When I first began working on the philosophy of thinking, before I had even read my beloved Husserl, Proust and Piatigorsky, I spent a great deal of time arguing with myself about how far thinking-about-thinking was possible. Recently I came across an amusing phrase – a person trying to understand themselves is like sight trying to see its own eye. There is a lot of sense in this, and what really surprises me is the importance of doubt as the beginning of knowledge – but not Cartesian doubt, the very thing Descartes became famous for, but a doubt closer to our own intuition of the mystical.
The first thing that catches the eye when life realises itself is the complete absence of a vacuum – both material and spiritual. In every direction in which thought and body move, we find the possibility of moving further, receiving feedback from everything we perceive – perhaps not the feedback we expected or wanted, but we never encounter a situation in which we encounter non-being. ‘Life is always something else,’ said Marcel Proust, and there is a great deal of truth in this concise formula of life, easily proved in our material life. But thinking itself never encounters a barrier either, except for one great barrier, the only one that stops us as we go ever deeper into the essence of things – fatigue. We may experience difficulties or arrive at unexpected conclusions, but none of this stops us as it might if we had only simple syllogisms at our disposal – but no, no and no! We have countless tools for thinking at our disposal, although the very situation of there being no vacuum looks rather problematic and turns all these tools into a primitive implement in the search for truth. To me, the problem of our life being completely filled with various little things appears to be the essence of the problem of knowledge in general, because we cannot avoid the radical question that can be put to any ontologist – will your theory of the world (or, more often, fantasy of the world) pass the trial by fire of non-being? Put simply – what makes your little thing better than other little things and the relations between them? For as long as philosophy has known itself, we have kept following the path of the ouroboros, devouring our own tail and thus continuing to move. But do we need this food at all, why do we want this bread of knowledge? And is it not hunger that we should guard as something precious?
Let us examine time. Our past is possible through memory, because there can be no vacuum there – there is no space for a vacuum in our life. The future is not hazy, it is a wall constantly being pushed back, the past is what it is simply because otherwise there would have had to be something else. And the present contains everything. Thus, however much we try to escape beyond the horizon of our perception in search of truth, the very mysticism of revelation always turns out to be at the centre of our originally given space of thinking, when it recognises itself as problematic thinking – when this centre ceases to follow the naïve laws of matter, which are given in abundance from the very birth not even of thinking, but of our own materiality, which perceives the world’s solidity, its thingness, as something familiar and dimly recognised as part of our own body. This corporeality of existence pushes us towards taking possession of materiality through the idea of a single body – we ourselves want to become a single body as we indulge our every whim – above all, the whim of power. But problematic thinking, which is what all thinking essentially is, pulls back on the reins, even in the most primitive animals, to break this faith in the naïve truth of matter. What for? Why? ‘I don’t understand,’ you will say. Exactly! We do not understand why this happens, and this not understanding is forever hiding behind our backs, gently pushing us forwards. The phenomenon of not understanding is the most mystical thing in the world, something that became obvious to me partly through reading Husserl’s meditations. The passion of my mind, which does not believe in stable entities, at one point in my life went as far as rejecting mathematics as the science of maximum stability – paradoxical as it may seem, mathematics is the most material of the sciences, and my conclusions against it were naïve, but the very essence of my intuition lay in the desire to take the measure of truth away from everything external, be it language or a scientific formula, and return it to that stream of thinking which has no material substrates, which in Buddhist methodology are perceived through five sense organs: touch, smell, hearing, sight and thinking – more precisely, that part of it which perceives forms or, I would say, which is thinking in the naïve sense. Husserl, a mathematician, followed the same path and very soon realised that the problem of what he called intentionality lies in the cause of thinking, not in its effects.
The puppet theatre of conclusions that we build on the dubious foundations of other, already given conclusions quickly falls apart as we turn our gaze towards thinking itself. Obviously, any theory of the world should also easily explain our thinking, even if the theory itself is difficult to prove. In this respect, religion has gone furthest, perhaps this is precisely why it occupies such a fundamental place in culture – religion has given thinking its place within its own ontology, and this is a difficult task. What is more, in many ways we can refer to any religion – and is that not surprising? This leap from the material world to thinking – to our own thinking – is easiest to make through the divine. In other words, we need a god to bring us back home. This problem of not understanding, briefly outlined in this note, is one of the foundations of my philosophy – I do not believe in knowledge of being beyond this framework of not understanding, which must itself be studied as part of our personal ontology.