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Technology, the little titanic mistake, is Nothing that saves humanity from itself
Durs Grünbein
Acknowledgements
This book was made possible through the support of a number of people and institutions, to all of which I owe a debt of gratitude. First and foremost, I would like to thank the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung and the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. I completed the manuscript while I was guest professor at the Sorbonne, which was enabled by a Feodor Lynen fellowship for experienced researchers. The research project that led to The Meaning of Thought is concerned with fictional objects – that is, with the question of the extent to which those objects that we imagine and tell stories about really exist. Answering this question means further elaborating the framework of New Realism, in which, as I’ve made clear elsewhere, fictional objects are quite welcome, just like unicorns. I would also like to thank my own university, the University of Bonn, for granting me a generous period of leave so that I could take up the research grant in Paris.
In this connection, thanks are due to the CNRS, to the president of the University of Paris 1, Professor Georges Haddad, and to the rector of the University of Bonn, Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Michael Hoch for their support in founding a new research centre on New Realism (Centre de Recherches sur les Nouveaux Réalismes, CRNR), funded by the CNRS and partner universities. A key focus of this centre is the prospects for a realist philosophy of perception, a topic I have had the pleasure of being able to pursue with the philosophers Jocelyn Benoist and Quentin Meillassoux. Considerable thanks are due to Jocelyn Benoist in particular, to whom I owe the inspiration for trying to overcome the subject–object split already at the level of perception, so as to arrive at a realist understanding of the sensible. Benoist’s own recent work constitutes one of the most important contributions to this goal.
I would also like to thank the senate of the Republic of Chile for the invitation to their Congresso Futuro. It was at this event that I had the opportunity to get to know Giulio Tononi, whose non-reductionist, realist theory of consciousness gets us beyond the subject–object dichotomy on the terrain of neuroscientific research. Unfortunately, I had completed the manuscript of the book before I was able to visit Tononi’s lab in Madison, Wisconsin, in May 2018, which meant that the fruits of our conversations did not find their way into the book.
Thanks are also due to my colleagues at the Center for Science and Thought (CST) at the University of Bonn and at the International Center for Philosophy NRW for many days of conversation about the topics of the book. Ulf-G. Meissner, Michael N. Forster and Jens Rometsch deserve particular mention: for many months, I have had the pleasure of discussing with them which form should be taken by a realist theory of perception and thought. In addition, I had the opportunity to run an immensely stimulating seminar in Bonn together with Jocelyn Benoist and Charles Travis on the manuscript of Charles’s new work on Frege, in which he defends the existence of an ‘invisible realm’ against the error of a linguistic reading of the reality of thought. One day, I might reveal to Charles that behind Frege stands the good old project of an ‘invisible church’,1 which is called German idealism.
I would also like to express my gratitude to the team working at my chair: Walid Faizzada, Marin Geier, Mariya Halvadzhieva, Jens Pier, Jens Rometsch and Jan Voosholz, for their comments on an earlier version of the book and for their help in putting together and preparing the final manuscript.
Notes
1 1. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, ‘Hegel an Schelling [End of January 1795]’, in Johannes Hoffmeister (ed.), Briefe von und an Hegel (Hamburg: Meiner, 1969), pp. 15–18, here p. 18.
Preface
The present book is the concluding part of a trilogy that began with Why the World Does Not Exist and continued with I am Not a Brain. Yet I have written it so that it can be understood without any acquaintance with its two predecessors. All three books have the same intended audience: anyone who likes to engage in philosophical thinking. And it is precisely this phenomenon, thinking, that is my topic in this book. Over the course of the following pages I will develop a theory of (human) thought that anyone should be able to understand.
Thought is perhaps the central concept of philosophy. Ever since Plato and Aristotle, philosophy has been understood as a science that thinks about thinking. Thinking about thinking is the origin of logic. Logic, in turn, is one of the foundations of our digital civilization, as, were it not for advances in philosophical logic in the nineteenth century, computer science would never have developed. In this regard, George Boole (1815–1864) and Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) were especially influential. Both were mathematicians, logicians and philosophers, and both set out a theory of thought which they used as the basis for developing the first systems of symbolic logic, the systems which underlie contemporary computer science. They thus did much to prepare the way for the digital revolution of our own day.
You are about to read a philosophical book free from opaque technical jargon. To follow the central arguments, there is no need to have worked your way through the technical aspects of logic. The main thesis I am going to advance is that human thought is a sense organ. Thinking is aesthetic (in the best case, something pleasurable) and not an exercise of force, discipline, punishment or blind, creativity-stifling rule-following. On the contrary: philosophical thought is a creative process, which is why philosophers such as the Romantics or Friedrich Nietzsche even went so far as to (try to) push it into the same camp as poetry.
Yet philosophy is ultimately neither quite like mathematics nor quite like poetry (or indeed any other art form). It borders on both domains, forming a point of intersection between the two.
Philosophy is the most general way of thinking about our thinking. It is more general still than mathematics, which is itself a form of language and thought that serves as a foundation for the natural sciences and technology. However, while not utterly unrelated to them, mathematics doesn’t give us the foundation of poetry, painting, religion, music or philosophy. What unites all of these highly sophisticated human phenomena is our sense of thought, and the structure and nature
