People used to believe in 'the soul' as they believed in grammar and the grammatical subject: people said that 'I' was a condition and 'think' was a predicate and conditioned - thinking is an activity and a subject must be thought of as its cause. Now, with admirable tenacity and cunning, people are wondering whether they can get out of this net - wondering whether the reverse might be true: that 'think' is the condition and 'I' is conditioned, in which case 'I' would be a synthesis that only gets produced through thought itself.
About this quote
- What does it mean?
- Nietzsche questions whether the self is a product of thought rather than the thinker being the cause of thought.
- In plain terms
- He wonders if 'I' is created by thinking, not the other way around.
- What can you take from it?
- Consider that identity may emerge from mental activity.
Where it applies
Putting it to work
Questions to consider
- Is the self a cause or an effect of thought?
- What evidence supports one view over the other?
Another view
The idea is abstract and hard to test empirically.
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