Table of Contents

Acknowledgement and Gratitude

1/7
Can I Learn to ​Think?

2/7
Beginning

3/7
Elementary Relations Between Thinking and Language

4/7
Elementary Relationships of Truth and History

5/7
Thinking and a Dynamic Concept of Truth
Truth and Causality

7/7
Thinking and Love

Epilogue

These images are examples of more than 90 works that were made especially for the book Can I Learn To Think?. The particular technique developed for this cycle gives the ink drawings an essential, if not unique, feeling. 

sample chapter (5/7)

Thinking and a Dynamic Concept of Truth

1.     
The truth can only be grasped in the act of bringing it forth.  This is what we call thinking.  It comes to light in the way it is worded, which at the same time is reality. That is to say, it comes to light in its ceaseless shaping on the way from unity to multiplicity and also in the act in which I, thinking it anew, formulate the truth differently from what it was before.

2.     
Thus truth can be experienced on two interwoven levels: in its new formulation and in its difference from the previous forms of truth.

3.    
 In other words, truth is the way through which one forming activity constantly expresses itself in diverse ways.  It is a creative principle that cannot be understood without its creative act (because that is what it is).  Or, in different words, again: lawfulness that is not a law of something does not implement itself, does not exist, cannot be recognized as truth.  Thus, truth works as a formative activity and as such shapes reality.  This dynamic character of lawfulness, the bringing forth of something singular, can also be found in the form of truth that relates to the concept as a law of nature relates to phenomena.

4.     
Compared to the truth experienced in thinking, my ideas are only fixed images, static formulations that I hold as the truth, but which are only a temporary, limited expression of ‹perpetual motion›.

5.     
What something is can only mean how it is acting and what it is doing, effecting.

6.     
As we know, an action presupposes a person who acts, someone who does something and behaves in a certain manner.  That is why we must speak of ‹behavior›.  The truth we seek through thinking, what something really is, means how and what something does, how it behaves.  Therefore truth is knowing the behavior of a thing.  Or formulated better and differently: the being and essence of a thing, what makes it what it is, its identity, is its behavior.

7.
We call the formulation of behavior through thinking the grasping of its lawfulness.  This is a repetitive model of behavior that is extracted from events.

8.
The lawfulness represents the working thought to the extent that its behavior repeats itself.  It does not contain the differences between the various actual events of similar behavior, but collects the similarity, that which repeats itself.

9.
(‹The difference between the various actual events of similar behavior…› cannot be explained through combinations of different lawfulness.  It is always a surplus, a uniqueness.  The beauty of a single sunrise or the smell of a rose early in the morning can never be grasped as the sum of natural law.  Uniqueness is not the sum of generalities, but something radically different.)

10.
The formulating thinking changes unique behavior into generalities.  It abstracts the specificity from the repetitive process to grasp its unity and to formulate it in conceptual language.

11.  
When I try to determine the truth, to set clear boundaries around its lawfulness, to  ‹make an end to it› (‹to define it›),  I obtain concepts that may be easier to use, but which have in fact lost their reality, their productive character.  I then have abstract concepts that are lifeless, but possibly useful.  We withdraw the creative potential from the truth and define this as it was instead of what it can be, what it is becoming.

12.  
Without its creative aspect, without being thought of as becoming, the truth is a concept without world, without effect and reality: it is coherent in itself, but only valuable in relation to other concepts, hence it is only mathematical-geometrical-logical.  Meta-concepts are created that only relate to other concepts and words as a sort of grammar or, better said, more like a grammar machine that relates concepts and words to each other without having any relation to actions and behavior in the world.

13.  
It is the task of thinking to keep the recognized truth from the illusion of being definitive without losing the recognition of its eternal effectiveness.

14.
The truth does not behave like black and white – except in the mathematical-binary case – but like color: it is not really measurable, it is qualitative, changing in different lights, while there is no such thing as ‹the final correct› light.  The light of thought, which makes visible the color of truth, reveals it ‹in an ever new light›, sees it and shows it in new colors and tones.  This doesn’t mean that there cannot also be fog, darkness and false light.

15.
A thinking that aims for concepts is unifying and immutable.  But this always moves me into generality, thus into a truth that moves in a direction away from reality.  If thinking strives to grasp truth as a changing, metamorphosing experience – after what I will sum up as a ‹dynamic concept of truth› – then endless differences contained and brought forth in a concept unfold in thinking. Now the truth moves in the direction of reality, opens in its center, thinks its potential, its coming possibilities.

16.
If I now return to the concept, I can understand: if I recognize truth as that which makes something into what it is, then at the same time I point to the fact that truth as an activity brings things forth so that it must also be perceived as creative.  Thought of in this way, the concept is a retrospective formulation of the behavior.

17.
Thinking that is oriented to the productive, creative character of truth, concept and being, will have the character of will. 

18.
A thought or concept is therefore a unit of knowledge that can bring forth many differences without losing its specificity as a defined concept. 

19.
In other words: both knowledge and being are that which exists in the world so that it differs endlessly from itself without ceasing to be identical with itself.

20.
We can think about the essence of knowing and formulating dynamic concepts and lawfulness as an analogy to jazz music.  In a jazz piece there is a motif.  It can, for example, be a popular song.  It can be played in numerous different variations; forward, backward and in many improvised and planned variations.  What is essential, the original motif which is always present or the numerous possible variations that make a good jazz piece out of it?

21.
(If I begin to understand truth as a dynamic event, then I begin to grasp in a new dimension the formulation of Paul Klee ‹becoming is superior to being›.  Also, the observation of Gilles Deleuzes that ‹the philosopher is an artist who forms concepts› appears rooted in the nature of truth and knowing.)