Georg Christoph Lichtenberg - With unflagging intelligence and encyclopedic curiosity, Lichtenberg wittily deflates the pretensions of learning and society, examines a range of philosophical questions, and tracks his own thoughts down hidden pathways to disconcerting and sometimes hilarious conclusions

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, Trans. by R. J. Hollingdale. NYRB Classics, 2000. [1765.-1799.]


introduction


German scientist and man of letters Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was an 18th-century polymath: an experimental physicist, an astronomer, a mathematician, a practicing critic both of art and literature. He is most celebrated, however, for the casual notes and aphorisms that he collected in what he called his Waste Books. With unflagging intelligence and encyclopedic curiosity, Lichtenberg wittily deflates the pretensions of learning and society, examines a range of philosophical questions, and tracks his own thoughts down hidden pathways to disconcerting and sometimes hilarious conclusions.

Lichtenberg's Waste Books have been greatly admired by writers as very different as Tolstoy, Einstein, and Andre Breton, while Nietzsche and Wittgenstein acknowledged them as a significant inspiration for their own radical work in philosophy. The record of a brilliant and subtle mind in action, The Waste Books are above all a powerful testament to the necessity, and pleasure, of unfettered thought.


Among the great achievements of the German spirit.— Gordon Craig


This collection of jottings isn’t the sort of book you “read” but, rather, one in which you browse, grazing on the thoughts of a wonderfully fertile mind.— The Vancouver Sun


If one reads them the way one eats chocolates, two or three at a time, The Waste Books gives a rare pleasure, stating things we might have thought of ourselves, expressed in ways that never would have occurred to us.—Arthur Danto, Bookforum


Nietzsche credited Lichtenberg as the greatest German aphorist. The Waste Books, a collection of 1,085 aphorisms written over the course of Lichtenberg’s adult life, amply attests to that. The pieces cover every conceivable topic—from science, religion and philosophy to daily observations (An amen face) and meditations about girls: Even the gentlest, most modest and best of girls are always better, gentler and more modest if their mirrors have told them they are looking more beautiful than ever. — Tirdad Derakhshani


"Let him who has two pairs of trousers turn one of them into cash and purchase this book," wrote Lichtenberg in 1775. Which was a little frivolous of him, as the book he was writing in was a notebook unintended for publication. The English title of this collection of his jottings comes from accountancy; the waste book ( Sudelbuch or Klitterbuch in German) contains unsorted details of every transaction before they are tidied up for the purposes of bookkeeping.
As it turned out, Lichtenberg never tidied up the notebooks he kept from 1765 to 1799, but they became the cornerstone of his fame thereafter. He was a scientist, but may now, because of the startling quality of his aphorisms, fairly be called the German writer's favourite writer, highly rated by, among others, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heine and Karl Kraus.
Open The Waste Books at random and you meet a thinker of great urbanity, charm, and incisiveness. One does not want to run down one's own profession, but take this remark and muse on its applicability to our own times: "The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can't hear yourself speak." (It is soothing to know that people have been suffering from the rapid and meaningless turnover of judgements from celebrity-obsessed hacks for more than 200 years.) Or take this, a remark which strikes me as having a particularly modern sense of humour: "The course of the seasons is a clock in which a cuckoo goes 'cuckoo' when spring arrives."
This is the joy of The Waste Books : not being intended for publication, they are more playful, more private and times more catty than aphorisms produced by a self-consciously important writer. (Whom was Lichtenberg describing when he wrote, "Whenever he composes a critical review, I have been told he gets an enormous erection"? And of whom, you find yourself wondering, could it be true today? Hmm? It's like eavesdropping on someone's thoughts. One of the great things about this selection is that Lichtenburg's sillier aperçus (Wwhen we read odes our nostrils expand and so do our toes") have been left in. Silliness has always been part of Lichtenberg's attraction. He's a decently sceptical gentleman: he doesn't shake his head over humanity like La Rochefoucauld, or bang on and on about God like Pascal.
Penguin first published this selection in 1990; congratulations to NYRB Classics for reissuing it (they have been putting out an extraordinarily good list lately, and I have been torn as to which one to choose). Aphorisms, complained Nietzsche, aren't taken seriously enough. He meant, of course, his own aphorisms, but the same applies to everyone else's. One wonders why collections of aphorisms aren't more popular: they're short and require virtually no attention span whatsoever to enjoy. The problem with good ones, however, is that they make you think, and this is something that books of modern aphorisms, like The Little Book of Calm , do not really want us to do. Keep this by your bed, though, and you may find it very rewarding, even if, at times, you find yourself perplexed. "Courage, garrulousness and the mob are on our side. What more do we want?"— Nicholas Lezard


Containing thousands of aphoristic notes, Lichtenberg’s books read like clippings from newspaper horoscopes, fortune cookie fortunes and one-liners commingling with trenchant observations about the human condition and the existential peccadilloes with which it’s fraught. So, why call these gems The Waste Books?
In his student days he began the lifelong practice of recording his thoughts, observations and reminders in notebooks that he called Sudelbücher after the “waste books” in which English business houses of the time entered transactions temporarily until they could be recorded in formal account books. – Scientific American

In some ways, Lichtenberg is the spiritual godfather of microblogging – from Twitter to the digital scrapbooking on Tumblr and its ilk, Lichtenberg’s recorded observations read like memento mori for his muse. As R.J. Hollingdale observed in his introduction to a New York Review Books edition:

“The contents of these notebooks are very heterogeneous: a single page can include aphorisms, scientific jottings and sketches, linguistic experiments, phrases that have struck the writer and appealed to him, notes for future work, dates to be remembered, titles of books to be purchased; what the Sudelbücher are not, however, are diaries…”

Indeed, as Lichtenberg himself observed, “I have jotted down a host of little thoughts and sketches, but they are awaiting not so much a final revision as a few more glimpses of the sun that will make them blossom.”
Consider:
“An auction at which people bid with things other than money, e.g. books.”
“If, as Leibniz has prophesied, libraries one day become cities, there will still be dark and dismal streets and alleyways as there are now.”
“We have often the thoughtless respect accorded ancient laws, ancient usages and ancient religion to thank for all the evil in the world.”
Lichtenberg also invents similes that anticipate Raymond Chandler by 150 years: “He moved as slowly as an hour-hand in a crowd of second-hands.”
Often his quotes will seem to have a prescient sense of relevance, like this bit, which could stand as a contemporary indictment against the film industry: “All we really have are transplanters of novels and comedies. Few are raised from seed.”
And sometimes version of his notions show up in film, like this bit which reminds me of a scene from Woody Allen’s Manhattan: “A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.”
Occasionally, Lichtenberg seems to be wandering down a blind path, which, inevitably leads to a real showstopper of a perception:
“It thunders, howls, roars, hisses, whistles, blusters, hums, growls, rumbles, squeaks, groans, sings, crackles, cracks, rattles, flickers, clicks, snarls, tumbles, whimpers, whines, rustles, murmurs, crashes, clucks, to gurgle, tinkles, blows, snores, claps, to lisp, to cough, it boils, to scream, to weep, to sob, to croak, to stutter, to lisp, to coo, to breathe, to clash, to bleat, to neigh, to grumble, to scrape, to bubble. These words, and others like them, which express sounds are more than mere symbols: they are a kind of hieroglyphics for the ear.”
And yes, he repeated “to lisp.” Inasmuch as Lichtenberg riffed on onomatopoeia as hieroglyphics for the ear, having thumbed through some of my own waste books I’m reminded that my handwriting is apparently its own kind of hieroglyphics. Someday, I might set upon decoding this private graffitti. Who knows, I might find a gem. Or as Lichtenberg wrote: “The thoughts written on the walls of madhouses by their inmates might be worth publicizing.” - Daedalus Howell




We may use Lichtenberg’s writings as the most wonderful dowsing rod: wherever he makes a joke, there a problem lies hidden. —Goethe
Lichtenberg digs deeper than anyone… . He speaks from the subterranean depths. Only he who himself digs deep hears him. —Karl Kraus
[T]here are truths that are singularly shy and ticklish and cannot be caught except suddenly —that must be surprised or left alone. —Nietzsche

In the exacting ledger of posterity, the aphorist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg rates high but is undeniably a specialty item. He is not a household name. He is something rarer: a name savored by household names. Goethe, who corresponded with Lichtenberg, admired him greatly (even though Lichtenberg disputed his theory of color). Arthur Schopenhauer, not someone addicted to dispensing praise glibly, reserved his highest compliment for Lichtenberg, declaring him to be a Selbstdenker, some- one who genuinely thought for himself. Likewise, Nietzsche, whose powers of contempt often outshone his talent for appreciation, repeatedly cited Lichtenberg with agreement and respect. (Nietzsche might have had Lichtenberg in mind when, in The Gay Science, he defended his own method of handling philosophical problems: “I approach deep problems like cold baths: quickly into them and quickly out again. That one does not get to the depths that way, not deep enough, is the superstition of those afraid of the water.”) Kierkegaard, too, regularly cited or alluded to Lichtenberg, and in fact prefaced his book Stages on Life’s Way with a version of one of Lichtenberg’s most famous aphorisms: “Such works are mirrors: when an ape looks into them, no apostle looks out.” Wittgenstein, with his weakness for sudden enthusiasms, made Lichtenberg one of his causes, recommended him to various correspondents, and pressed copies of his work on friends, including Bertrand Russell. Lichtenberg’s influence on Wittgenstein’s work went deeper than mere content: the gnomic form of the Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations owes a great deal to the example of Lichtenberg’s aphorisms. Scratch an important nineteenth- or twentieth-century thinker and the chances are good that you will find a warm word or two for the work of G. C. Lichtenberg.

Nevertheless, what Jacques Barzun said of the English essayist Walter Bagehot is also true of Lichtenberg: he is well known without being known well. A healthy slice of his most enduring work has been translated into English, but that was some years ago and—such is the fickleness of intellectual fashion—Lichtenberg’s reputation has diminished into a name flanked by a handful of witty remarks:

He swallowed a lot of knowledge, but it seemed as if most of it had gone down the wrong way. He who is enamored of himself will at least have the advantage of being inconvenienced by few rivals. Not only did he not believe in ghosts, he wasn’t even afraid of them. A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments. The fly that does not want to be swatted is safest if it sits on the fly-swatter.

There is a lot of gold in Lichtenberg. The casual negligance of presumed familiarity has assured that it remains buried for most American and English readers. We hear the name, remember an epigram or two, and leave it at that.

The republication of R. J. Hollingdale’s translation of a selection of Lichtenberg’s aphorisms[1] may serve as a welcome corrective. First published by Penguin in 1990, Hollingdale’s translation of 1,085 aphorisms amounts to perhaps a quarter of the material that Lichtenberg collected in the nine volumes of his notebooks (two of which went missing in the nineteenth century, along with portions of two others). Lichtenberg began keeping his notebooks in his student days in the mid-1760s and he kept scribbling in them until a few days before his death, at fifty-seven, in 1799.

As Hollingdale observes in his introductory essay, these notebooks are not diaries. Lichtenberg did keep a diary—a voluminous one—where he recorded the itineraries of his domestic and social life. But the notebooks were something else, a general repository, an intellectual clearinghouse, “a Book wherein I write everything, as I see it or as my thoughts suggests it to me.” Lichtenberg’s notebooks are a sort of omnibus. As J. P. Stern put it in Lichtenberg: A Doctrine of Scattered Occasions (1959)—the best book in English on Lichtenberg—they consist of “jottings, extracts, calculations, quotations, autobiographical observations, platitudes, witticisms, drafts as well as polished aphorisms.” Lichtenberg considered publishing at least portions of his notebooks but never did. His feelings about their value seemed to vacillate with his moods, which themselves vacillated wildly. Sometimes he referred to their contents as Pfennigs-Wahrheiten—“penny-truths”—at other times he waxed grandiloquent: “I have scattered seeds of ideas on almost every page which, if they fall on the right soil, may grow into chapters and even whole dissertations.”

The first German edition of Lichtenberg’s notebooks, published early in the nineteenth century, bore the title Bemerkungen vermischten Inhalts (“Remarks on Miscellaneous Subjects”). It was an accurate if understated title. Later editions have been known by the picturesque word that Lichtenberg himself occasionally employed: Sudelbücher, Lichtenberg’s translation of the disused English term “Waste Books.” According to the OED, a “waste book” is “A rough account-book … in which entries are made of all transactions (purchases, sales, receipts, payments, etc.) at the time of their occurrence, to be ‘posted’ afterwards into the more formal books.” Substitute the words “thoughts, musings, observations, quotations, etc.” and you have the “waste book”—the rough draft—of the soul’s economy that Lichtenberg produced. Hollingdale speaks in this context of the “variegated inconsequentiality” of the Sudelbücher. They have a little of everything, but what they present is not so much a system as a sensibility, a take on the world.

Lichtenberg did not think of himself as an aphorist. I am not sure that the word Aphorismus even appears in the Sudelbücher. By training, he was an academic and a man of science. He was born in Oberramstadt, near Darmstadt, in 1742, the youngest of seventeen children, five of whom survived childhood. His father, who died when Lichtenberg was nine, was a prominent clergyman, part of the reformist Lutheran movement called Pietism, which stressed Bible-study and the ideal of simple Christian living. Lichtenberg tells us that he lost his Christian faith when he was sixteen, though he retained a somewhat amorphous belief in God inspired less by the Bible than by Leibniz’s vision of a pre-established, divinely ordered harmony that suffuses the cosmos. Although popular with other children, Lichtenberg was a weak and sickly child. He suffered from a malformation of the spine, caused probably by tuberculosis, which resulted in his being a hunchback. Not surprisingly, this physical fact influenced his entire life and outlook. Still, Lichtenberg was not without a sense of humor about his condition. “My head,” he explained, “lies at least a foot closer to my heart than is the case with other men: that is why I am so reasonable.” Later he mused that “If Heaven should find it useful and necessary to produce a new edition of me and my life I would like to make a few not superfluous suggestions for this new edition chiefly concerning the design of the frontispiece and the way the work is laid out.”

Lichtenberg’s malady did not prevent his having many erotic attachments. Hollingdale describes his private life as “very irregular.” Lichtenberg’s executors destroyed the more intimate portions of his diaries, so posterity has been spared many details, but it is clear that he preferred his women simple and he preferred them young. In 1777 he met Maria Stechard, a poor weaver’s daughter who was then tweleve or thirteen. Lichtenberg employed her as a housekeeper, and she soon became his mistress. They lived together from 1780 until her early death in 1782. He was affected by her death, Hollingdale notes, “as by nothing before or afterwards.” The relationship provided Lichtenberg’s neighbors with something to gossip about, much to his chagrin. It also brought him much happiness. “She reconciled me,” Lichtenberg sadly recalled, “to the human race.” In 1784, Lichtenberg met Margarete Kellner, a daughter of a whitewasher, who was then in her early twenties. From 1786 they lived together and were married in 1789. Although the relationship was stormy, Margarete gave Lichtenberg seven children. She survived him by forty-nine years.

Life was not easy for Lichtenberg. One early critic described him as “the Columbus of hypochondria.” The fact that not all his maladies were imaginary made his situation all the more painful. J. P. Stern speaks of the “indefinable mixture of illness and hypochondria, sloth and fits of depression, indolence and fear” that ruled intermittently over Lichtenberg’s life. In one note, he bitterly announced his plan to write an autobiography called “The Story of My Mind, as well as of My Wretched Body.”

Lichtenberg’s career unfolded at the University of Göttingen, where he studied mathematics and science and, from 1770, held a succession of academic positions. He was an immensely popular teacher, one of the first to weave experiments into his lectures. Students came from far and wide not so much to study with as to witness, to “hear Lichtenberg.” A man of prodigious but unfocused curiosity, Lichtenberg dabbled everywhere but persevered nowhere. In science, his primary interests were in astronomy and electricity. Some of his scholarly work in astronomy was recognized by later astronomers who named a lunar crater after him. In 1780, to the consternation of his neighbors, he erected the first lightning rod in Göttingen (“That sermons are preached in churches,” Lichtenberg observed, “doesn’t mean the churches don’t need lightning rods.”) In 1784, Alessandro Volta came to watch Lichtenberg’s experiments with electricity. We still speak of “Lichtenberg figures,” the star-shaped patterns formed in dust by certain electrical discharges. (“Lightning flowers” are Lichtenberg figures etched in the capillaries just beneath the skin when someone is hit by lightning.) Although he was elected to the Royal Society in 1788, Lichtenberg made no important scientific discoveries. “A physical experiment which makes a bang,” he noted, “is always worth more than a quiet one. Therefore a man cannot strongly enough ask of Heaven: if it wants to let him discover something, may it be something that makes a bang. It will resound into eternity.” Much to his regret, Lichtenberg made no bangs in the world of science.

He did, however, generate an enthusiastic following. At the beginning of his teaching career, Lichtenberg tutored the sons of some English aristocrats. So popular was he that, in 1770, he was invited to England by his former pupils. It was the first of two visits. (The second, longer, one was from September 1774 until just before Christmas 1775.) It was love at first sight. Like the better sort of German then and later, Lichtenberg became a ferocious Anglophile. He moved in the highest social circles. He met Priestley, who performed experiments for him, and many other men of science. The King and Queen delighted in his company and in speaking German with him. (Göttingen, as it happened, was one of George III’s Hanoverian dominions.) So conspicuous was the royal favor—the King caused great commotion by coming to Lichtenberg’s lodging one morning at 10:00 AM and asking for “Herr Professor”—that a rumor briefly circulated that Lichtenberg was George II’s illegitimate son. Lichtenberg became an avid theater-goer in London. He was mesmerized especially by Garrick’s acting (“he appeared wholly present in the muscles of his body”) and said that it was from Garrick that Germans could learn most about what the word “man” really means. Lichtenberg’s other great discovery in London was the engravings of Hogarth (who had died in 1764). Beginning in 1794, Lichtenberg published a series of meticulously detailed “explanations” (Lichtenberg called it an Ausfürliche Erklärung) of Hogarth’s engravings. Not a belt-buckle or button, barely a speck of dust, is left uninventoried. Lichtenberg’s English translator described that work, which remained incomplete at Lichtenberg’s death, as “a unique and sometimes bizarre excursion” into the textual recapitulation of the visual.

It is not surprising that Lichtenberg found in Hogarth a congenial spirit. Quite apart from their artistic merit, Hogarth’s engravings are masterpieces of social observation. And it was to this above all that Lichtenberg devoted himself. “Chief employment of my life,” he minuted in his diary in 1771, “to observe people’s faces.” One commentator described him as a “spy on humanity.” It was almost literally true. Lichtenberg delighted in observing the street scene with a telescope from the eyrie of his window. “When an acquaintance goes by I often step back from my window, not so much to spare him the effort of acknowledging me as to spare myself the embarrassment of seeing that he has not done so.” Lichtenberg was the faculty of menschenbeobachterisch—human observing—made flesh. The fruit of that passion was a collection of aphorisms united not by theme or tone but by a sensibility that was at once generous and disabused.

He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery. If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger. Wine is accredited only with the misdeeds it induces: what is forgotten is the hundreds of good deeds of which it is also the cause. Wine excites to action: to good action in the good, to bad in the bad.  

Lichtenberg once said that he would give part of his life to know what was the average barometric pressure in paradise. He never discovered that quantum, but in his aphorisms we have an extraordinary register of the barometric pressure of the human heart.

As a literary form, aphorisms have the liability of their strength. Aphorisms are insights shorn of supporting ratiocination. Sometimes they are arrived at in an instant, in a sudden illumination; sometimes, as Lichtenberg’s draftings and redraftings of the same phrase or idea reveals, they are arrived at through a process of intellectual and rhetorical honing. Bertrand Russell reports that when he told Wittgenstein that he should not simply state what he thought was true but should provide arguments, Wittgenstein replied that arguments spoil the beauty of insights and that “he would feel as if he was dirtying a flower with muddy hands.” Just so, aphorisms are the blossoms of thought. They may depend on stalk and soil, but their beauty is independent of those prerequisites.

Whether arrived at instantly or through patient refinement, the defining characteristic of the successful aphorism is what we might call its suddenness. Some good aphorisms are obvious truths stated neatly. “You can make a good living from soothsaying [vom Wahrsagen] but not from truthsaying [vom Wahrheit-sagen].” The best are truths that only seem obvious after they have been stated neatly. (They inspire the thought: “Now why didn’t I think of that?”) Many aphorisms have an enigmatic or double-sided character: they cut both ways and depend upon some essential ambiguity or equivocation for their power, their poetry. Whether they are true often seems secondary or beside the point: they are piquant, they feel revelatory and thought-provoking, and that is enough. “The roof tile,” Lichtenberg says, “may know many things the chimney doesn’t know.” I would hate to part with that mot. But is it true? It would take an intrepid man to say.

Many people discount aphorisms, partly because so many are ambiguous, partly because they are episodic, isolated, and compressed. They seem too pat to be pertinent. Those traits can be liabilities, depending on the subject at hand. One would be ill-advised, for example, to trust a manual for bridge-builders or heart surgeons that was composed of aphorisms. But in other contexts the very characteristics that rob aphorisms of discursive strength endow them with other sorts of intellecutal power. Nietzsche was quite right to defend the aphorism against its detractors. (“It is aphorisms!,” he wrote with mock contempt. “Is it aphorisms?—May those who would reproach me thus reconsider and then ask pardon of themselves.”)

But Nietzsche was also right that the aphorism, though it can reach deep, must do so quickly. A ponderous aphorism is a failed aphorism. It follows that, considered as intellectual nourishment, aphorisms are best taken sparingly; their very concentration makes them hard to digest en masse. Like an electric flash on a camera, they require time between discharges if they are to be fully illuminating. When Lichtenberg says that “The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted,” we nod in agreement. He has encapsulated an entire theory of heresy in a handful of words. When he goes on to say in another aphorism that “With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in something else,” we nod again. Here we have the mechanics of some forms of atheism in a nutshell. When we read further that “This was the handle by which you had to grip him if you wanted to pour him out; if you gripped him anywhere else you burned your fingers,” we may nod again—here is an astute observation about a familiar character type. But how many more such nuggets can we take on board at a sitting? My own recommendation is that aphorisms be taken in doses of no more than a few pages a day. Any more, and the mind begins skipping.

Often, the appeal of an aphorism is a function of its cynical knowingness: “If I should ever produce an edition of his life,” Lichtenberg wrote of we know not whom, “go straight to the index and look up the words bottle and conceit: they will contain the most important facts about him.” We all know people like that, just as we know what Lichtenberg means when he observes that “Sometimes men come by the name of genius in the same way that certain insects come by the name of centipede; not because they have a hundred feet, but because most people cannot count above fourteen.”

Still, the element of cynicism can be overdone. “What is called an acute knowledge of human nature,” Lichtenberg writes, “is mostly nothing but the observer’s own weaknesses reflected back from others.” Well, sometimes, perhaps. But sometimes an acute knowledge of human nature is just that: an acute knowledge of human nature. “What they call ‘heart,’” Lichtenberg tells us, “lies much lower than the fourth waistcoat-button.” Well, yes, there is such a thing as sex. But is “heart,” is romance, to be entirely explained as a cover or front for sex? Freud thought so. Maybe Lichtenberg did, too. Were they right?

Having a low opinion of human nature may not be a prerequiste for being a good aphorist. But it helps. (It also, nota bene, aids in one’s appreciation of aphorisms.) Chamfort, Pascal, Gracián, Vauvenargues, La Rochefoucauld: none of these master aphorists was burdened by an overly sunny view of humanity, though each was gloomy in his own way. Pascal’s observation that all a man’s troubles begin when he leaves his room is of quite a different character from La Rochefoucauld’s thought that “In the misfortunes of our best friends we always find something that does not displease us.” But both proceed from the assumption that things are always worse than they seem.

The cynical nature of many aphorisms is one reason the genre is so popular. Many people, especially many intellectuals—the most ardent customers for the aphorism—pride themselves above all on their disillusionment. They see themselves “seeing through” manners, pretensions, morals, whatever, and what they see is seldom edifying. (As a class, intellectuals are rarely—to use Wordsworth’s phrase—“surprised by joy.”) Aphorists are by profession debunkers. That is a large part of their power. It also points to a limitation. Untempered by elements of affirmation, debunking generates its own species of bunk. Take the aphorism by La Rochefoucauld quoted above. It is one of his most famous, and was well-known already in Lichtenberg’s day. Lichtenberg himself thought well of it, noting that “It sounds peculiar, but he who denies the truth of it either doesn’t understand it or does not know himself.” But mightn’t it also be that it sounds peculiar because it is peculiar, and that the misfortunes of our best friends generally stir pity, empathy, and compassion?

Many of Lichtenberg’s aphorisms are more ruminative than scarifying. “There is a great difference,” he observes, “between still believing something and again believing it.” Anyone who has reflected on the seasons of faith will know what Lichtenberg means. Some of his aphorisms have pointed relevance to the contemporary cultural scene: “It requires no especially great talent to write in such a way that another will be very hard put to understand what you have written.” Others, alas, have been overtaken by events: “It is easy to construct a landscape out of a mass of disorderly lines, but disorderly sounds cannot be made into music.” Lichtenberg was especially acute on the follies that intellectual life falls prey to. “Nowadays,” he notes, “we everywhere seek to propagate wisdom: who knows whether in a couple of centuries there may not exist universities for restoring the old ignorance.” And again: “There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.” Do Lichtenberg’s aphorisms add up to a coherent philosophy? I doubt it. J. P. Stern suggests that Lichtenberg promulgated a doctrine of “scattered occasions” (the phrase is Bacon’s), a sort of “inverted Categorical Imperative” that invests the moment, not the moral maxim, with absolute value. Perhaps. But that is simply to elevate the absence of doctrine into a doctrine. Lichtenberg’s acts of espionage on mankind were unsystematic even about being unsystematic. They were raids on the interesting, conducted as time, mood, and inspiration permitted. There is no unifying thread, though there are recurrent themes. One familiar theme is part description, part admonition: “It is almost impossible to bear the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody’s beard.” If you bear the torch, Lichtenberg seems to say, be wary. - Roger Kimball

We know with much greater clarity that our will is free than that everything that happens must have a cause.  Could we therefore not reverse the argument for once, and say: our conception of cause and effect must be very erroneous because our will could not be free if our idea of cause and effect were correct?

This is essentially right and invites commentary.  Which of the following propositions is better known, more evident, more credible, or more likely to be true?

 

1. With respect to some actions and omissions, the human will is libertarianly free, free in the 'could have done otherwise' sense.
2. Every event, including every action and failure to act of a human person, is the terminus of a causal chain extending into the past to times prior to the person's birth, and every event is as such necessary given what has gone before.

Given that the propositions cannot both be true, if (1), then ~(2).  One can now argue either my modus ponens to (~2) or by modus tollens to (~1).  Lichtenberg is suggesting in effect that the modus ponens argument is to be preferred.

I agree.  For I know directly, in my own case, that I am morally responsible for some of my actions and failures to act, and that therefore I am free with respect to these actions and omissions.  This is surely better known than that every event is necessitated by earlier events, and that nothing I do or leave undone is ever something for which I am morally responsible.  The direct, first-person evidence trumps third-person considerations. If you balk at my use of 'know,' then I will say that it is more evident, clearer, more likely to be true, more credible, that I am free.

Think about it.  How do you know that every event has a cause that necessitates it?  It is not a conceptual or analytic truth like Every effect has a cause.  That's true ex vi terminorum. But there is nothing in the concept event or the meaning of 'event' that warrants the inference that every event has a cause.  Uncaused events are thinkable without contradiction.*  Nor do you know the relevant principle by experience.  Have you examined every event? No.  But even if you had examined every cause-effect sequence in the universe, you could not find the necessity by experience.  As Lichtenberg's man Kant famously said, "Experience teaches what is the case, but not what must be the case."    For Kant, the causal principle is synthetic a priori.  But now: how clear is the very concept of the synthetic a priori, first, and second, how clear is it that the causal principle is an instance of it?  And third, how clear are the pillars of the Kantian edifice that undergird the synthetic a priori? 

One might reach for inference to the best explanation.  What is the best explanation of the success of the natural sciences in the explanation, prediction, and control of natural phenomena?  That (macro)nature is  deterministic.  But the inference is shaky and less to be relied upon than the direct evidence that here and now I did something I (morally) should not have done, something I know I could have refrained from doing.

It is not absolutely self-evident that I am morally responsible and libertarianly free, but it is evident, and indeed more evident than the premises of any deterministic argument.  That's enough.

One should never philosophize in such a way that one denies or discounts the very phenomenological evidence that got us philosophizing in the first place.

And if I have good reason to believe that something is the case, then I have good reason whether or not I can solve every puzzle to which the thing gives rise.

You say free will is an illusion?  I say that that is nonsense and that you are playing fast and loose with 'illusion.'

_____________

*Of course I am not saying that my free actions are uncaused: an uncaused event is not eo ipso a free event.  My free actions are caused by me, the agent.  I am their creative source, their agent-cause.  The idea is not entirely clear, granted.  But it is even less clear that I am a deterministic system. - Bill Vallicella

Odd title, unusual book. Lichtenberg (1742-1799) was a German polymath: astronomer, experimental physicist, mathematician and critic of art and literature. In his student days he began the lifelong practice of recording his thoughts, observations and reminders in notebooks that he called Sudelb¸cher after the "waste books" in which English business houses of the time entered transactions temporarily until they could be recorded in formal account books. By the end of his life he had accumulated 11 Sudelb¸cher, which he labeled as volumes A through L (skipping I). Hollingdale, a translator of Nietzsche, Goethe and Schopenhauer, has translated the notebooks. Here he presents excerpts, focusing on what he says are best called aphorisms. Lichtenberg turns out to be quite an aphorist, repeatedly surprising and entertaining the modern reader. Examples: "Whenever he was required to use his reason he felt like someone who had always used his right hand but was now required to do something with his left." "You can make a good living from soothsaying but not from truthsaying." "The book which most deserved to be banned would be a catalog of banned books." "Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is." - Scientific American

The sure conviction that we could if we wanted to is the reason so many good minds are idle.

One is rarely an impulsive innovator after the age of sixty, but one can still be a very fine orderly and inventive thinker. One rarely procreates children at that age, but one is all the more skilled at educating those who have already been procreated, and education is procreation of another kind.

It is almost everywhere the case that soon after it is begotten the greater part of human wisdom is laid to rest in repositories.

The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can't hear yourself speak.

Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older.

Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will.

We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.

It is a question whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when it hits the chair it has bumped into.

The fly that does not want to be swatted is safest if it sits on the fly-swat.

Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation, namely an imitation of its opposite.

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

What I do not like about our definitions of genius is that there is in them nothing of the day of judgment, nothing of resounding through eternity and nothing of the footsteps of the Almighty.

With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.

Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

The great rule: If the little bit you have is nothing special in itself, at least find a way of saying it that is a little bit special.

A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.

Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. From this we can see how useful it is to employ reason in seeking out the laws of taste.

A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out. We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.

It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth ... into a liar -- that I call an achievement.

Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism.

There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.

If we make a couple of discoveries here and there we need not believe things will go on like this for ever.... Just as we hit water when we dig in the earth, so we discover the incomprehensible sooner or later.

The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.

What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don't deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don't we just as often draw the wrong ones?

A clever child brought up with a foolish one can itself become foolish. Man is so perfectable and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense.

Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatever.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

We say that someone occupies an official position, whereas it is the official position that occupies him.

As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word.

If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards.

The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.

Actual aristocracy cannot be abolished by any law: all the law can do is decree how it is to be imparted and who is to acquire it.

Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity.

One cannot demand of a scholar that he show himself a scholar everywhere in society, but the whole tenor of his behavior must none the less betray the thinker, he must always be instructive, his way of judging a thing must even in the smallest matters be such that people can see what it will amount to when, quietly and self-collected, he puts this power to scholarly use.

It is in the gift for employing all the vicissitudes of life to one's own advantage and to that of one's craft that a large part of genius consists.

The greatest events occur without intention playing any part in them; chance makes good mistakes and undoes the most carefully planned undertaking. The world's greatest events are not produced, they happen.

There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity did not exist.

If an angel were ever to tell us anything of his philosophy I believe many propositions would sound like 2 times 2 equals 13.

With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in some other thing.

Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.

Once the good man was dead, one wore his hat and another his sword as he had worn them, a third had himself barbered as he had, a fourth walked as he did, but the honest man that he was -- nobody any longer wanted to be that.

We are obliged to regard many of our original minds as crazy at least until we have become as clever as they are.

Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficulty: elephants and poodles find many things obscure.

Doubt must be no more than vigilance, otherwise it can become dangerous.

There is no more important rule of conduct in the world than this: attach yourself as much as you can to people who are abler than you and yet not so very different that you cannot understand them.

I have remarked very clearly that I am often of one opinion when I am lying down and of another when I am standing up.

Sickness is mankind's greatest defect.

The most heated defenders of a science, who cannot endure the slightest sneer at it, are commonly those who have not made very much progress in it and are secretly aware of this defect.

Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself.

We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.

With prophecies the commentator is often a more important man than the prophet.

The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.

The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted.

A schoolteacher or professor cannot educate individuals, he educates only species.

To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.

Prejudices are so to speak the mechanical instincts of men: through their prejudices they do without any effort many things they would find too difficult to think through to the point of resolving to do them.

Reason now gazes above the realm of the dark but warm feelings as the Alpine peaks do above the clouds. They behold the sun more clearly and distinctly, but they are cold and unfruitful.

Of all the inventions of man I doubt whether any was more easily accomplished than that of a Heaven.

We often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings their original state of innocence, to find our way out of the rubble of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak ourselves, and I might almost say to exist ourselves.

What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment.

People often become scholars for the same reason they become soldiers: simply because they are unfit for any other station. Their right hand has to earn them a livelihood; one might say they lie down like bears in winter and seek sustenance from their paws.

The "second sight" possessed by the Highlanders in Scotland is actually a foreknowledge of future events. I believe they possess this gift because they don't wear trousers. That is also why in all countries women are more prone to utter prophecies.

We do not think good metaphors are anything very important, but I think that a good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on...

That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim.

First we have to believe, and then we believe.

So-called professional mathematicians have, in their reliance on the relative incapacity of the rest of mankind, acquired for themselves a reputation for profundity very similar to the reputation for sanctity possessed by theologians.

The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.

Sometimes men come by the name of genius in the same way that certain insects come by the name of centipede -- not because they have a hundred feet, but because most people can't count above fourteen.--

It is almost impossible to carry the torch of wisdom through a crowd without singeing someone's beard.

Soothsayers make a better living than truthsayers.

The often unreflected respect for old laws, old customs and old religion we have to thank for all mischief in the world.

Now that education is so easy, men are drilled for greatness, just as dogs are trained to retrieve. In this way we've discovered a new sort of genius, those great at being drilled. These are the people who are mainly spoiling the market.

Let him who has two pairs of trousers turn one of them into cash and purchase this book.

There can hardly be stranger wares in the world than books: printed by people who do not understand them; sold by people who do not understand them; bound, reviewed and read by people who do not understand them; and now even written by people who do not understand them.

It is a bad thing that truth has nowadays to have its cause pleaded by fiction, novels and fables.

The course of the seasons is a clock in which a cuckoo goes "cuckoo" when spring arrives.

Just as there are polysyllabic words that say very little, so there are also monosyllabic words of infinite meaning.

What a pity it isn't a sin to drink water, cried an Italian, how good it would taste.

When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?

We ought really to call "a book" only that which contains something new: the rest are only a means of learning quickly what has already been done in this or that field. To discover new countries and to fournish accurate charts of what you have discovered: that is the difference. What has not yet been said on this matter?

What concerns me alone I only think, what concerns my friends I tell them, what can be of interest to only a limited public I write, and what the world ought to know is printed...

[Excerpt from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, written 1765-1799, translated by R.J. Hollingdale (2000).]

German physicits, mathematician, astromoner, and satirical writer, best-known for his aphorisms he collected in his notebooks (waste books). Lichtenberg has been admired by such writers and philosophers as Goethe, Nietzsche, Schopenhaeur, Tolstoy, and Wittgenstein. Goethe once said: "We may use Lichtenberg’s writings as the most wonderful dowsing rod: wherever he makes a joke, there a problem lies hidden." In his notebooks Lichtenberg examined unsystematically a wide variety of subjects, from society and philosophical questions to psychology and art and literature. Throughout his life Lichtenberg suffered from poor health, but he had hypochondriac tendencies, too.

"The greatest things in the world are brought about other things which we count as nothing: little causes we overlook but which at length accumulate." (from The Waste Books, translated by R. J. Hollingdale)

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was born in Oberramstadt, near Darmstadt. He was the first of seventeen children, most of whom died at an early age. From his childhood Lichtenberg suffered from a malformation of the spine. In spite of becoming a hunchback and the target of crude and offensive remarks, his writing do not show bitter attitude toward life. And as much as his own outlook was observed by other people, he observed their behavior and his own life. His physical handicap Lichtenberg also could deal with humour. "My head," he said, "lies at least a foot closer to my heart than is the case with other men: that is why I am so reasonable."
Lichtenberg's father, Johann Conrad Lichtenberg, was a Lutheran clergyman. He died in 1751 when Lichtenberg was nine. Henrietta Catharina (Eckard) Lichtenberg, his mother, came also from a clerical family; she died in 1764. Later Lichtenberg said, that he had dreams of his mother every night. In 1763 Lichtenberg entered Göttingen University, where he studied mathematics and the natural sciences. His first printed work was 'Von dem Nutzen, den die Mathematik einem Bel Esprit bringen kann' (1766), which was published in Hannoverische Magazin. After graduating, he worked as a tutor for three years. During this period Lichtenberg started to read Kant, but later he was more drawn to Spinoza’s way on thinking.
His first sexual encounter Lichtenberg may have experienced in 1766 with Maria Justine Schulzen, a cleaning woman. In 1777 he met Maria Stechard, a weaver’s daughter, who was then about thirteen years old. She started to visit his house daily as a housekeeper and from 1780 she lived with him permanently. Maria died in 1782. "She reconciled me to the human race," Lichtenberg recalled, but soon he found another love, Margarethe Kellner, and again a much younger woman with a working class background. They lived together from 1786 and were married in 1789. Margarethe gave him six children and outlived him by 49 years.
Lichtenberg left Göttingen only three times. He visited England twice – in 1770 and 1774-1775. These journeys made him an Anglophile; especially he enjoyed the atmosphere of political freedom. According to a story, one morning George III once arrived unannounced on his doorstep, asking in German whether the Herr Professor was at home. A rumor or joke began to circulate that Lichtenberg was George II’s illegitimate son. Lichtenberg's interest in English life and art led him to write a comprehensive study on Hogarth's engravings, Ausfürliche Erklärung der Hogarthischen Kupfertische, 1794-1835. Lichtenberg produced the first five of 14 instalments.
In 1770 Lichtenberg was appointed assistant professor of physics at Göttingen and in 1775 he become Professor Ordinarius. He taught mathematics, physics, astronomy, and a variety of other subjects. As his fame spread, his lectures on physics started to attract students from different parts of Europe. At that time it was very common that physicist were also mathematicians, and passed readily from mechanics to astronomy. Among his students were the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855), the geographer, naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), and the romantic poet Novalis (1772-1801). Trying to hide his hump from the curious students, he always came into the lecture room facing his audience.
From 1778 Lichtenberg contributed to the Göttinger Taschenkalender, a publication intended to spread the philosophy of the Enlightenment. With G.A. Forster he edited the Göttingisches Magazin der Literatur und Wissenschaft between 1780 and 1782. In 1793 he was elected a member of the Royal Society.
In 1793 Lichtenberg started an affair with his servant girl, Dolly. Probably he recorded in one of his notebooks (the K book) intimate details of this amorous adventure, but most of the book has been destroyed. During his last years he drank more than before. One of his neighbors have told, that Lichtenberg woke up late, had coffee, bitter, and wine. With lunch he drank wine, and in the afternoon he drank wine and liqueur. And in the evenings he read and wrote. Lichtenberg kept on filling up his notebooks until a few days before his death. He died at fifty-seven, on February 24, 1799.

Lichtenberg has been credited with introducing the aphorism into German literature. However, his notebooks in which he wrote his aphorism for his own amusement, were published posthumously. The names of the volumes followed the alphabets from A to L, which has several pages missing. Notebooks G and H have disappeared.
It is possible that Lichtenberg began keeping his notebooks, or Südelbücher ("waste books") as he called them, while still in school, but his earliest surviving notes are from the mid-1760s. He also kept a diary. Lichtenberg's aphorism were first collected in the posthumpus edition Vermischte Schriften (1800-05). It consisted of nine volumes. Lichtenberg's style is intimate and direct. Human nature and its foibles provided much material for his observations. "Soothsayers make a better living in the world than truthsayers," he once said. Lichtenberg ironized the Sturm und Drang school of writers and admired such English writers as Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding. Michel de Montaigne was the only French writer, whom he read with a pencil in his hand. At that time writers seldom recorded their dreams, but Lichtenberg showed genuine interest in them. "I know from endeniable experience that dreams lead to self-knowledge," he wrote. "Aus den Träumen der Menschen, wenn sie dieselben gnau anzeigten, ließe sich vielleicht vieles auf ihren Charakter schließen. Es gehörte aber dazu nicht etwa einer sondern eine ziemliche Menge." (from Sudelbuch A) Later Freud referred to him several times.
In the spirit of Enlightenment Lichtenberg was an empiricist, who opposed dogmatism and wanted to substitute knowledge for fancy. "Superstition," he explained, "originates among ordinary people in the early and all too zealous instruction they receive in religion: they hear of mysteries, miracles, deeds of the Devil, and consider it very probable that things of this sort could occur in everything anywhere." Lichtenberg questioned accepted truths, but his ironic rationalism was balanced and cultivated. Goethe’s theory of color he dismissed. In geometry he come to the conclusion that Euclid's axioms based on common sense might not be the only right ones. At the age of sixteen Lichtenberg lost his Christian faith. In the light of his notebook it seems that he was not an unshakable atheist. Once he noted: "Never undertake anything for which you wouldn't have the courage to ask the blessing of heaven."
Lichtenberg's first important work was Über Physiognomik, wider die Physiognomen (1778), a satire on Johann Caspar Lavater's Physiognomische Fragmente. Lavater's theory, that people's characters can be read from their portrait silhouettes, prompted also 'Fragment von Schwänzen', published in Baldingers Neues Magazin für Aerzte in 1783. Imitating Lavater's pretentious language, Lichtenberg examined the "expressive" qualities of tails, tails of dogs and pigs, and "pigtails" of men, all presented as silhouettes. "What kindliness in the silky tender slope," he wrote of an pigtail, "effective without any masking hemp-hiding ribbon, and yet smiling bliss like plaited sunbeams. Soaring as far above even crowned heads as saint's halo over a nightcap..." Also the early satire, Von Konrad Photorin (1773), was directed against Lavater. - www.kirjasto.sci.fi/lichten.htm