“ Now even in the most complex actions I am able to be my own critic mainly
because the sum total of historically completed actions lives in me,
objectively unfolded in the language of my people. Besides my friends and
tutors, my teachers and professors, I have constant interlocutors, critics
and helpers in those who throughout the centuries posed and solved the most
serious and difficult riddles of existence, who in themselves, in their
works personally experienced the problems of their time and argued with the
time, and with me, a representative of another culture that is still the
same, continuing culture of humankind. And I together with them, in
disputation with them, take part (even if I discover only for myself) in the
discovery of great ideas, ideals and evaluations. In myself I relive anew
the clash of the notions of good and evil, beauty and happiness, truth and
aim. They are born again in me and perhaps in some way they are new.... And
now I myself on the basis of my own experience, assessing my own actions,
know that thinking is not description, not the reproduction of that which is
given in the imagination, of that what I find in the spatial field of
experience. Thinking is my movement, the movement of my knowledge in time.
And this movement in time is possible because the different voices of
different times, peoples, epochs and cultures constantly come to life in my
life. Teaching someone to think does, in fact, mean involving him in active,
objective intercourse, bringing human history into his life, teaching him to
feel, rejoice and suffer, to protest and admire, to know and thus to carry
in himself a whole world in all its integrity as the known, conscious world
of our life. This is the only way to awaken the doer and the critic, the
craftsman and the artist in a person. So now my different Selves live even
in my dreams, arguing with each other, assuming the shape of other people
including people that have never existed in this world. They argue, imagine,
act and even solve problems with which I and they wrestled during my waking
hours. But sometimes, just because in a dream they are not restrained by the
clear knowledge “That can't happen” , they are able to find something that
really never did happen but that today I simply cannot do without” .
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