I think therefore I am.
I know that this has been considered innumerable times, I know that I need to read much more on this inexhaustible topic, but still can’t avoid making a minor, ill-educated comment. The statement adopts the form of a logical deduction. The experience of thinking demonstrates the necessity of existence. Yet it seems to me that existence is less something to be logically deduced than a predicament that immediately affects us. It is a constitutive condition rather than something that either requires or has the capacity to be logically deduced. Whichever way one decides on the relationship between thought and being, being and thinking persist.
Actually more to the point is the strangeness of what is constitutive for us – thinking being, being that is living and self-aware. All manner of existence is inanimate. Thinking less establishes the necessity of being than represents a curious addition. As thinking beings we have no sense of simple existence – of existence without thought. And yet ultimately everything that we think and do is shaped by inanimate forces that exceed us. The hardest thing for us to think is that a dimension of unthinking objectivity ultimately provides the basis for our subjective experience.