08 Jan The “I” – if it’s there at all – surely doesn’t control the “thinking”. (JON FERGUSON)
There are still harmless self-observers who believe ‘immediate certainties’ exist, for example, ‘I think’… But I shall reiterate a hundred times that ‘immediate certainty’, like ‘absolute knowledge’ and ‘thing in itself’, contains a contradiction in adjecto (contradiction in terms)…when I analyze the event expressed in the sentence ‘I think’ I acquire a series of rash assertions which are difficult, perhaps impossible, to prove
– for example, that it is I which thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of an entity thought of as a cause, that an I exists, finally that what is designated by ‘thinking’ has already been determined- that I know what thinking is… In this way the philosopher acquires in place of that ‘immediate certainty’… a series of metaphysical questions… ’Whence do I take the concept thinking? Why do I believe in cause and effect? What gives me the right to speak of an I… an I as cause… an I as cause of thoughts?…” (BGE 16)
And this thump:
“As for the superstitions of the logicians, I shall never tire of underlining a concise little fact which these superstitious people are loath to admit – namely, that a thought comes when ‘it’ wants, not when ‘I’ want; so that it is a falsification of the facts to say: the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the predicate ‘think’. It thinks: but that this ‘it’ is precisely that famous old ‘I’ is, to put it mildly, only an assumption, an assertion, above all not an ‘immediate certainty’.” (BGE 17)
To understand simply what is being said here, just try, yourself, not to think for thirty seconds… no luck right? You can’t turn off thinking. The “I” – if it’s there at all – surely doesn’t control the “thinking”. What was or is a “certainty” for so many thinkers, is, for Nietzsche, a great uncertainty, and more, a source of numerous errors which we will stumble on later.
Nietzsche For Breakfast
Jon Ferguson
