Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Philosophical Writings

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Steven Tester

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781438441986
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Admired by philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Freud, Benjamin, and Wittgenstein, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) is known to the English-speaking world mostly as a satirist. An eminent experimental physicist and mathematician, Lichtenberg was knowledgeable about the philosophical views of his time, and interested in uncovering the philosophical commitments that underlie our common beliefs. In his notebooks (which he called his Waste Books) he often reflects on, challenges, and critiques these philosophical commitments and the dominant views of the Enlightenment, German idealism, and British empiricism. This scholarly collection of Lichtenberg's philosophical aphorisms contains hundreds of trenchant observations drawn from these notebooks, many of which have been translated into English here for the first time. It also includes a historical and philosophical introduction to his writings, situating him in the history of philosophy and ideas, and is supplemented with a chronology, suggestions for further reading, and extensive introductory and textual notes explaining his references.

PHILOSOPHICAL WRITINGS SELECTED
FROM THE WASTE BOOKS

Notebook A

1765–1770

The great trick of regarding small deviations from the truth as the truth itself—a trick upon which the whole of differential calculus is based—is also the basis of our ingenious thoughts, where the whole thing would often collapse if we were to consider the deviations with philosophical rigor. [1]

It is a question whether in the arts and sciences a best is possible beyond which our understanding cannot reach. This point is perhaps infinitely dis-tant, yet with every approximation we have less ahead of us. [2]

To create a charicteristica universalis, we must first abstract from the syntax of language; syntax is a certain music we have composed, which in a few cases (“femme sage, sage femme”) has its peculiar use. If we are to make progress in our characteristica, we first require a language that adheres to concepts, or we must at least seek one for special cases. But since our most important decisions, when we think them without words, are often only points, such a language would be as difficult to formulate as the others that are supposed to be derived from it. [3]

When one believes—as metaphysicians often do—that one understands something one really does not, it could be called affirmative nescire.¹ [5]

It is difficult to say how we came to possess our current concepts. No one, or very few of us, would be able to recount when they first heard mention of the name Leibniz. To explain how we first acquired the belief that all men are mortal would be still more difficult; we do not arrive at this idea as quickly as one would believe. If it is this difficult to explain the origin of phenomena that occur within us, how will we fare in this respect when we wish to establish something about the things outside us? [9]

[…] The question is really whether we arrived at geometry through the division of farmland or if we merely applied a previously discovered theory. Such division certainly could not be performed without geometry, and even the most ignorant farmer would discover geometrical propositions when dividing a field into equal parts. Only a people can advance things in this matter without ever arriving at the proposition of the equivalence of ∆ ∆. Our gardeners are no geometers, yet only they are adept in resolving many situations. It is indeed a question what in everyday life most cleverly leads men to discover the most important geometrical propositions. To be sure, they do not arrive there by a straight line.² [10]

The discovery of the most significant truths depends upon a subtle abstraction, yet our everyday life, with its competencies, habits, and routines, constantly endeavors to make us incapable of this. It is the work of philosophers to unlearn these trivial mindless abilities, which we have acquired through observation since childhood. Thus even as a child, a philosopher should already be educated differently. [11]

When we look at an object, we simultaneously see many others but less distinctly. The question is whether this is habituation or whether it has another cause. If the first is the case, we should be able to become accustomed to seeing things distinctly without directly attending to them. [13]

In some sciences, the endeavor to discover a universal principle may often be just as fruitless as the endeavor of a mineralogist to discover some primary universal element through the compounding of which all minerals arose. Nature creates neither genera nor species, but individua, and in our shortsightedness, we must seek out similarities to be able to retain many things simultaneously. These concepts become more and more inaccurate the broader the categories are which we create. [17]

The greatest things in the world are brought about by others, to which we pay no attention, insignificant causes that we overlook but that eventually accumulate. [19]

In his novel Émile, Rousseau rightly calls accent the soul of speech. We often think people stupid, but upon examination we discover it is only their simple tone or accent that makes them seem this way. Since tone is not conveyed in writing, the reader must be directed to it by being shown more clearly through phrasing where it belongs. This is what distinguishes ordinary speech from a letter and what should distinguish a merely printed speech from one that is actually delivered.³ [21]

The influence of style upon our attitudes and thoughts, which I have discussed elsewhere, is evident even in Linnaeus, who is usually quite precise; he suggests that stones grow, plants grow and live, and animals grow, live, and sense. The first is false because the growth of a stone bears no resemblance to that of plants and animals. The intensification of expression, which he noticed in the latter series, probably led him to include the former in this classification.⁴ [22]

To match versification to the thought is a very difficult art, the neglect of which is responsible for much ridiculous verse. Versification and thought are related to one another as in everyday life savoir-vivre is to occupation. [23]

If we wish to create a philosophy of use to us in life or wish to give general principles for a perpetually contented life, we must certainly abstract from what introduces too much diversity in our observations—much as in mechanics we ignore friction or other similar particular properties of bodies, so our calculations are not so cumbersome, or we at least replace them with a single letter. Insignificant mishaps undeniably introduce much uncertainty into our practical principles, so we must dismiss them and attend to overcoming the significant ones. This is undoubtedly the true meaning of certain propositions in the Stoic philosophy.⁵ [28]

The superstition of ordinary people originates in their early and all too zealous instruction in religion, where they hear of secrets, miracles, and acts of the devil and believe it probable such things might occur everywhere in anything. If, however, they were first taught about nature, they would more readily regard the supernatural and mysterious aspects of religion with greater awe rather than considering them quite commonplace as they now do—so commonplace, indeed, that they do not think it extraordinary when someone tells them that today six angels crossed the street. Neither are the images in the Bible good for children. [29]

Habit might be called a moral friction: something that does not allow the mind to glide easily over things but joins it to them so it cannot easily free itself. [32]

In the everyday question of how to do something in the best possible way, we are seeking a certain maximum. [37]

The proof advanced by philosophers that there is a future life, which consists in their saying that were it not the case then God could not reward our final moments, belongs to the proofs by analogy. We reward only after the fact, thus God must also. We do this out of lack of anticipation, but where we are not thus hindered we also reward in advance, as we pay in advance our university tuition. Might God not also have paid in advance? When Plutarch says that the victor is not crowned during the battle but only afterward, he is similarly obscure; it is a mere analogy, a kind of proof that is both false and cruel. [42]

Death is a constant quantity—only pain is variable and may be intensified infinitely. Those who defend torture must admit this, or they torture in vain. In many, pain reaches a maximum and yet is < death. [53]

The argument against the materialists offered in Herr Unzer's journal Der Arzt, and that derives from the mutability of our body, truly has some force. Certainly the parts of my body are no longer me when I am a few years older, so how could successive souls, so to speak, impart consciousness to one another? One might respond that the transformation is very gradual, just as traditions have been passed on even though every eighty years the earth itself is different. This is how La Mettrie would respond. Another demonstration, esteemed by Herr Fontenelle, that the surprising effect of thought upon the body is inexplicable if thoughts follow mechanical laws is no more formidable. It is true, if I whisper gently in the ear of a man that he will be arrested if he does not immediately abscond, he will bolt and run frantically for miles. Yet we need assess an effect according to the sound the word makes that gives rise to it, just as little as we estimate an attack against the state by the force of an explosion; the thought thus continues to act, perhaps in a manner like a spark to gun powder.⁶ [56]

Prejudices are, so to speak, the acquired instincts of human beings: through prejudice we can accomplish many things we would find too difficult to think through to the point of decision. [58]

According to Home, in seeing and hearing we do not sense the immediate contact of bodies outside of us in the same way as with other senses. (If we had no eyes, perhaps the feeling of sensations would seem as equally to occur within us; it is only because we have eyes that we locate sensations where we see a cause for them p.m.)⁷ [70]

Whenever we read a good thought, we should see if something similar might be thought and said about another matter, assuming here that it has some affinity with the former. This is a kind of analysis of thought that perhaps some scholars adopt without saying. [76]

Understanding the meaning of a word in our mother tongue often takes us many years. I also have in mind understanding the meaning tone can lend to a word. The meaning of a word is, if I may express myself mathematically, given by a formula in which the tone is the variable and the word is the constant quantity. This opens the possibility of infinitely enriching language without increasing the number of words. I have found that the phrase “It is good” is pronounced in five different ways, each time with another meaning, which is often determined by yet a third variable, namely, the facial expression. [93]

If substances possess properties that allow others to apprehend them, then we can at once be members of different worlds without being conscious of ourselves in more than one of them, for the properties of substances are, in a manner of speaking, permeable. Thus we can die in one world and continue to live in another. [87]

If we could organize our most abstract principles, which our reason apprehends without much previous sensation, in such a way as to facilitate a transition to their application, it would produce a practical metaphysics—only this transition currently eludes our metaphysics. [97]

We ourselves are the measure of the miraculous. Were we to seek a common measure, the miraculous would disappear and all things be reduced to the same size. [110]

Minds or spirits without an external world must be strange indeed; since the ground of every thought lies within it, even the most fantastic combinations of ideas would always be correct. We call people insane when the order of their concepts no longer corresponds to the sequence of events in our orderly world; thus a careful observation of nature, or even mathematics, is certainly the most effective preventative of insanity; nature is, so to speak, the guide rope by which our thoughts are lead, so they do not stray. [111]

The grocer who weighs something is as much engaged in placing an unknown quantity on one side and a known quantity on the other as the algebraist. [113]

The conflict over meaning and being, which has done so much harm in religion, might have done more good had it been fought on other fields, for it is a common source of our misfortune that we believe things actually to be what they really only mean. [114]

It is an entirely unavoidable defect of all languages that they express only the genera of concepts and seldom can say adequately what they wish to say. For if we compare our words with things, we discover that the latter consist in a wholly different order from the former. The properties we observe in our souls are connected in such a way that it is not easy to delineate a boundary between them, but the words with which we express them are not constituted in this way. Two successive and related properties are expressed with signs that seem to indicate no relationship with one another. We should be able to decline words philosophically and to indicate their relationship through modifications. In the geometrical analysis of a line a, one indefinite section of it is called x; the other section is not called y, as in ordinary life, but a − x. This is why mathematical language has such great advantages over ordinary language. [118]

When Plato says passions and natural desires are the wings of the soul, his expression is enlightening; such comparisons illuminate the matter and are, as it were, translations of the difficult concepts of one man into a language understood by all—true definitions. [120]

Undoubtedly creatures might exist whose organs are so sensitive that they are unable to reach through a ray of light, just as we are unable to reach through a stone because our hands would be destroyed. [121]

Perhaps a thought is the cause of all motion in the world, and the philosophers who taught that the world is an animal perhaps arrived at the idea this way; but they may not have expressed themselves as exactly as they perhaps should have. Our entire world is only the effect upon matter of one of God's thoughts. [123]

The wor...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Chronology
• Note on the Edition, Text, and Translation
• Introduction
• Philosophical Writings Selected from the Waste Books
• Notes
• Further Reading