Arthur Schopenhauer: On Thinking for Yourself

A new translation

This is a translation from scratch of Schopenhauer’s short essay, “On Thinking for Yourself” (“Selbstdenken”).¹ Why? Because I found the existing translations I’m aware of dissatisfying, and because I thought it might be fun.

The goal was to convey some of Schopenhauer’s raw style by being a bit more literal in some places, while also trying to better preserve his wit for modern readers. Obviously, there is no concession to political correctness here whatsoever (the very thought), and no attempt to simplify anything. It came out a little less cleaned up and less academic than other translations, but hopefully more true to the original spirit and ideas.

Translating 19th century German is an interesting exercise. There are many words here with an extremely rich philosophical meaning that are impossible to translate directly without writing whole essays about them. Translating such texts is a game of truly feeling yourself into the author: taking a step back after reading a paragraph and sensing what it was he sought to convey, and his mood when he wrote it. You have to hear his chuckling in your mind, his frustration, his anger, and his sense of wonder. You need to apprehend directly the nimble stirrings of the guy who wrote these things. I tried my best to stay true to that spirit.² So there you go.

Arthur Schopenhauer: On Thinking for Yourself

§. 257.

Just as the most plentiful library, if unorganised, is of less use than a very meagre but well-ordered one, so the greatest amount of knowledge, if you haven’t ploughed through it by thinking for yourself, counts for far less than a much tinier portion that you have thought through from all kinds of angles. The reason is that only by multidimensionally piercing together what you know, by relating every truth to all other truths, can you truly acquire and gain power over your knowledge. You can ponder only what you know; which is why you should learn something: but you also know only what you have pondered.

Now it is true that you can force yourself, via discipline, to read and learn: but not to think, not really. Because just as a fire needs to be kindled and sustained by an airflow, thinking needs to be kindled and sustained by some sort of interest in what it is directed to; which may be a pure objective interest or a merely subjective one. The subjective interest is only ever aimed at our personal affairs, whereas the objective interest is only for those minds whose very nature it is to think: for whom thinking comes as natural as breathing. Alas, there are only very few of those around. Which is why it is such a rarity among academics.

§. 258.

The difference between how thinking for yourself affects your mind, as opposed to reading, is incredibly great. And since it is the mind that drives someone to one or the other in the first place, this means that the chasm even gets bigger over time.

Reading, you see, forces thoughts on your mind that are as foreign and incompatible with its current direction and mood as the signet is to the wax on which it impresses its seal. Which means that during reading, the mind has to suffer the utter external coercion to think now this, now that, even while at the moment it might neither have the drive nor be in the mood for it. – When thinking for yourself, on the other hand, your mind follows its very own drive, as triggered and shaped either by your current surrounding or some memory. This is because your palpable surrounding, unlike reading, doesn’t impose one particular thought on the mind, but merely provides it with the raw material and stimulation to think something according to its own nature and current disposition. – Hence reading a lot robs the mind of all elasticity, just as the constant pressure of a weight takes it from the spring. This is the reason why scholarly erudition impoverishes most people’s spirits even more, and makes them even stupider than they already are by their very nature.

§. 259.

At the end of the day, only your very own foundational thoughts are true and truly alive: because it is really only those that you fully understand and grasp in their essence. The external thoughts you have read are the leftovers of a stranger’s meal, the discarded cloths of some foreign guest.

Our own thought, as it arises within, is to the one read elsewhere as the mark left by a prehistoric plant on a stone is to the blooming plant in spring.

§. 260.

Reading is a mere surrogate for thinking for yourself. It means allowing someone else to lead your thoughts on a leash. What’s more, the only thing many books are good for is to demonstrate how many erroneous ways there are, and how hard we could get lost if we allowed them to guide us. He who is guided by genius, on the other hand, who thinks for himself, voluntarily, correctly, possesses the compass to find the right path.

You should therefore only read when the source of your own thoughts dries up—which will happen often enough even to the best of minds. But to frighten off your own, ur-potent thoughts to take up a book is a crime against the Holy Spirit. It would be like fleeing from real nature to go visit a herbarium or to look at nice landscapes in engravings.

It is true that sometimes, you could have easily found a truth or an insight ready-made in a book, which you have instead laboured hard for, pondering and combining, slowly, by using your own mind. And yet, the same truth or insight is worth a hundred times more if you have acquired it by thinking for yourself. Because only then does it enter the full coherence of your thoughts and relates to them perfectly and firmly, understood with all its grounds and consequences; only then does it take on the colour, the hue, the structure of your entire way of thinking: because it came just at the right time when your unique thought structure stirred up the urge. And so what has been gained sits tight, never to leave you again. Accordingly, Goethe’s verse:³

What from your fathers’ heritage is lent,
Earn it anew, to really possess it!

finds here its most perfect application, indeed, its explanation.

The truth merely learned, on the other hand, is taped to us like an attached limb, a false tooth, a wax nose, or at best one made by rhinoplasty from alien flesh. Whereas the truth acquired by thinking for ourselves is like the natural limb: it alone is truly ours. Here we find the root of the difference between the thinker and the mere scholar. It is also why the intellectual achievements of the self-thinking man resemble a beautiful painting hitting you fully alive, with the right light and shades, sustained hue, perfectly rendered harmony of colours. The intellectual substrate of the mere scholarly academic, on the other hand, is like a large palette full of all kinds of colours, at best ordered systematically, but without harmony, cohesion or meaning.

§. 261.

To read is to think with another’s head instead of your own. But there is nothing more disadvantageous to your own thinking, which after all seeks to form a coherent whole—a system, albeit not a strictly complete one—, than too heavy an influx of foreign thoughts via reading. This is because such thoughts, the fruits of another’s mind belonging to another’s system, are of a different colour and will never come together on their own to form a whole: of thought, of knowledge, of insight and conviction. No, it’s rather that such externally imposed thoughts will produce a small Babylonian cacophony in the head and rob the mind, now overcrowded, of all clear understanding and almost disintegrate it. We can observe this state among many academics who lack common sense, the capacity for correct judgement and practical tact, when compared to many of the unschooled who have managed to always give their own thinking priority, using it to subordinate the knowledge they acquired from external sources such as experience, conversation, or the little reading they have done. Now this is precisely what the academic thinker does, but on a grander scale: while he needs much knowledge and therefore must read a lot, his mind is strong enough to master all of it, assimilate it, and incorporate it into the system of his thought. That way, he can subsume it under the organic, coherent whole of his ever-growing, superb insight. His own thinking always rules, like the ground-bass of the organ, never to be drowned out by foreign sounds as is the case with the merely polyhistorical heads, in which, as it were, bits and pieces of music of all keys run into each other even while you cannot make out the keynote any more.

§. 262.

Those who spent their life reading and pulled their wisdom from books are like those who got their detailed account of a foreign country from so many travel diaries. They can tell you much about many things: but in the end, they have no coherent, marked, thorough knowledge of what the place is about. Whereas those who spent their life thinking are like those who have been in the country themselves: they alone really know what they are talking about, know things as they relate to the whole, and are truly at home there.

§. 263.

The man thinking for himself is to the common book-philosopher as the eyewitness is to the historian: the first can talk from his own, immediate perception. This is why all those who think for themselves basically agree, their differences merely a result of different perspectives: where those don’t change anything, they all say the same thing, because they merely report what they have apprehended objectively. I have often been reluctant to say certain things publicly because of their contrarian nature, only to find them later, to my great joy and surprise, in the old works of great men. The book-philosopher, on the other hand, reports what this one has said, that one has meant, and still another has objected, and so on. He then compares, considers, criticises, trying that way to get to the truth of the matter, while becoming quite similar to the critical historian. For example, he will investigate whether Leibniz might have, at any point in time, for just a while, been a Spinozist; things like that. The aficionado of curiosities may find very clear examples of this in Herbart’s “Analytische Beleuchtung der Moral und des Naturrechts” or his “Briefe über die Freiheit.” One can only marvel at the great length someone like that will go to, because it seems to me that if he wanted to tackle the actual subject itself, he would quickly reach his goal with just a little thinking for himself. There is a little problem here, however: you cannot control this process at will. You can always sit down and read, but not so with thinking. As with people, so with thoughts: you can’t always call them up when you want to, but must rather wait patiently until they arrive. Thinking about a certain matter must present itself to you on its own terms by way of a fortunate, harmonious coming together of the external trigger and the right inner atmosphere and tension: which is precisely what such people never experience. That being said, even the greatest mind is not able to think for himself all the time. Thus he would be well-advised to use the remaining time to read, even though as I said it is a surrogate for thinking for oneself and feeds the mind material by allowing another to think for you—always in a manner that is not your own. Which is, again, why you shouldn’t read too much; so that your spirit doesn’t get used to the surrogate, lest it loses the real thing: in other words, so that it doesn’t get used to the beaten paths and therefore, by walking a stranger’s line of thought, alienates you from your own. Least of all should you give up looking at the real world in favour of reading: because it is there that the occasion and the atmosphere for thinking for yourself will knock at your door much more often than by reading. For it is the vivid, the exemplification, the real, in its primal power, which is the natural matter of the thinking mind, and can stir it deeply most reliably.

After all these deliberations, it shouldn’t be a surprise that you can easily tell apart the self-thinking man from the book-philosopher by their style. The first will strike you as serious, immediate, raw, and clinically precise; while the second clearly got everything second-hand: dead concepts, silly stuff randomly thrown together, like the copy of a copy. His style consists of conventional, indeed vulgar, filler phrases and worn-out buzzwords: like a small state that has only foreign currencies in circulation because it doesn’t mint its own.

§. 264.

While reading cannot replace thinking, neither can mere experience. The purely empirical is to thinking as eating is to digestion and assimilation. The empirical bragging about how it alone has added to human knowledge would be like the mouth bragging about how it alone is sustaining the body.

§. 265.

Characteristic of minds of the highest order is the raw quality of their judgements. Everything they put before you is the result of their very own thinking, and announces itself as such even in their style. Like the prince, they possess imperial immediacy: in the empire of minds. The others are mediated, which you can already see in their style that lacks any distinct internal form.

Every true thinking man is therefore like a monarch: he is immediate and doesn’t recognize anybody above him. His judgements, like the decrees of a monarch, spring from his own perfect authority and arise directly from himself. For just as the monarch doesn’t accept any orders, so the thinking man doesn’t accept authorities, but refuses everything he hasn’t confirmed for himself. Whereas the vulgus among the heads, slave to all kinds of dominant opinions, authorities and biases, is like the common populace, silently obeying laws and orders.

§. 266.

Those people who are so quick and eager to settle controversial issues by appeal to authority in reality are glad when they can, instead of using their own reason and insight, of which there is surely not enough, put forward that of strangers. Their number is legion.

§. 267.

In the realm of the real world, no matter how beautiful, happy and gracious it may be, we still can only ever move under the sway of gravity, which we have to overcome at every turn: but in the realm of thoughts, we are incorporeal spirits outside gravity or distress. This is why there is no happiness on earth comparable to that which a fine, fertile mind, at the right hour, finds within himself.

§. 268.

The presence of a thought is like the presence of a lover. We believe we will never forget this thought, and that we will always care for that lover. Alas, out of sight, out of mind! The most splendid thought is in danger of being irretrievably forgotten if not written down; the lover of being abandoned if she is not wedded.

§. 269.

There are a great many thoughts that are valuable for the one who thinks them; but only very few that possess the power to act further via resonance or reflection; that can, in other words, hold the attention and interest of the reader after they have been written down.

§. 270.

But with all that, it must be said that there can only be real value in something a man has, above all else, thought for its own sake. You see, you can categorise thinkers into those who engage in thinking primarily for themselves, and those who always think for others. The first are the real deal, they are the self-thinkers in both meanings of the word: they are the true philosophers. They alone are serious about it all. What’s more, the pleasure and happiness of their very being lies in thinking. The others are the sophists: they desire appearances and seek their happiness in that which they hope to get from others: this is their true mission. You can quickly figure out to which category someone belongs by his whole demeanour and mannerisms. Lichtenberg is an example of the first category: Herder already belongs to the second.

§. 271.

If we consider in earnest how great and obvious the problem of Being truly is, this ambiguous, tortured, ephemeral, dream-like Being; a problem so great and obvious that it overshadows and dwarfs all other problems or goals the minute one becomes aware of it; and if we further bring to mind how all people, except the very rare and few, are not aware of this problem in any clear way, or worse, don’t even know it exists, but rather put all their effort into anything and everything; wasting away their life, their minds set exclusively on the current day and the hardly longer time span of their personal future: and doing all that by either explicitly rejecting the problem of Being or readily allowing themselves to be treated to some vulgar system of prole metaphysics and be content with it; if we consider all that, I say we may well come to the conclusion that we should call man a thinking being only in a very loose sense indeed; at which point we will cease to marvel at any expression of thoughtlessness or dumbness but rather recognize that while the intellectual horizon of the normals goes beyond that of the animal, whose whole being—aware of neither past nor future—is more like one single present, it doesn’t go as amazingly far beyond that as is fashionable to assume.

All of this goes to the point where even in conversation, you will find people’s thoughts as short as cut straw, which explains why no longer thread can be spun from them.

We should further note that, if the world were populated by beings that truly think in any recognisable sense, it would be unimaginable for noise of any kind to be allowed and licensed with no boundaries whatsoever, as is in fact the case even for the most horrible and senseless sort. Indeed, if nature had bothered to designate man to think, she wouldn’t have given him ears, or at least equipped them with airtight shutters like bats have, for which I envy them. But the truth is that man is a poor animal among others whose strengths are exclusively tuned to the conservation of his existence, which is why he needs his ears receptive at all times: ears that can announce, whether we want it or not, by day and by night, the approaching predator.

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1. The original essay (“Selbstdenken”) was part of Schopenhauer’s book Parerga und Paralipomena II; the source text I used is the last authorized edition, published 1851: Erstausgabe Berlin, A. W. Hayn 1851, text online available here: https://aboq.org/schopenhauer/parerga2/selbstdenken.htm]

The paragraph numbers reflect that the essay was part of a longer book; I left them in there.

2. This is a rough draft that may still need some editing, so there might be some errors and oversights in here.

3. [»Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast,
Erwirb’ es, um es zu besitzen,«

From Goethe’s Faust I, English here: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/14591/pg14591-images.html]