(This is my Jenseits-17 comment,
which was already touched upon in my entry Spontaneous Generation, in the Genius section [posted on
April 14, 2011, as part of a composite entry Reading Books],
but here it serves as a neat supplement to the entry The Mysterious Commonwealth Of Concepts,
which it immediately follows in my book, but was posted on this blog separately
on January 31, 2012.)
Here
is a delightful little observation, typical of Nietzsche’s genius: flimsy, yet
profound:
“A thought comes when it wishes, not when I wish, so
that it is a falsification of fact to say that the subject I is the
condition of the predicate think.”
[From Nietzsche’s Jenseits (17).]Indeed, our best thoughts are never tortured out of a persistent conscientious effort at thinking, but they are rather spontaneous, as though coming from outside us, or even out of the mystical depths of our being, over which we have no control. Curiously, this argument does not refute the Cartesian cogito ergo sum, as, even if our thoughts as such do not represent a proof of our existence, the fact that they use us as their medium, does. After all, the word cogito is a terribly complex concept, which must never be taken for granted, as if a reasonably well educated adult might comprehend it any better than a budding kindergarten learner…
Another inscrutable philosophical mystery!
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