Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Lichtenberg, Georg

  • Of Cats and Mice, Laws and Criminals

    Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, tr. R. J. Hollingdale, New York Review Books, 1990, p. 101: Certain rash people have asserted that, just as there are no mice where there are no cats, so no one is possessed where there are no exorcists. That puts me in mind of anarchists who say that where…

  • Lichtenberg on Religion and Stoicism

    Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, tr. R. J. Hollingdale, New York Review Books, 1990, p. 112, Notebook G, Aph. #24: To make man as religion wants him to be resembles the undertaking of the Stoics: it is only another grade of the impossible. I agree completely with Herr Lichtenberg that the Stoic ideal is…

  • If You Understood Me, You Would Agree with Me!

    Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, tr. R. J. Hollingdale, New York Review Books, 1990, p. 204, Notebook K, Aph. #84: To call a proposition into question all that is needed is very often merely to fail to understand it.  Certain gentlemen have been all too ready to reverse this maxim, and to assert that…

  • Still Perfect After All These Years

    Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, tr. R. J. Hollingdale, New York Review Books, 1990, p. 223, Notebook L, Aph. #67: If we did not remember our youth, we should [would] not be aware of old age:  the malady of age consists solely in our no longer being able to do what we could do…

  • Why Lichtenberg is not on Facebook

    Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, tr. R. J. Hollingdale, New York Review Books, 1990, p. 162, Notebook J, Aph. #168, hyperlink added! As soon as he receives a little applause many a writer believes that the world is interested in everything about him.  The play-scribbler Kotzebue even thinks himself justified in telling the public…

  • Georg Lichtenberg, Aphoristically, on the Freedom of the Will, with Commentary

    Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, tr. R. J. Hollindale, New York Review Books, 1990, pp. 161-162: 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…

  • The Art of the Aphorism

    Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, tr. R. J. Hollindale, New York Review Books, 1990, p. 156: He despises me because he does not know me, and I despise his accusations because I know myself. Related articles 'I am not a spy. I am a philosopher.'