Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: Philosophical Writings (SUNY Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy)
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 1438441967
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The definitive scholarly edition of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s philosophical aphorisms. Admired by philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Freud, Benjamin, and Wittgenstein, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) is known to the English-speaking world mostly as a satirist. An eminent experimental physicist and mathematician, Lichtenberg was knowledgeable about the philosophical views of his time, and interested in uncovering the philosophical commitments that underlie our common beliefs. In his notebooks (which he called his Waste Books) he often reflects on, challenges, and critiques these philosophical commitments and the dominant views of the Enlightenment, German idealism, and British empiricism. This scholarly collection of Lichtenberg’s philosophical aphorisms contains hundreds of trenchant observations drawn from these notebooks, many of which have been translated into English here for the first time. It also includes a historical and philosophical introduction to his writings, situating him in the history of philosophy and ideas, and is supplemented with a chronology, suggestions for further reading, and extensive introductory and textual notes explaining his references. “This is a great project by an extremely knowledgeable translator. Tester does a fine job making the case for Lichtenberg and explaining his thinking.” — Carl Niekerk, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Steven Tester is a joint PhD candidate in philosophy at Humboldt University in Berlin and in German at Northwestern University.
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something is perceived will depend also on the material constitution of the brain. And one might indeed find evidence for a view that regards perception as incorporated in a system of matter throughout Lichtenberg’s thoughts and his discussions of Priestley (F 1130). Yet as tempting as such a solution might be, his pronouncements against our knowledge of the causal features of things in themselves seem to make such an explanation dubious. There are also great difficulties in resolving his seeming
and if we wished to investigate it, we would find it impossible given our modes of representation. Yet both teach that we should believe in such an incomprehensible being (merely incomprehensible? Belief is something miserable here. What is belief? Obviously, we must believe). Regarding the entire spirit of Spinozism, Jacobi believes a nihilo nihil fit. (I also do not understand how from the fact that all phenomena have a cause we hope to prove that the whole must have an external cause; it seems
speculation; manner of representing. [2021] Notebook J 143 Since we have no sensation of magnetic forces, it could also even be the effect of a physical body that is not an object of our senses. [. . .] [2040] Above all, to expand the frontiers of science; without this, all is for nothing. [2041] Just once to try on Kantian philosophy with my so-called metempsychosis. [2043] What have we done? What are we now doing? What else should we do? [2076] Would it not be a good idea at the
like to know whether sleep has ever been considered in this regard. Why do we sleep? Sleep seems to me to be more a relaxation of the organs of thought than anything else. If a person were not to exhaust himself physically in the least but to do his business according to his utmost comfort, he would in the end still become sleepy. This at least is a manifest indication that while we are awake more is expended than earned, and as experience teaches us, this deficiency cannot be compensated for
the question of the relationship between mind and body in his writings on physiognomy. Eighteenth-century physiognomists claimed that the character or soul of a person was mirrored in their physical features, particularly the face, so that intelligence, for example, could be inferred from features such as the distance between a person’s eyes or the shape of her head. Physiognomy was taken very seriously by its scholarly adherents; but it also became a wildly popular theory, and in parlors