in thinking. Curious rationalism which bases love on thinking! And an unpleasant kind of thinking which is about to become sentimental! But there is no trace of any of this in that line. What the line tells we can fathom only when we are capable of thinking. And that is why we ask: What is called thinking—and what does call for it?
We shall never learn what "is called" swimming, for example, or what it "calls for", by reading a treatise on swimming. Only the leap into the river tells us what is called swimming. The question "What is called thinking?" can never be answered by proposing a definition of the concept thinking, and then diligently explaining what is contained in that definition. In what follows, we shall not think about what thinking is. We remain outside that mere reflection which makes thinking its object. Great thinkers, first Kant and then Hegel, have understood the fruitlessness of such reflection. That is why they had to attempt to reflect their way out of such reflection. How far they got, and where it took them, are questions that will give us much to think about at the proper juncture along our way. In the West, thought about thinking has flourished as "logic." Logic has gathered special knowledge concerning a special kind of thinking. This knowledge concerning logic has been made scientifically fruitful only quite recently, in a special science that calls itself "logistics." It is the most specialized of all specialized sciences. In many places, above all in the Anglo-Saxon countries, logistics is today considered the only possible form of strict philosophy, because its result and procedures yield an assured profit for the construction of the technological universe. In America and elsewhere, logistics as the only proper philosophy of the future is thus beginning today to seize power over the spirit. Now that logistics is in some suitable way joining forces with modern psychology and psychoanalysis, and with sociology, the power-structure of future philosophy is reaching perfection.