Another insightful saying from the book Everyday Psychology, by Dr Steve Edwards.
‘We are, therefore I think’.
Dr Edwards comments: ‘Jean Paul Satre inverted Descartes’s famous saying ‘I think, therefore I am’ with the maxim ‘existence precludes essence’, meaning that consciousness presupposes being. While it may be ontologically and philosophically correct to say ‘I am, therefore I think’, it is truer psychologically to say ‘we are, therefore I think’, in that we are conceived by two parents and typically become a person through our relationships with our families and other significant persons.
Martin Buber, the famous German-Jewish philosopher-theologian, has expressed this as follows: ‘Erst am du werda ich zum ich’ – ‘only through you do I become an I.’