Very few people, I am afraid,
even among the caste that proudly calls itself educated are
familiar with the name of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, either as a scientist or
as a thinker. It is however my private indulgence, expressed in the birth of
this glowing special entry. (Although I am by no means alone, in showering his
philosophical excellence with highest praise: both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche
have shared my admiration for Lichtenberg.) In my childhood, a collection of
his incomparable aphorisms stood in the front row of a library shelf in my
room; and it was one of the books which I enjoyed rereading on various
occasions.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
(1742-1799) is entered as a “German scientist and satirist” in my
Webster’s Biographical Dictionary, and the Internet Wikipedia only
adds him being an “Anglophile.” In representing Lichtenberg’s enduring
value, I am however with Schopenhauer, who calls him a true philosopher,
which is of course the proper way to describe him. Here is that apposite
passage, from Schopenhauer’s Parerga und Paralipomena:
“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 are written down. It is what a man has thought out
directly for himself, which alone has true value. The thinkers may be
classed as follows: those who, in the first place, think for themselves, and
those who think directly for others. The former 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 existence for them consist in thinking. The others are the sophists,
who wish to seem, and who seek their happiness in what they hope to get
from the others; their earnestness consists in this. As to which of these two
classes one belongs is quickly seen by his whole method and manner. Lichtenberg
is an example of the first class, while Herder obviously belongs to the second.
Schopenhauer has several other
allusions to Lichtenberg’s aphorisms, all of the latter collected together in
the book titled Vermischte Schriften, although the name given to his
notebooks, kept from his student days until his death, by Lichtenberg himself
was Die Sudelbücher, The Wastebooks. Here are some:
That
arithmetic is the basest of all mental activities is proved by the fact that it
is the only one that can be accomplished by means of a machine. Take, for
instance, the reckoning machines, which are so commonly used in England at the
present time, and solely for the sake of convenience. But all analysis---
finitorum et infinitorum--- is fundamentally based on calculation. Therefore,
we may gauge the “profound sense of the mathematician,” of whom Lichtenberg has
made fun, saying: “These so-called professors of mathematics have taken
advantage of the ingenuousness of others, attaining the credit of possessing
profound sense, which strongly resembles the theologians’ profound sense of
their own holiness.”
…This
explains how modesty came to be a virtue. It was invented only as a protection
against envy. That there have always been rascals to urge this virtue and to
rejoice heartily over the bashfulness of a man of merit has been shown at
length in my chief work. In Lichtenberg’s Vermischte Schriften, I find this
saying quoted: Modesty should be the virtue of those who possess no other.
…Lichtenberg
asks: When a head and a book come into collision, and one sounds hollow, is
it always the book? And elsewhere--- Works like this are as a mirror; if
an ass looks in, you cannot expect an apostle to look out.
Difficult
though it be to acquire fame, it is an easy thing to keep, when once acquired.
Here, again, fame is in direct opposition to honor, with which everyone is
presumably accredited. Honor has not to be won; it must only not be lost. But
there lies the difficulty! For, by a single unworthy action, it is gone
irretrievably. But fame, in the proper sense of the word, can never disappear;
for the work, by which it was acquired, can never be undone, and fame attaches
to its author, even though he does nothing to deserve it anew. The fame which
vanishes, or is outlived, proves itself thereby to be spurious, in other words,
unmerited, and due to a momentary overestimate of a man’s work, not to speak of
the kind of fame which Hegel enjoyed and which Lichtenberg describes as trumpeted
forth by a clique of admiring undergraduates, the resounding echo of
empty heads; such fame as will make posterity smile when it lights upon
a grotesque architecture of words --a fine nest with the birds long gone; it’ll
knock at the door of this decayed structure of conventionalities and find it
utterly empty! --- not even a trace of thought there to invite the
passer-by.
Nietzsche quotes Lichtenberg
approvingly in his Menschliches #133:
A God
who is all love as is occasionally assumed would not be capable of one single
selfless action, which should remind us of this thought of Lichtenberg’s taken
from a more common sphere: “It is impossible for us to feel for others, as
the saying goes.--- We feel only for ourselves. This principle sounds harsh,
but it is not, if it is only understood correctly. We love neither father nor
mother nor wife nor child, but, rather, the agreeable feelings that they give
us.” (Menschliches 133.)
End of Part I.
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