Lichtenberg’s life, no less than Swift’s, abounded in fascinating contradictions, all the more fascinating in that they stemmed from an eminently reasonable mind. A supremely conscious atheist, not only did he deem Christianity to be “the most perfect system for fostering peace and happiness in the world,” but it even happened in moments of emotional turmoil that he abandoned himself to the mystical life of others, going so far as to “pray fervently.” After having written: “The French Revolution is the result of philosophy, but what a leap from Cogito ergo sum to the cry ‘To the Bastille!’ echoing from the Palais Royal!” and after having accepted the Terror, he was moved to tears by the death of Marie Antoinette. As much as he despised love à la Werther, in 1777 he fell for a young girl of twelve: “Since Easter 1780,” he wrote six years later to the pastor Amelung, “she had spent all her time at my home. … We were together constantly. When she was in church, I felt I had sent my eyes and all my senses with her. In a word, she was, without the consecration of a priest (forgive me this expression, my dear and excellent friend), my wife. … Great God, this celestial creature died on August 4, 1782, in the evening, just before sunset.”
Although the man of “enlightenment” was the decided adversary of the Sturm und Drang movement that at the time presided over German literature, he was from the first the most enthusiastic admirer of Jean Paul. In him, the man of science (as a professor of physics at the University of Göttingen, he was Humboldt’s teacher, and discovered that positive and negative electricity are not conducted equally in insulating materials) coexisted in perfect intimacy with the dreamer (the rationalist Lichtenberg sang the praises of Jacob Boehme, and was the first to penetrate the deep meaning of dream activity; the least we can say is that his views on the subject remain extremely current). He should be celebrated as the very prophet of chance, which Max Ernst would later call the “master of humor.” Nothing could be more symptomatic, in this regard, than to see him devote his earliest lessons to calculating probability in games of fortune.
One of the most remarkable traits of my character is surely the singular superstition by which I see everything as a premonition, and take one hundred things a day as oracles. I don’t need to describe them here: I understand what I mean all too well. Every crawling insect serves as an answer to questions about my destiny. Isn’t this strange in a physics professor?
Neither deny nor believe. … “I am confident,” he says again, “of my ability to demonstrate that one can sometimes believe in something and yet not believe in it. Nothing is less fathomable than the systems that motivate our actions.”
In the white cone of his famous “smoldering candle,” we rediscover with emotion on Abel’s pastel the subtlest smile that ever there was, belonging to a precursor in every genre: one is reminded of a Paul Valéry in his early phase, as revised and corrected by Monsieur Teste (but Valéry has no more in common with Lichtenberg than the art of numbering his notebooks). Here is one of the great masters of humor. He was the inventor of this sublime philosophical inanity, which configures by absurdity the dialectical masterpiece of the object: “a knife without a blade, which is missing the handle.” In his solitude, he managed to do much more than vary the positions of love, as some men do: he described sixty-two ways of resting one’s head on one’s hand.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Vermischte Schriften, 1770-1799.
BIBLIOGRAPHY IN ENGLISH: Aphorisms (selections). The Lichtenberg Reader.
APHORISMS
I’ve studied hypochondria, and how greatly this study has pleased me!—To tell the truth, my hypochondria is a special talent that consists in this: knowing how to draw from any incident in life, no matter what it might be called, the greatest quantity of poison for my personal use.
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It is not the force of his mind, but the force of the wind that has carried that man so far.
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He was one of those who want to do everything better than you ask them to. This is a frightful quality in a servant. [§]
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The highest level that can be reached by a mediocre but experienced mind is a talent for uncovering the weaknesses of those greater than itself.
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If you want to see what man can do if he wanted to, you have only to think of those who have broken out of prison or tried to break out. They have done as much with a single nail as they could have with a battering ram. [§]
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Man loves company, even if it is only that of a smoldering candle. [§]
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There are people who can make no decision before having a chance to sleep on it. That’s all very well; but there might be cases where one risks becoming a prisoner, along with one’s bedclothes.
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When we are young we scarcely know we are alive. We acquire the feeling of health only through sickness. That the earth draws us toward it becomes apparent when we jump into the air through the blow we receive on falling. When age sets in, the state of being sick becomes a species of health and we no longer notice we are sick. If recollection of the past did not stay with us we would notice little of the change. I therefore also believe that animals grow old only from our point of view of them. A squirrel which on the day of its death leads the life of an oyster is no more unhappy than the oyster. Man, however, who lives in three places—in the past, in the present, and in the future—can be unhappy if one of these three is worthless. Religion has even added a fourth—eternity. [§]
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Out of an exaggerated care to avoid a disaster you do precisely that which brings one down upon you, whereas if you had done nothing you would certainly have been safe: this is one of the most annoying of situations to be in. For in addition to the unpleasantness of the thing itself, you have also the mortification of self-reproach and of having made yourself ludicrous in the eyes of others. I have seen someone smash a valuable vase by trying to move it from where it had been standing quietly for at least six months simply because he was afraid it might one day be accidentally knocked over. [§]
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He had outgrown his library as one outgrows a waistcoat. Libraries can in general be too narrow or too wide for the soul. [§]
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Whereas everyone these days is writing for children, it would be a good idea to have, for once, a book written by children for adults. But this is no mean task, if one expects to remain in character.
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It would be an excellent thing to invent a catechism, or better still a course of study, by which members of the third estate could be metamorphosed into something like beavers. I know of no better animal in all creation: he bites only when attacked, is industrious, extremely matrimonial, a capable artisan, and his hide is excellent.
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The man was such an intellectual he was of almost no use. [§]
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If I know the genealogy of Dame Science, Ignorance is her older sister. Is it really so repulsive to choose the older sister, even if one has