is, as Heidegger once observed, “out of order” (italics added).19 It interrupts any doing, any ordinary activities, no matter what they happen to be. All thinking demands a stop-and-think.

we are what men always have been—thinking beings. By this I mean no more than that men have an inclination, perhaps a need, to think beyond the limitations of knowledge, to do more with this ability than use it as an instrument for knowing and doing.

Thinking, no doubt, plays an enormous role in every scientific enterprise, but it is the role of a means to an end; the end is determined by a decision about what is worthwhile knowing, and this decision cannot be scientific. Moreover, the end is cognition or knowledge, which, having been obtained, clearly belongs to the world of appearances; once

Mnemosyne, Memory, is the mother of the Muses, and remembrance, the most frequent and also the most basic thinking experience, has to do with things that are absent, that have disappeared from my senses. Yet the absent that is summoned up and made present to my mind—a person, an event, a monument—cannot appear in the way it appeared to my senses,

Might the problem of good and evil, our faculty for telling right from wrong, be connected with our faculty of thought?

It is, therefore, indeed always the same subject that is both a member of the visible and the invisible world, but not the same person, since . . . what I as mind think is not remembered by me as man, and, conversely, my actual state as man does not enter my notion of myself as mind.” And he speaks in a strange footnote of a “certain double

thinking always implies remembrance; every thought is strictly speaking an after-thought. It may, of course, happen that we start thinking about a still-present somebody or something, in which case we have removed ourselves surreptitiously from our surroundings and are conducting ourselves as though we were already absent.

Analogies, metaphors, and emblems are the threads by which the mind holds on to the world even when, absent-mindedly, it has lost direct contact with it, and they guarantee the unity of human experience.

The insights of metaphysics are “gained by analogy, not in the usual meaning of imperfect resemblance of two things, but of a perfect resemblance of two relations between totally dissimilar things.”73