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Arthur Schopenhauer on Noise and Genius

In August 1821, while living in Berlin, the 33-year-old Arthur Schopenhauer had an altercation with a neighbour, the 47-year-old seamstress Caroline Louise Marquet. On that day, he was enraged by the noise of three women talking in the private anteroom to his apartment. When he demanded that they leave, two of the women complied but Marquet refused.

Later, Marquet claimed that Schopenhauer kicked and punched her and threw her down the stairs, leaving her paralysed on the right side and unable to work. He countered that he had only pushed her, and that she fell to the ground on purpose so that she could sue him.

Following a six-year legal battle ending in May 1827, he was made to pay her medical expenses along with a maintenance allowance of 60 thalers per annum for the rest of her life. On the day she died in 1842, the great philosopher of compassion recorded in his ledger, in Latin, Obit anus, abit onus [The crone dies, the burden is lifted].

The Case of Immanuel Kant

Schopenhauer built his pessimistic philosophy on that of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who also hated noise. Although gregarious and fond of laughter, Kant needed absolute quiet to write. According to lore, he once moved lodgings on account of a crowing rooster.

In May 1784, Kant, who lived all his life in Königsberg (present-day Kaliningrad), penned a letter to the police superintendent to complain about the “stentorian singing of prayers by the hypocritical inmates of the jail” (in the Iliad, the Greek herald Stentor had a voice as loud “as fifty voices of other men”). He was offended not merely by the noise but also by the insincerity of the prayers, which were offered, he thought, simply to appear God-fearing to the jailor.

Schopenhauer on Noise

In his essay On Noise (1851), Schopenhauer rails hardest not against the nattering of women but the cracking of whips in narrow resounding streets (the nineteenth century equivalent of revving motorbikes or these fart-can cars with modified exhausts): “Hammering, the barking of dogs, and the screaming of children are abominable; but it is only [his emphasis] the cracking of a whip that is the true murderer of thought.” To him, the cracking of whips was all the more unbearable for being unnecessary, and, worse than unnecessary, useless.

Schopenhauer links misophonia [the hatred of sound] with intellect and creativity: “Certainly there are people, nay, very many, who will smile at [my predicament], because they are not sensitive to noise; it is precisely these people, however, who are not sensitive to argument, thought, poetry, or art, in short, to any kind of intellectual impression: a fact to be assigned to the coarse quality and strong texture of their brain tissues.”

For Schopenhauer, genius is precisely this: the ability of the mind to remain focused on a single point and object. But as soon as a focused mind is interrupted or distracted, it is no better than an ordinary mind. It is, says Schopenhauer, as with a large diamond, which, if shattered, loses most of its value; or as with an army, which, if dispersed, loses most of its power.

It is not merely a matter of genius but also of happiness, because, as every creative person knows, there is no happiness greater than that of the mind at play. Aristotle famously conceived of God, the traditional fount of all reason, as a mind that turns blissfully upon itself. In contrast, people who are too frightened to put two and two together, or too dense to do so, use noise to help occupy and numb their minds.

What Science Says

Was Schopenhauer being fanciful in linking misophonia (the hatred of noise) with intellect and creativity? In recent years, researchers at Northwestern University have found that real-world creativity may be associated with a reduced ability to filter “irrelevant” sensory information. “Leaky” sensory gating may help our brains integrate ideas that are outside the focus of our attention and thereby promote associative and creative thinking. But if these extraneous ideas are, well, noise, it can also cripple us.

The genius mind is like a high-compression engine, which knocks if fuelled with lower octane gasoline, i.e. nonsense. Even if he might have overstated his case, Schopenhauer, it seems, was on to something.

Neel Burton is author of The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.

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Lessons from the teenage Schopenhauer’s European tour.

Schopenhauer at the age of fourteen.

Arthur Schopenhauer was born on in 22 February 1788 at 114 Heiliggeistgasse in the free city of Danzig (present-day Gdańsk, Poland). His father, Heinrich Floris, was one of the city’s most prominent merchants. Heinrich Floris was determined that his only son should become a merchant, and regularly upbraided him for his poor posture and even worse handwriting.

In 1793, when Arthur was five years old, Prussia annexed Danzig. The Schopenhauer family moved to the free Hanseatic city of Hamburg. At nine years old, Arthur was sent to Le Havre in France to live with the family of his father’s business associated, Grégoire de Blésimaire, who had a son, Jean Anthime, of Arthur’s age. The two years that Arthur spent in le Havre were, he claimed, among the happiest of his life. He became fluent in French, learn to play the flute, and forged a lifelong friendship with Jean-Anthime. Later in life, Schopenhauer would play the flute every day—leading Nietzsche to wonder whether he was indeed such a pessimist.

When Arthur was in his mid-teens, the principal of his private school, Dr Runge, who recognised his exceptional potential, attempted to persuade Heinrich Floris to redirect him onto an academic path. Arthur too exerted considerable pressure on his father. To settle the matter in his favour, the wily Heinrich Floris offered Arthur a Hobson’s choice between remaining in Hamburg to learn Latin and prepare for university, or accompany his parents on a luxurious two-year pleasure tour through Europe—on condition that he commit to a merchant apprenticeship upon their return.

Arthur’s European tour: The Wimbledon academy

Thus, in 1803, the fifteen-year-old Arthur set off on a tour of Holland, Britain, France, Switzerland, Austra, and Prussia. In England, he spent twelve weeks at Reverend Thomas Lancaster’s academy in Wimbledon, while his parents toured the North. Teachers thought of him as a “seething, belligerent pupil.” He developed a lifelong antipathy towards Anglicanism and later described the experience as a form of “incarceration.” But he became fluent in English, and, later, would write German in a more limpid English style.

Schopenhauer is still regarded as one of the greatest stylists in the German language. In On Language and Words, he would argue that language, though essential for human reasoning, shapes and limits our thoughts. It often serves as a substitute for true thinking, and distances us from intuitive perception and action. 

However, learning another language can increase our range and flexibility of thought by obliging us to separate the concept from the word and to break down and reconstruct thoughts according to a different organisational scheme. This is all the more true of the classical languages (Latin and Greek), which call for a non-literal translation that forces a melting down and recasting of thought.

Arthur’s European tour: Three hangings and a hard-labour penitentiary

Tourism in those days could take in the ugly as well as the beautiful. On June 8, 1803, Arthur witnessed three hangings from the window of a pub opposite Newgate prison in London. He noted in his travel diary that the men, right before the drop, took to praying: “One of them, who moved his hands up and down as he prayed, made the same movement a couple more times after he had fallen.”

On April 8, 1804, he visited the Bagne de Toulon, to be made famous by Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. “Can one think of a more terrible feeling than that of one of these unfortunates as he is chained to the bench in the dark galley and from which nothing but death can separate him?”

Later, he would compare the whole world to a penitentiary, and this period of his life to the Buddha’s awakening, when Prince Siddharta (later, the Buddha) ventured out of the palace only to be confronted everywhere by the “Four Sights” of age, sickness, death, and an ascetic monk.

Why Arthur warned against book knowledge

There can be no doubt that Arthur gained a lot more from his travels than he would have done from sitting in a Hamburg classroom. His worldliness, he would argue, gave him an advantage over “mere scholars” or “book philosophers”, for true thought must be rooted in direct observation and firsthand experience of the world.

Reliance on books is like “thinking with somebody else’s head” and produces only superficial knowledge, which, “like an artificial limb, false, tooth, or waxen nose,” is not organically woven into our being. Children, he thought (like Jean-Jacques Rousseau), should not be exposed to “theories and doctrines” until the age of sixteen.

In On Reading and Books, Schopenhauer wrote: “For the person who studies to gain insight, books and studies are merely rungs of the ladder he climbs to the summit of knowledge. As soon as a rung has raised him one step, he leaves it behind. On the other hand, the many who study to fill their memory do not use the rungs of the ladder for climbing, but take them off and load themselves with them to take away, rejoicing at the increasing weight of the burden. They remain below forever, since they are carrying what ought to have carried them.

Nietzsche, in the autobiographical Ecce Homo:

[Sickness] bestowed on me the compulsion to lie still, to be idle, to wait and be patient … But to do that means to think! … My eyes alone put an end to all bookwormishness, in plain terms … I was redeemed from the “book,” for years at a time I read nothing—the greatest favour I ever did myself! 

Neel Burton is author of The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.

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Whereas Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel could count as optimists, Schopenhauer is the first (and last) thinker in all Western philosophy to have constructed a complete and systematic pessimism.

But he is interesting for other reasons too. For his Great Philosophers series (1987), Bryan Magee, who wrote a thick book on Schopenhauer, introduced him as “the only major Western philosopher to draw serious and interesting parallels between Western and Eastern thought.” 

Magee continues: “He was the first major Western philosopher to be openly and explicitly atheist. He placed the arts higher in the scheme of things and more to say about them than any other important philosopher … He was himself among the supreme writers of German prose. Many of his sentences are so brilliantly aphoristic that they’ve been torn out of context and published separately in little books of epigrams.”

Schopenhauer’s humorous epigrams

To give you a flavour, here are a few of his many epigrams:

  • Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.
  • Life is a business that does not cover its costs.
  • The pleasure in this world, it has been said, outweighs the pain… If the reader wishes to see shortly whether this statement is true, let him compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other.
  • What everyone most aims at in ordinary contact with his fellows is to prove them inferior to himself.
  • Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people. There is no more mistaken path to happiness than worldliness.
  • It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.

Here’s why you laughed, according to Schopenhauer himself

Probably, you chuckled while reading these aphorisms. But why did you chuckle? Schopenhauer has his own theory of laughter, which is a version of the incongruence theory, according to which laughter arises from a contradiction between a concept (what people think is happening) and its reality (what is in fact happening)—highlighting a failure of reason over perception. Thus, when people laugh at us (rather than along with us) they are filling the gap between our idea of ourself, or people’s general idea of us, and the sad reality.

Many people who read Schopenhauer’s aphorisms laugh only half-heartedly, because they feel threatened by them. But the few who laugh full-throatedly feel liberated by their truth. In this moment of pure perception, while they laugh, they escape, if only for a few seconds, from the tyranny of the Will—the blind, irrational force that, in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, underlies all reality, and forces us to exist and strive without purpose.

Schopenhauer’s theory of weeping

Schopenhauer also had a theory of weeping. Weeping, which is a physical expression of mental misery, is a form of self-compassion. As such, it requires an outside perspective on the self, which is why animals don’t cry, and children don’t cry if no one is watching. Schopenhauer cites the example of a person who did not think to weep over their misery until their case was summarised to them in court and they were brought to reflect upon their suffering—when they suddenly broke into a stream of tears.

When we weep, we become “both the sufferer and the compassionate onlooker.” Because weeping originates from self-compassion, it suggests to others that the crier is capable of compassion, and thus worthy of compassion. Psychopaths don’t cry, or only crocodile tears.

A final reason why Schopenhauer is funny

To me, Schopenhauer is important also because he is the first since antiquity to offer a comprehensive solution to the problem of living and suffering. As well as a great philosopher, he was a fine psychologist, so that we often find ourself laughing along with him. But almost as often, we find ourself laughing at him, owing, I think, to the incongruence between his lofty philosophy of temperance and compassion and his own bad boy ways.

Neel Burton is author of The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.

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Intuition has never been more devalued than in our rational-scientific age.

At a wine bar in Corsica, I ordered a glass of Vermentino and shared some low-key wine talk with the sommelier who brought it to me. After a time, I ordered another glass, and we spoke again. I like testing my intuitions, so I said, at point blank, “You write poetry, don’t you?” The chap, taken aback by my sorcery, confirmed that he did indeed write poetry, and even that some of his poems had been published.

An intuition is a disposition to believe elaborated without hard evidence or conscious deliberation. I say “disposition to believe” rather than “belief” because an intuition is usually held with less certainty or firmness than a belief; and “believe” rather than “know” because an intuition is not justified in the normal sense, and not necessarily true or accurate.

It is not just that intuition is arrived at without hard evidence or conscious deliberation, but that these can impede it. “I am not absentminded” wrote the polymath GK Chesterton, “it is presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.”

Intuition versus instinct

Intuition is often confused with instinct. Instinct is not a sense about something, but a more or less strong tendency towards a particular behaviour that is innate and common to the species. “Anna stepped back, intuiting that the dog would follow its instinct and attack.”

Although instincts are ordinarily associated with animals, human beings also have quite a few, even if they are, or can be, strongly modified by culture, temperament, and experience. Examples of human instincts include any number of phobias (fear of heights, fear of spiders…), territoriality, tribal loyalty, and the urge to procreate and rear their young. These instincts are often distorted or sublimed: for example, tribal loyalty may find an outlet in sport, and the urge to procreate may take the more rarefied form of romantic love.

Aristotle says in the Rhetoric that human beings have an instinct for truth, and in the Poetics that we have an instinct for rhythm and harmony.

The psychology of intuition

If intuition is not instinct, how does it operate?

An intuition involves a coming together of facts, concepts, experiences, thoughts, and feelings that are loosely linked but too disparate and peripheral for deliberate or rational processing. As this reflection is sub- or semi-conscious and the workings are hidden, an intuition appears to arise ex nihilo, out of nothing and nowhere, and cannot, or at least not readily, be justified.

What makes an intuition so hard to support and argue for is that it is founded less on arguments and evidence than on the interconnection of things. It hangs, delicately, intricately, and invisibly, like a spider’s web.

The surfacing of an intuition, which can also occur in dream or meditation, is often mingled with a concordant feeling such as joy or fear, or simple pride and pleasure at the supreme cognitive and human achievement that an intuition represents.

How to invite intuition

If this is how intuition works, then we can invite intuition by expanding the range of our experiences, and by tearing down the barriers, such as biases, fears, and inhibitions, that are preventing them from coalescing.

We should also give ourself more time and space for free association. My own intuitive faculty is sharpest when walking, showering, travelling, or otherwise daydreaming, and when I am well rested.

Clearly, the more we know, the more we can intuit, and there is no such thing as wasted knowledge.

Finally, it would help if we could simply acknowledge the place and power of intuition. We have micro-intuitions all the time, about what to eat, what to wear, what road to take, whom to talk to, what to say, how to respond, and so on. I call them micro-intuitions because they rely on a great number of subtle variables, and escape, or largely escape, conscious processing. But what about the macro-intuitions?

Never in the history of humanity has the intuitive or mystic faculty been more neglected or devalued than in our rational-scientific age.

Neel Burton is author of the newly published How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero.

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The symbol of wisdom is the owl, a bird of prey which cleaves through darkness.

Every time I utter the word “wisdom”, someone giggles or sneers. Wisdom, more so even than expertise, does not sit comfortably in an egalitarian, anti-elitist society. In an age dominated by materialism and consumerism, science and technology, and specialization and compartmentalization, it is too loose, too grand, and too mysterious a concept. With our heads in our smartphones and tablets, in our bills and bank statements, we simply do not have the time or mental space for it, or even the idea of it.

But things were not always thus. The word “wisdom” features 222 times in the Old Testament, which includes all of seven so-called ‘wisdom books’: Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Solomon, the Book of Wisdom, and Sirach.

Here is Ecclesiastes 7:12:

For wisdom is a defence, and money is a defence: but the excellency of knowledge is, that wisdom giveth life to them that have it.

The word “philosophy” literally means “the love of wisdom”, and wisdom is the overarching aim of philosophy, or, at least, ancient philosophy.

In Plato’s Lysis, Socrates tells the young Lysis that, without wisdom, he will be of no worth to anyone:

And therefore, my boy, if you are wise, all men will be your friends and kindred, for you will be useful and good; but if you are not wise, neither father, nor mother, nor kindred, nor anyone else, will love you.

The patron goddess of Athens, the city in which the Lysis is set, is none other than Athena, goddess of wisdom, who sprung out from the skull of Zeus. Her symbol, and the symbol of wisdom, is the owl, a bird of prey which cleaves through darkness.

Indeed, “wisdom” derives from the Proto-Indo-European root weid-, “to see”. In Norse mythology, Odin gouged out one of his eyes and offered it to Mimir in exchange for a drink from the well of knowledge and wisdom, symbolically trading one mode of perception for another, higher one.

Wisdom as knowledge

But what exactly is wisdom? People often speak of “knowledge and wisdom” as though they might be closely related or even the same thing. So one hypothesis is that wisdom is knowledge, or a great deal of knowledge. If wisdom is knowledge, then it has to be a certain kind of knowledge, or else learning the phonebook, or the names of all the rivers in the world, might count as wisdom. And if wisdom is a certain kind of knowledge, then it is not scientific or technical knowledge, or else every contemporary person would be wiser than the wisest of ancient philosophers. Any twenty-first century school-leaver would be wiser than a Seneca or Socrates.

Remember: the Delphic oracle pronounced Socrates the wisest of all people not because he knew everything or anything, but because he knew the extent of what he did not know.

Still, there seems to be more to wisdom than mere “negative knowledge”, or else I could simply be super-skeptical about everything and count myself wise…

Or maybe wisdom consists in having high epistemic standards, that is, in having a high bar for believing something, and an even higher bar for calling that belief knowledge. But then we are back to a picture of wisdom as something like science…

Wisdom as correct opinion

In Plato’s Meno, Socrates notices that people of wisdom and virtue seem to be very poor at imparting those qualities. Themistocles was able to teach his son Cleophantus skills such as standing upright on horseback and shooting javelins, but no one ever credited the poor wretch with anything like his father’s wisdom; and the same could also be said of Lysimachus and his son Aristides, Pericles and his sons Paralus and Xanthippus, and Thucydides and his sons Melesias and Stephanus. And if wisdom cannot be taught, not even by the wisest of Athenians, then it is not a kind of knowledge.

If wisdom cannot be taught, how, asks Meno, did good people come about? Socrates replies that right action is possible under guidance other than that of knowledge: a person who has knowledge of the way to Larisa (a city-state in Thessaly) may make a good guide, but a person who has only correct opinion about the way, but has never been and does not know, might make an equally good guide. Since wisdom cannot be taught, it cannot be knowledge; and if it cannot be knowledge, it can only be correct opinion—which explains why paragons of wisdom such as Themistocles, Lysimachus, and Pericles were unable to impart their wisdom even unto their own sons. Wise people are no different from soothsayers, prophets, and poets, who say many true things when they are divinely inspired but have no real knowledge of what they are saying.

Wisdom as the understanding of causes

Aristotle gives us another clue in the Metaphysics, when he says that wisdom is the understanding of causes. None of the five senses are regarded as wisdom because, although they give the most authoritative knowledge of sense particulars, they are unable to discern the distal causes of anything. Similarly, we suppose artists to be wiser than artisans because artists know the “why” or cause, and can therefore teach, whereas artisans do not, and cannot. In other words, wisdom is the understanding of the right relations between things, which calls for more distal and removed perspectives, and maybe also the ability or willingness to shift between perspectives.

In the Tusculan Disputations, Cicero cites as a paragon of wisdom the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras, who, upon being informed of the death of his son, said, “I knew that I begot a mortal.” For Cicero, true sapience consists in preparing oneself for every eventuality so as never to be taken, or overtaken, by surprise. And it is true that wisdom, the understanding of causes and connexions, has forever been associated with both insight and foresight.

In conclusion

In sum, wisdom is not so much a kind of knowledge as a way of seeing, or ways of seeing. When we take a few steps back, like when we stand under the shower or go on holiday, we begin to behold the bigger picture. In common parlance, “wisdom” has two opposites: “foolishness” and “folly”, which both derive from the Latin follis [bellows, bag], and involve, respectively, lack and loss of perspective.

In cultivating a broader perspective, it helps, of course, to be knowledgeable, but it also helps to be intelligent, reflective, open-minded, and disinterested—which is why we often seek out and pay for “independent” advice.

Above all, it helps to be courageous, because the view from on high, though it can be exhilarating, and ultimately liberating, is at first terrifying … not least because it conflicts with so much that we have been taught or enculturated to think.

Courage, said Aristotle, is the first of the human qualities, because it is the one which underwrites all the others.

Neel Burton is author of How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero