Mekkes on "Present Thinking"

Life such as it is now, for us twentieth-century people, has not fallen out of the sky. Neither has science: it has its history. Everyone knows and understands this, except Western science itself, especially since the previous century. It believes in the always 'present thinking', which, like a camera on a tripod, takes snapshots of the 'factuality' in front of the lens - snapshots that, as in a film, give the illusion of movement, of events, of history. However, the camera itself stands fixed, positioned outside that movement. From that point the story begins and ends, and the person behind the camera remains completely out of the picture. This “present thinking” can itself at most focus somewhat more sharply, reflecting and correcting itself, but it remains holding the first and last word for itself.

How has science become so uncritical and pretentious in our Western mind, especially in this West that was once Christianized, and thus could have known that history is the history of life, and not a result of thought? 

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Various thinkers had already warned against this in the nineteenth century: people such as Kierkegaard (who emphasised the subjective existence of the thinker) and Marx (philosophers have interpreted the world, but the point is to change the world); in the Netherlands, and especially for our Christian circles, Abraham Kuyper. But that this raised questions concerning the privileged position of thought, and pointed to another core, remained misunderstood or was ignored: people fitted Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Kuyper into their own frame of thought.

But it was precisely reformational philosophy that made it clear that Kuyper had indicated a different central point of reflection than thinking.

With this, reformational philosophy had provisionally found a basis from which to proceed to the attack. If there is a central point that transcends thinking – central because it is the centre of everything in life – then a break with 'thinking' as a fixed point must be made. 

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It is not enough to make critical comments on the content of humanistic assertions, now included in a broader framework as 'general-natural'. The content could not be the primary target; it is a question of the point out of which people operate, namely the exclusive universal validity of thinking, regardless of how critically praised. The 'Self-criticism' of thinking, as provided by Immanuel Kant, is also not enough, according to reformational philosophy: self-criticism must be pushed so far that I, thinking, see that thinking is not an independent activity, and therefore know that I have to account for what precedes science. In other words; self-criticism must penetrate to the question: where do the outflows of life come from, including thinking, which is after all an activity of life? 

Mekkes, J P A. “God’s Normaal en de wijsbegeerte.” (1974) pp.35-37