Need to know

Each of us has, I hope, at one point in time discovered a thinker whose writing captures exactly what we think, or have been trying to think, but couldn’t find the right words to say. As the poet Alexander Pope wrote in 1711, in self-fulfilling lines: ‘True wit is nature to advantage dress’d,/ What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d …’ Regular readers of Aeon+Psyche will be familiar with the dilemma that such a discovery poses: the powerful influence of this great mind, who promises to broaden the horizons of your thinking, is at the same time so potentially overwhelming that it threatens your ability to think for yourself. What was supposed to help expand your mind may, in fact, close it. How, then, to keep it open?

The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer – who was, as it happens, this sort of discovery for me – placed the highest value on thinking for yourself. (There is, of course, a single German word for this activity: Selbstdenken, which is also the title of one of Schopenhauer’s essays.) For him it was, above all, an intellectual virtue: it is the only way for us to make our knowledge truly secure. But it appears also to have had an existential dimension for him: if we lose the ability for independent thought, then we miss out on a key opportunity to become our authentic, original selves. And then there is a straightforwardly practical consideration: if you fail to think for yourself, how will you know what you should do, as opposed to the things you are simply told to do?

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For these reasons, Schopenhauer was surprisingly critical of the value of reading; if we read too much, he thought, then we will fail to think for ourselves. His stance on reading is surprising in a couple of ways. First of all, it is a paradoxical piece of advice from anyone who expresses themselves in writing and therefore, presumably, hopes to be read. Secondly, Schopenhauer was himself extremely well read. Turn to any page of Schopenhauer’s works and you will likely find him quoting from ‘great books’ in all traditions – ancient and modern, East and West. I just tried it myself and landed on Lucretius.

The novelist Marcel Proust, who admired Schopenhauer and noticed the same ‘dangers of erudition’ as him, also noticed how Schopenhauer’s own approach to book-learning offered an exemplary solution to the problem. One solution – not Schopenhauer’s – would have been to suppress his erudition and contrive or pretend to be as little well read as possible; the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example, prided himself on how little philosophy he had read (although he too had been an avid reader of Schopenhauer). However, Schopenhauer, says Proust, ‘offers us the image of a mind whose vitality wears the most enormous reading lightly …’ In other words, Schopenhauer never pretended to be anything other than extremely well read, but he was always, clearly, his own ultimate authority.

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And Proust, in his own reading of Schopenhauer, is of course an exemplary case study himself. Apart from the fact that he evidently read Schopenhauer very carefully, it will be obvious to anyone who reads his novels that Proust, like Schopenhauer, was deeply bookish – especially with his characters’ tendency to produce verbatim quotations from Jean Racine or Victor Hugo. There’s a reason, after all, that Proust devoted an entire essay to the topic of reading and the important role it had played in his intellectual development, which is where we can find his remarks on Schopenhauer. And yet, no one will deny that Proust was, or became, a truly original writer and thinker.

So, apart from leading by example, what advice did these two great minds have for being highly erudite, on the one hand, while still thinking for yourself, on the other?

Source: https://t-tees.com
Category: WHY