Thinking requires distance and exaggeration to grasp the factual
Evidence
Only at a remove from life can the mental life exist, and truly engage the empirical. While thought relates to facts and moves by criticizing them, its movement depends no less on the maintenance of distance. It expresses exactly what is, precisely because what is is never quite as thought expresses it. Essential to it is an element of exaggeration, of over-shooting the object, of self-detachment from the weight of the factual, so that instead of merely reproducing being it can, at once rigorous and free, determine it. Thus every thought resembles play, with which Hegel no less than Nietzsche compared the work of the mind. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 153
Categorization
- SEED: Essay angle: why ‘over-shooting the object’ is constitutional for real thought, opposed to today’s demand for factual fidelity.
- XREF: Connects to Nietzsche’s perspectivism and Kant’s antinomy of taste; also to later post-structuralist critique of representation. — connects to: Thought requires deliberate self-distancing because reality resists being understood directly
- DEEPTHINKING: The paradoxical claim that thought expresses what is exactly BECAUSE it never quite matches it — a dense, paradigm-shifting reversal of correspondence theories.