’s own imagination. The transcendental apperception comes down to the same thing.⁷ Defined by its mere affiliation, the “I think” itself becomes a passive entity, completely distinct from the active reflection upon a “my.” Kant thus captured the passive moment in the activity of thinking faithfully, just as even in his most precarious propositions his impressive honesty constantly attends to what presents itself in the phenomena; the Critique of Pure Reason is already, in the sense in which Hegel later entitled his analysis of consciousness, a Phenomenology of Spirit. Thinking in the conventional sense of this activity is only one aspect of spontaneity and hardly the central one and in fact is localized solely within the region of what is already constituted, correlative to the world of things. At the level Kant calls the transcendental, activity and passivity are by no means administratively separated from each other in the way suggested by the external architecture of the philosophical work. This passive moment conceals the fact, which Kant did not mention, that what is apparently independent—the originary apperception—is actually dependent upon the objective realm, however undetermined it may be, and which in the Kantian system took refuge in the doctrine of the thing-in-itself situated beyond experience. No objectivity of thinking as an act would be possible at all if thinking in itself, according to its own form, were not bound to what is not itself properly thinking: this is where one must seek and work out what is enigmatic in thinking.⁸

Where thinking is truly productive, where it creates, it is also always a reacting. Passivity lies at the heart of the active moment, the ego models itself on the non-ego. Something of this still affects the empirical form of philosophical thinking. In order to be productive, thinking must always be determined from its subject matter. This is thinking’s passivity. Its efforts coincide with its capacity for such passivity. Psychology calls this ‘object-relation’ or ‘object-cathexis.’⁹ However, it extends far beyond the psychological dimension of the thought process. Objectivity, the truth of thoughts, depends on their relation to the subject matter. From the subjective point of view, philosophical thinking is incessantly confronted with the necessity of proceeding via its own internal logical consistency and nevertheless also of accepting what is different from it and what is not a priori subject to its own lawfulness. Thinking as a subjective act must initially surrender itself to the subject matter, even when, as Kant and the Idealists taught, thinking constitutes or indeed even produces its subject matter. Thinking still depends on the subject matter even when the concept of a subject matter is problematic and thinking alleges that it first establishes it.¹⁰ There is hardly a stronger argument for the fragile primacy of the object and for its being conceivable only in the reciprocal mediation of subject and object than that thinking must snuggle up to an object, even when it does not yet have such an object, even intends to produce it.¹¹ In Kant, such factuality of method finds its expression in the content. It is true that his thought is indeed directed toward the forms of the subject, yet it seeks its goal in the definition of objectivity. Despite the Copernican turn, and thanks to it, Kant inadvertently confirms the primacy of the object.¹²

The act of thinking can no more be reduced to a psychological process than to a timelessly pure, formal logic. Thinking is a mode of comportment, and its relation to the subject matter with which it comports itself is indispensable. The active moment of the thinking process is concentration. It struggles against whatever might distract it from the matter at hand. Concentration mediates the exertions of the ego through what is opposed to it. Hostile to thought is avidity, the distracted gaze out past the window that wants nothing to escape it; theological traditions such as that of the Talmud have warned of it. The concentration of thought bestows upon productive thinking a quality the cliché denies it. Not unlike so-called artistic inspiration, it lets itself be directed, to the extent that nothing distracts it from the matter at hand. The subject matter opens up to patience, the virtue of thinking. The saying, “genius is diligence,”¹³ has its truth not in a slavish drudgery but rather in this patience toward the subject matter. The passive connotation of the word “patience” expresses well the nature of this behavior: neither zealous bustling about nor stubborn obsession but rather the long and uncoercive gaze upon the object. The current scientific and scholarly discipline requires that the subject disengage itself for the sake of a naively imputed primacy of the subject matter.¹⁴ Philosophy contradicts this. Thinking should not reduce itself to method; truth is not the residue that remains after the subject has been eradicated. Rather, it must incorporate all innervation and experience into the contemplation of the subject matter in order, according to its ideal, to vanish within it. Mistrust of this is the current avatar of hostility toward thinking. It fastens upon reflective thinking in the narrower sense, which reveals itself to be useful not through zeal but by dint of its dimension of passivity and concentration. Its calmness retains something of that happiness the conventional notion of thinking finds unbearable.¹⁵ The Americans have their own pejorative expression for this: armchair thinking*, the behavior of one who comfortably sits in an easy chair like a friendly and superfluous grandfather enjoying his retirement.

Yet the malicious resentment against the person who sits and thinks has its detestable justification. Frequently such thinking behaves as if it had no material. It plunges into itself as though into a sphere of alleged purity. Hegel denounces this sphere as empty profundity.¹⁶ The chimera of a Being that is not commandeered or defiled by anything concrete is finally nothing other than the mirror reflection of a thinking in itself, completely indeterminate and formal. It condemns thinking to the parody of the wise man gazing at his navel; it falls prey to an archaism that by undertaking to save for philosophical thinking its specific object—which should not at any price be an object—forfeits the moment of the subject matter itself, the nonidentical. Wisdom today simulates a historically irretrievable agrarian form of spirit, cast from the same mold as those sculptures that mime originality by practicing a protohistorical naiveté and by this ceremony hope to attain an ancient verity that never existed and that nowadays the late industrial world supplies only all too faithfully.¹⁷ The synthetic archaism of philosophizing will fare no better than the plaster of Paris classicism of Canova and Thorwaldsen compared to the Attic classics.¹⁸ But there is just as little ground for transforming reflective thinking into a form of indirect practical activity; that would only foster, from a societal perspective, the repression of thinking. It is characteristic that independent academic institutions were established, reactively, to offer those appointed to them the opportunity to meditate. Without a contemplative moment praxis degenerates into conceptless activity, but meditation as a carefully tended special sphere, severed from possible praxis, would hardly be better.

Certainly reflective thinking has not been described accurately enough. Most likely it should be called expansive concentration. By gauging its subject matter, and it alone, thinking becomes aware of what within the matter extends beyond what was previously thought and thereby breaks open the fixed purview of the subject matter. For its part the subject matter can also be extremely abstract and mediated; its nature should not be prejudged by a surreptitiously introduced concept of concretion. The cliché that thinking is a purely logical and rigorous development from a single proposition fully warrants every reservation. Philosophical reflection must fracture the so-called train of thought that is unrefractedly expected from thinking. Thoughts that are true must incessantly renew themselves in the experience of the subject matter, which nonetheless first determines itself in those thoughts. The strength to do that, and not the measuring-out and marking-off of conclusions, is the essence of philosophical rigor. Truth is a constantly evolving constellation, not something running continuously and automatically in which the subject’s role would be rendered not only easier but, indeed, dispensable. The fact that no philosophical thinking of quality allows of concise summary, that it does not accept the usual scientific distinction between process and result—Hegel, as is known, conceived truth as process and result in one¹⁹—renders this experience palpably clear.²⁰ Philosophical thoughts that can be reduced to their skeleton or their net profit are of no worth. That countless philosophical treatises are philistine and could not care less about being so is more than just an aesthetic shortcoming: it is the index of their own falsity. Where philosophical thought, even in important texts, falls behind the ideal of its constant renewal through the subject matter itself, it is defeated. To think philosophically means as much as to think intermittences, to be interrupted by that which is not the thought itself. In emphatic thinking the analytic judgments it unavoidably must use become false. The force of thinking, not to swim with its own current, is the strength of resistance to what has been previously thought. Emphatic thinking requires the courage to stand by one’s convictions. The individual who thinks must take a risk, not exchange or buy anything on faith—that is the fundamental experience of the doctrine of autonomy. Without risk, without the imminent possibility of error, there is objectively no truth.²¹ Most stupidity in thinking takes shape where that courage, which is immanent to thinking and which perpetually stirs within it, is suppressed. Stupidity is nothing privative, not the simple absence of mental ability, but rather the scar of its mutilation. Nietzsche’s pathos knew that. His imperialistically adventurous slogan about the dangerous life basically meant instead: to think dangerously, to spur on thought, to shrink back from nothing in the experience of the matter, not to be intimidated by any convention of received thought.²² Autarkic logical consistency, however, from its societal perspective has not least of all the function of hindering this idea. Wherever thinking today exercises an emphatic and not an agitating influence, this is probably not to be ascribed to individual qualities like talent or intelligence. The reasons are objective: one of them, for instance, is that the thinking person, favored by biographical circumstances, did not allow his vulnerable thinking to be completely extirpated by the control mechanisms. Science needs the person who has not obeyed it; what satisfies his spirit is what defames science: the memento of obtuseness, to which science inevitably condemns itself and for which it feels a preconscious sense of shame.

The mode of philosophical thinking is affected by the fact that in it the relationship between process and subject matter qualitatively diverges from that in the positive sciences. In a certain sense, philosophical thinking continually attempts to express experiences; indeed, they are in no way adequately covered by the empirical concept of experience. Understanding philosophy means assuring oneself of this experience by reflecting on a problem autonomously and yet always remaining in the closest contact with the problem in its given configuration. With every expectation of cheap ridicule one could say that philosophical thought is so constituted that it tends to have its results before it has thought them.²³ One may radically distrust the Heideggerian hyphen-philology and yet not disavow that reflective thinking, as opposed to thinking, linguistically refers to the idea of philosophical construction as one of reconstruction.²⁴ In this lies at once also the worst temptation, that of apologetics, of rationalization, of the justification of blindly professed convictions and opinions. The thema probandum is just as much the truth and untruth of thinking. It relinquishes its untruth insofar as it attempts, through negation, to follow its experience. An adequate philosophical thinking is not only critical of the status quo and its reified replica in consciousness but is equally critical of itself. It does justice to the experience animating it not through compliant codification, but rather by means of objectification. Whoever thinks philosophically hardens intellectual experience by the same logical consistency whose antithesis he wields. Otherwise intellectual experience would remain rhapsodic. Only in this way does reflective thought become more than a repetitive presentation of what is experienced. Its rationality, as a critical one, transcends rationalization. Nonetheless, to him who observes it in itself, philosophical thinking seems to make possible the knowledge of what he wants to learn and only to the extent that he really knows what he wants to learn.²⁵ This self-experience of thinking contradicts the Kantian limitation, his intention of using thought to lessen thought’s power. It also answers the sinister question, how one could think what one thinks and yet live: precisely by thinking it. Cogito, ergo sum.

Because the discipline of philosophical thinking manifests itself at first in the formulation of the problem, presentation in philosophy constitutes an indispensable aspect of the subject matter.²⁶ Probably this is also why cogent solutions that occur to the thinker do not emerge like the sums from a difficult addition, after the line has been drawn and the figures tallied. That much is legitimate in idealism, but it distorts the characteristic nature of philosophical thought into hubris by claiming that, because truth does not join thought externally, the latter is identical with this very truth itself. Philosophy’s power of attraction, its happiness, is the fact that even the desperate thought conveys something of this certainty about the product of thinking, a final trace of the ontological proof of God, possibly its ineradicable core.²⁷ The notion of someone who sits down and “reflects about something” in order to ascertain something he did not know beforehand is as distorted as the inverse idea of winged intuition. Thinking begins in the labor upon a subject matter and its verbal formulation: they ensure its passive element. Put extremely: I do not think, and yet that itself is surely thinking.²⁸ A not wholly inappropriate material sign for it would be the pencil or fountain pen one holds in the hand while thinking, as is said of Simmel or of Husserl, who apparently couldn’t think at all except while writing, similar to how the best thoughts come to many writers while they are writing. Such instruments, which one doesn’t even need to use practically, are an admonishment that one should not just up and start thinking, but rather think of something. For this reason texts to be interpreted and criticized are an invaluable support for the objectivity of thought. Benjamin once alluded to this with the dictum that to every respectable thought belongs a respectable portion of stupidity as well.²⁹ If thought avoids this dictum for the sake of the chimera of its primordiality, if it scents in every concrete object at once the danger of concretization,³⁰ then the thought is not only lost to the future—which would be no objection, almost the contrary—but in itself it will be unconvincing. Yet it is therefore all the more decisive that those very tasks, the fecundity of which determines in turn the fecundity of thought, are autonomous; that they not be imposed but pose themselves: this is the threshold separating thinking from intellectual technique. Thinking must desperately navigate between such intellectual technique and amateurish dilettantism. Amateurish is the thinking that completely ignores the intellectual division of labor, instead of respecting and transcending it. A naive, fresh beginning stultifies thought no less than does a fervid conformity to the division of labor. Philosophy that, to speak with Kant, would do justice to its cosmical concept, would raise itself above its conception as a specialized science—according to Kant its scholastic concept that a priori is incompatible with its proper concept³¹—no less than above the prattle about worldviews that derives the illusion of its superiority from the pitiful meagerness of the leftovers from specialized knowledge out of which it makes its own specialty. Resistance to the decline of reason would mean for philosophical thinking, without regard for established authority and especially that of the human sciences, that it immerse itself in the material contents in order to perceive in them, not beyond them, their truth content. That would be, today, the freedom of thinking. It would become true where it is freed from the curse of labor and comes to rest in its object.