Essays of Schopenhauer
current terms, resembles a small state where there is a circulation of
foreign money because it coins none of its own.
* * * * *
Mere experience can as little as reading take the place of thought. Mere
empiricism bears the same relation to thinking as eating to digestion
and assimilation. When experience boasts that it alone, by its
discoveries, has advanced human knowledge, it is as though the mouth
boasted that it was its work alone to maintain the body.
The works of all really capable minds are distinguished from all other
works by a character of decision and definiteness, and, in consequence,
of lucidity and clearness. This is because minds like these know
definitely and clearly what they wish to express--whether it be in
prose, in verse, or in music. Other minds are wanting in this decision
and clearness, and therefore may be instantly recognised.
The characteristic sign of a mind of the highest standard is the
directness of its judgment. Everything it utters is the result of
thinking for itself; this is shown everywhere in the way it gives
expression to its thoughts. Therefore it is, like a prince, an imperial
director in the realm of intellect. All other minds are mere delegates,
as may be seen by their style, which has no stamp of its own.
Hence every true thinker for himself is so far like a monarch; he is
absolute, and recognises nobody above him. His judgments, like the
decrees of a monarch, spring from his own sovereign power and proceed
directly from himself. He takes as little notice of authority as a
monarch does of a command; nothing is valid unless he has himself
authorised it. On the other hand, those of vulgar minds, who are swayed
by all kinds of current opinions, authorities, and prejudices, are like
the people which in silence obey the law and commands.
* * * * *
The people who are so eager and impatient to settle disputed questions,
by bringing forward authorities, are really glad when they can place the
understanding and insight of some one else in the field in place of
their own, which are deficient. Their number is legion. For, as Seneca
says, "_Unusquisque mavult credere, quam judicare._"
The weapon they commonly use in their controversies is that of
authorities: they strike each other with it, and whoever is drawn into
the fray will do well not to defend himself with reason and arguments;
for against a weapon of this kind they are like horned Siegfrieds,
immersed in a flood of incapacity for thinking and judging. They will
bring forward their authorities as an _argumentum ad verecundiam_ and
then cry _victoria_.
* * * * *
In the realm of reality, however fair, happy, and pleasant it may prove
to be, we always move controlled by the law of gravity, which we must be
unceasingly overcoming. While in the realm of thought we are disembodied
spirits, uncontrolled by the law of gravity and free from penury.
This is why there is no happiness on earth like that which at the
propitious moment a fine and fruitful mind finds in itself.
* * * * *
The presence of a thought is like the presence of our beloved. We
imagine we shall never forget this thought, and that this loved one
could never be indifferent to us. But out of sight out of mind! The
finest thought runs the risk of being irrevocably forgotten if it is not
written down, and the dear one of being forsaken if we do not marry her.
* * * * *
There are many thoughts which are valuable to the man who thinks them;
but out of them only a few which possess strength to produce either
repercussion or reflex action, that is, to win the reader's sympathy
after they have been written down. It is what a man has thought out
directly _for himself_ that alone has true value. Thinkers may be
classed as follows: those who, in the first place, think for themselves,
and those who think directly for others. The former thinkers are the
genuine, _they think for themselves_ in both senses of the word; they
are the true _philosophers_; they alone are in earnest. Moreover, the
enjoyment and happiness of their existence consist in thinking. The
others are the _sophists_; they wish to _seem_, and seek their happiness
in what they hope to get from other people; their earnestness consists
in this. To which of these two classes a man belongs is soon seen by his
whole method and manner. Lichtenberg is an example of the first class,
while Herder obviously belongs to the second.
* * * * *
When one considers how great and how close to us the _problem of
existence_ is,--this equivocal, tormented, fleeting, dream-like
existence--so great and so close that as soon as one perceives it, it
overshadows and conceals all other problems and aims;--and when one sees
how all men--with a few and rare exceptions--are not clearly conscious
of the problem, nay, do not even seem to see it, but trouble themselves
about everything else rather than this, and live on taking thought only
for the present day and the scarcely longer span of their own personal
future, while they either expressly give the problem up or are ready to
agree with it, by the aid of some system of popular metaphysics, and are
satisfied with this;--when one, I say, reflects upon this, so may one be
of the opinion that man is a _thinking being_ only in a very remote
sense, and not feel any special surprise at any trait of thoughtlessness
or folly; but know, rather, that the intellectual outlook of the normal
man indeed surpasses that of the brute,--whose whole existence resembles
a continual present without any consciousness of the future or the
past--but, however, not to such an extent as one is wont to suppose.
And corresponding to this, we find in the conversation of most men that
their thoughts are cut up as small as chaff, making it impossible for
them to spin out the thread of their discourse to any length. If this
world were peopled by really thinking beings, noise of every kind would
not be so universally tolerated, as indeed the most horrible and aimless
form of it is.[12] If Nature had intended man to think she would not
have given him ears, or, at any rate, she would have furnished them with
air-tight flaps like the bat, which for this reason is to be envied.
But, in truth, man is like the rest, a poor animal, whose powers are
calculated only to maintain him during his existence; therefore he
requires to have his ears always open to announce of themselves, by
night as by day, the approach of the pursuer.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] See Essay on Noise, p. 28.
SHORT DIALOGUE ON
THE INDESTRUCTIBILITY OF OUR TRUE BEING BY DEATH.
_Thrasymachos._ Tell me briefly, what shall I be after my death? Be
clear and precise.
_Philalethes._ Everything and nothing.
_Thras._ That is what I expected. You solve the problem by a
contradiction. That trick is played out.
_Phil._ To answer transcendental questions in language that is made for
immanent knowledge must assuredly lead to a contradiction.
_Thras._ What do you call transcendental knowledge, and what immanent?
It is true these expressions are known to me, for my professor used
them, but only as predicates of God, and as his philosophy had
exclusively to do with God, their use was quite appropriate. For
instance, if God was in the world, He was immanent; if He was somewhere
outside it, He was transcendent. That is clear and comprehensible. One
knows how things stand. But your old-fashioned Kantian doctrine is no
longer understood. There has been quite a succession of great men in the
metropolis of German learning----
_Phil. (aside)._ German philosophical nonsense!
_Thras._----such as the eminent Schleiermacher and that gigantic mind
Hegel; and to-day we have left all that sort of thing behind, or rather
we are so far ahead of it that it is out of date and known no more.
Therefore, what good is it?
_Phil._ Transcendental knowledge is that which, going beyond the
boundary of possible experience, endeavours to determine the nature of
things as they are in themselves; while immanent knowledge keeps itself
within the boundary of possible experience, therefore it can only apply
to phenomena. As an individual, with your death there will be an end of
you. But your individuality is not your true and final being, indeed it
is rather the mere expression of it; it is not the thing-in-itself but
only the phenomenon presented in the form of time, and accordingly has
both a beginning and an end. Your being in itself, on the contrary,
knows neither time, nor beginning, nor end, nor the limits of a given
individuality; hence no individuality can be without it, but it is there
in each and all. So that, in the first sense, after death you become
nothing; in the second, you are and remain everything. That is why I
said that after death you would be all and nothing. It is difficult to
give you a more exact answer to your question than this and to be brief
at the same time; but here we have undoubtedly another contradiction;
this is because your life is in time and your immortality in eternity.
Hence your immortality may be said to be something that is
indestructible and yet has no endurance--which is again contradictory,
you see. This is what happens when transcendental knowledge is brought
within the boundary of immanent knowledge; in doing this some sort of
violence is done to the latter, since it is used for things for which it
was not intended.
_Thras._ Listen; without I retain my individuality I shall not give a
_sou_ for your immortality.
_Phil._ Perhaps you will allow me to explain further. Suppose I
guarantee that you will retain your individuality, on condition,
however, that you spend three months in absolute unconsciousness before
you awaken.
_Thras._ I consent to that.
_Phil._ Well then, as we have no idea of time when in a perfectly
unconscious state, it is all the same to us when we are dead whether
three months or ten thousand years pass away in the world of
consciousness. For in the one case, as in the other, we must accept on
faith and trust what we are told when we awake. Accordingly it will be
all the same to you whether your individuality is restored to you after
the lapse of three months or ten thousand years.
_Thras._ At bottom, that cannot very well be denied.
_Phil._ But if, at the end of those ten thousand years, some one has
quite forgotten to waken you, I imagine that you would have become
accustomed to that long state of non-existence, following such a very
short existence, and that the misfortune would not be very great.
However, it is quite certain that you would know nothing about it. And
again, it would fully console you to know that the mysterious power
which gives life to your present phenomenon had never ceased for one
moment during the ten thousand years to produce other phenomena of a
like nature and to give them life.
_Thras._ Indeed! And so it is in this way that you fancy you can
quietly, and without my knowing, cheat me of my individuality? But you
cannot cozen me in this way. I have stipulated for the retaining of my
individuality, and neither mysterious forces nor phenomena can console
me for the loss of it. It is dear to me, and I shall not let it go.
_Phil._ That is to say, you regard your individuality as something so
very delightful, excellent, perfect, and incomparable that there is
nothing better than it; would you not exchange it for another, according
to what is told us, that is better and more lasting?
_Thras._ Look here, be my individuality what it may, it is myself,
"For God is God, and I am I."