The many forces that now have to come together in the thinker. — To abstract oneself from sensory perception, to exalt oneself to contemplation of abstractions — that was at one time actually felt as exaltation: we can no longer quite enter into this feeling. To revel in pallid images of words and things, to sport with such invisible, inaudible, impalpable beings, was, out of contempt for the sensorily tangible, seductive and evil world, felt as a life in another higher world. ‘These abstracta are certainly not seductive, but they can offer us guidance!’ — with that one lifted oneself upwards. It is not the content of these sportings of spirituality, it is they themselves which constituted ‘the higher life’ in the prehistoric ages of science. Hence Plato’s admiration for dialectics and his enthusiastic belief that dialectics necessarily pertained to the good, unsensory man. It is not only knowledge which has been discovered gradually and piece by piece, the means of knowing as such, the conditions and operations which precede knowledge in man, have been discovered gradually and piece by piece too. And each time the newly discovered operation or the novel condition seemed to be, not a means to knowledge, but in itself the content, goal and sum total of all that was worth knowing. The thinker needs imagination, self-uplifting, abstraction, desensualization, invention, presentiment, induction, dialectics, deduction, the critical faculty, the assemblage of material, the impersonal mode of thinking, contemplativeness and comprehensiveness, and not least justice and love for all that exists — but all these means to knowledge once counted individually in the history of the vita contemplativa as goals, and final goals, and bestowed on their inventors that feeling of happiness which appears in the human soul when it catches sight of a final goal.
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If you’ve caught sight of and studied the limitations of the intellectual moves you’ve been trained to perform since toddlerhood, and gained some freedom from unconscious habit of thought, and perhaps even learned some new counts and steps and trained yourself to dance kinetically so the dance dances itself… you’ll see exactly why “objective” thinkers tend to be so sterile and stiff. Objective thinkers know only how to stand apart and think about things. They tune out music as mere noise, and consequently never go beyond the counts.
If we want the world to be a place we love to inhabit, we’re going to have to teach ourselves some new modes of knowing.