What is thinking?

What does it mean to ask what thinking is?: this seems to be the ineluctable question that poses itself to us even before we ask ourselves ‘what is thinking’? What is the nature of this thinking which is concerned, above all, with what thinking itself is? Is not it too obvious a “thing”, so we wonder, that we call “thinking” which we all “do” anyway spontaneously, early in the morning and late at night? And we always think and every day, without having to be concerned with what thinking itself is? Is it not too self-evident and immediately recognizable a phenomenon, and hence unproblematic a thing—that we think, and that this “thing” called “thinking” we do all the time, as spontaneously as eating and drinking and sleeping? Is it worthy enough of a problem or a question for us to be concerned with when there are much more serious, urgent and important, much more relevant and unavoidable problems that beset us today and daily make us thoughtful to the point of anguish and despair? Is not it rather symptomatic of the bourgeois inertia of arm-chair intellectuals who spend the whole day, every day, from morning till evening, in closed office rooms, thinking about “thinking”? ‘Thinking does not change the world; the task is to change the world’: so we are so told, from right to the left side, from the left to the right. It appears that thinking is only an impotent cry of a beautiful soul, the unending sigh of an “unhappy consciousness”, the intellectual luxury of a privileged few who can afford to think about thinking. Thus, it is deduced it is the most irrelevant task of thinking today to think of what thinking itself, as such, may at all be like.