… and that makes me think of René Descartes and his „Discours de la méthode“, containing an autobiographic episode, where he describes how he, just passing through a small village near Ulm, prevented from continuing his journey by the unusually severe winter of 1619, found the leisure to contemplate his thoughts as he was enclosed all day alone in a small warm room.
Currently in the home office, browsing my home bookshelves, Descartes’ book fell into my hand and I got stuck on the little green volume, the bilingual edition of Felix Meiner Verlag.
Descartes contemplative time of leisure was the impetus for a text that, first published in 1637, has left its mark in the history of philosophy. Today, for me, in my profession as a counselor, it is an impulse to trust one’s own thinking, one’s own judgment, and to encourage the people I counsel to do the same.
Here are a few links as a suggestion to continue browsing and thinking about independent thinking and the impulses it can give one, for the diverse shaping of one’s own life path.
Text editions freely available on the net:
The French original: https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Discours_de_la_m%C3%A9thode/%C3%89dition_Adam_et_Tannery
A German translation: https://www.textlog.de/descartes-methode.html
And an English translation at gutenberg.org (only available if you don’t have a German IP): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/59
And then tow interesting pages:
The transcript (in German) of a Deutschlandfunk radio broadcast: https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/descartes-und-der-schnee.700.de.html?dram:article_id=81434
And an article (in German) about a conference in Ulm: Artikel über eine Tagung in Ulm im Jahr 2019: https://www.uni-ulm.de/universitaet/hochschulkommunikation/presse-und-oeffentlichkeitsarbeit/unimagazin/online-ausgabe-uni-ulm-intern/uni-ulm-intern-nr-351-februar-2020/descartes/