Ten Things Schopenhauer Says with Which I Am in Complete Agreement

Ten things Schopenhauer says with which I am in complete agreement

1. Dilettantes! Dilettantes! – this is the derogatory cry those who apply themselves to art or science for the sake of gain raise against those who pursue it for love of it and pleasure in it. This derogation rests on their vulgar conviction that no one would take up a thing seriously unless prompted to it by want, hunger, or some other kind of greediness. The public has the same outlook and consequently holds the same opinion, which is the origin of its universal respect for the ‘professional’ and its distrust of the dilettante. The truth, however, is that to the dilettante the thing is the end, while to the professional as such it is the means; and only he who is directly interested in a thing and occupies himself with it from love of it, will pursue it with entire seriousness. It is from such as these, and not from wage earners, that the greatest things have always come.

Today (1/5/9) I submitted a paper on-line, and for the first time was asked to tick a box verifying that I was employed at an educational or research establishment, and also to record the date I received my PhD. These are terrible questions to ask. Work should be judged on its merits, and I cannot see any reason for asking these questions except to judge people’s work by some other criteria. It is not so very long ago that no institution in Australia awarded PhD’s, and I know elderly scientists in my field with international reputations who do not have one.

2. It is obviously high time that the Jewish conception of nature, at any rate in regard to animals, should come to an end in Europe, and that the eternal being which, as it lives in us, also lives in every animal should be recognised as such, and as such treated with care and consideration. One must be blind, deaf and dumb, or completely chloroformed by the foetor judaicus, not to see that the animal is in essence absolutely the same thing that we are

I would not choose to call this ‘the Jewish conception of nature’, although the books of the Pentateuch with their animal sacrifices are a very stark illustration of it. The Greco-Roman world also had this boundless disregard for animal life, so the two main sources of our Western civilisation are both thoroughly polluted in this regard. Nor would I understand ‘eternal being’ in perhaps the same way Schopenhauer intends. But I am still in complete agreement with the letter and the spirit of what he writes here. I have been a vegetarian of some form or other basically since I had a steady girlfriend and felt sufficiently free of the fear of latent homosexuality to do something as poofy as go vegetarian.

3. The exertion of weight in a stone is every bit as inexplicable as is thought in a human brain: this fact would suggest the presence of a mind in the stone. For this reason I would say to these disputants: you believe you perceive dead, i.e. completely passive material devoid of all qualities, because you suppose you can truly understand everything which you are able to trace back to a mechanistic effect. But as physical and chemical effects are avowedly incomprehensible to you so long as you cannot trace them back to mechanical effects, so are these mechanical effects themselves – that is to say, modes of expression proceeding from weight, impenetrability, cohesion, hardness, inflexibility, elasticity, fluidity, etc. – just as mysterious as these others, indeed as mysterious as thought in the human head. If matter can (you know not why) fall to earth, so it can also (you know not why) think.

I hold in my mind two separate conceptions of the electron: one of a point charge, and the other of a fluid spread according to a particular solution of Schrödinger’s equation throughout the entire universe. In this I am like anyone who teaches quantum mechanics. I also hold one other conception of the electron, which is an idiosyncratic fancy: that it might be something like an angel. This is not scientific and I do not teach it to anyone. I do mention as an amusing aside the physicist John Wheeler’s musing that perhaps there is only really one electron weaving the universe together- which we see as an electron as it goes forward and a positron as it goes backward in time. My pet name for this hypothetical electron is ‘Katrina’.

(When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea? ‘O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, `Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.’)

4. Obscurity and vagueness of expression is always and everywhere a very bad sign: for in ninety-nine cases out a hundred it derives from vagueness of thought, which in turns comes from an original incongruity and inconsistency in the thought itself, and thus from its falsity. If a true thought arises in a head it will immediately strive after clarity and will soon achieve it: what is clearly thought, however, easily finds the expression appropriate to it. The thoughts a man is capable of always express themselves in clear, comprehensible and unambiguous words. Those who put together difficult, obscure, involved, ambiguous discourses do not really know what they want to say: they have no more than a vague consciousness of it which is only struggling towards a thought: often, however, they also want to conceal from themselves and others that they actually have nothing to say.

Often we are struggling toward a thought, and a difficult discourse is the best we can come up with; but these are never pleasant to write, and I feel guilty for inflicting them on the reviewers of my papers when the results do not cohere into a conclusion I can readily get my head around.

5. The state is essentially no more than an institution for the protection of the whole against attacks from without and the protection of its individual members from attacks by one another. It follows that the necessity for the state ultimately depends upon the acknowledged injustice of the human race: without this no one would ever have thought of the state, since no one would have needed to fear any encroachment on his rights, and a mere union against attacks the attacks of wild animals or the elements would bear only a very slight similarity to a state. From this point of view it is easy to see the ignorance and triviality of those philophasters who, in pompous phrases, represent the state as the supreme goal and greatest achievement of mankind and thereby achieve an apotheosis of philistinism.

The growth of the reach of the state that I have observed over my lifetime fills me with foreboding for the future. I wish that legislators were constrained by the same restrictions we are if we want to introduce new units, or recommend new journals to the library: if they wish to introduce a new law, let them first nominate an old law which they will be repealing.

6. That the world has no ethical significance but only a physical one is the greatest and most pernicious of errors, the fundamental error, the intrinsically perverse view, and is probably at bottom also that which faith has personified as the Anti-Christ. Nevertheless, and despite all the religions, which all assert the opposite and seek to demonstrate it in mythical form, this fundamental error never quite dies out on earth but raises its head again and again until general indignation again and again compels it to hide it.

This is why I am on the side of the Taliban, against Professor Dawkins, when all is said and done.

7. A dictate of reason is the name we give to certain propositions which we hold true without investigation and of which we think ourselves so firmly convinced we should be incapable of seriously testing them even if we wanted to, since we should then have to call them provisionally in doubt.

I call these ‘core axioms’. Usually I find in discussion eventually that mine are different from those of the person I am arguing with, which makes any progress impossible. Thus my principal goal in argument is to find out what the other person’s are.

8. He who truly thinks for himself is like a monarch, in that he recognises no one over him. His judgements, like the decisions of a monarch, arise directly from his own absolute power. He no more accepts authorities than a monarch does orders, and he acknowledges the validity of nothing he has not himself confirmed.

I take pains to assure my students that they do not need to take what I am saying on authority, and if they had but world enough and time they could go out and verify anything I say for themselves. This is why chemistry is more satisfying to me than the historical sciences. Nothing makes me more uncomfortable when someone pronounces in the popular press ‘The scientific consensus is…’ without giving the reasons for this consensus, even if it is a consensus I agree with.

9. Just as we know of the earth only the surface, not the great, solid masses of the interior, so we know empirically of things and the world nothing at all except their appearance, i.e., the surface. Exact knowledge of this constitutes physics, taken in the widest sense. But that this surface presupposes an interior which is not merely superficies but possess cubic content is, together with deductions as to the character of the interior, the theme of metaphysics. To seek to construe the nature of things in themselves is an undertaking to be compared with seeking to construe stereometric bodies out of superficies and the laws that apply to them. Every dogmatic transcendental philosophy is an attempt to construe the thing in itself according to the laws of appearance, which is like trying to make two absolutely dissimilar bodies cover one another, an attempt which always fails because however you may turn them this or that corner always protrude.

I think a better analogy yet is to imagine ourselves living on the inside of the stereometric body.

10. The task of the novelist is not to narrate great events but to make small ones interesting.

I once attempted to write a novel in which nothing much would happen; but hardly had I begun then a troop of incidents and accidents charged into my head, dragging it back toward the ‘action adventure’ genre. This is an indication of my profound limitations as a novelist.

11. If you want to earn the gratitude of your own age you must keep in step with it. But if you do that you will produce nothing great.

12. My chief objection to pantheism is that is signifies nothing. To call the world God is not to explain it but merely to enrich the language with a superfluous synonym for the word world …For it would never occur to anyone taking an unprejudiced view of the world to regard it as a God. It would clearly have to be a very ill-advised God who knew of nothing better to do then to transform himself into a world such as this one.

13. The first rule, indeed by itself virtually a sufficient condition for good style, is to have something to say.

Uh-oh, that is more than ten. But I could doubtless go on to select many more.

(All quotes from ‘Essays and Aphorisms’, selected and translated by R. J. Hollingdale, 1970.)