It is useless and meaningless to tell a person, “Think for yourself.” The command is both impossible to obey, and impossible to disobey. If the person obeys the injunction, he or she has already disobeyed it by blindly following your advice. However, if the person decides to disobey the injunction, he or she must then obey it as a matter of course. Disobeying and obeying are joined seamlessly; each necessitates the other. This is a classic paradox; one side slides into the other seamlessly and eternally, forming a kind of Möbius loop, a surface with one continuous and endless side. (This is essentially the same as the paradox in Kierkegaard’s Johannes Climacus, which is a mind-bending read that I would highly recommend. It's the other half of the Kierkegaard edition we had to purchase for Sem. 5.)
If a person is to think for himself, the impetus must come from within himself; likewise, if a person is to not think for himself, no impetus must come from within himself. The mind is either active or passive; it either deliberates or it is acted upon, at any given moment. Our humanly existence consists in an unavoidable fluctuation between these two states, often in rapidly shifting and unpredictable patterns. If a person thinks that he always thinks for himself, then he is hopelessly arrogant and absurd. However, if a person thinks that he never thinks for himself, then he has already proven himself wrong. To never think for oneself would mean to have no self-consciousness, like animals and babies. Nevertheless, the task of a human is to increase the amount of time he spends thinking for himself—to increase more and more the ratio of active to passive mind, even if passive mind can never be completely eliminated. In this way, man more and more approximates Complete Knowing and Complete Self-knowing, which are one and the same thing. In this way, man becomes wise and approaches God.
But now I think I have left something out, because I started with a paradox and ended with a straightforward assertion; I started with a Möbius loop and ended up with a straight line. Is that because I straightened out the loop, untwisted the faulty language that caused the paradox to arise in the first place? Or is there another paradox here, in which active and passive mind are really one and the same, so that we ought to aim for both completely active and passive minds, or ought to aim for some ideal blend of the two?
-JMK
If a person is to think for himself, the impetus must come from within himself; likewise, if a person is to not think for himself, no impetus must come from within himself. The mind is either active or passive; it either deliberates or it is acted upon, at any given moment. Our humanly existence consists in an unavoidable fluctuation between these two states, often in rapidly shifting and unpredictable patterns. If a person thinks that he always thinks for himself, then he is hopelessly arrogant and absurd. However, if a person thinks that he never thinks for himself, then he has already proven himself wrong. To never think for oneself would mean to have no self-consciousness, like animals and babies. Nevertheless, the task of a human is to increase the amount of time he spends thinking for himself—to increase more and more the ratio of active to passive mind, even if passive mind can never be completely eliminated. In this way, man more and more approximates Complete Knowing and Complete Self-knowing, which are one and the same thing. In this way, man becomes wise and approaches God.
But now I think I have left something out, because I started with a paradox and ended with a straightforward assertion; I started with a Möbius loop and ended up with a straight line. Is that because I straightened out the loop, untwisted the faulty language that caused the paradox to arise in the first place? Or is there another paradox here, in which active and passive mind are really one and the same, so that we ought to aim for both completely active and passive minds, or ought to aim for some ideal blend of the two?
-JMK
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