Eva Bohne

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was born in Leipzig, spent most of his life moving between German courts and libraries, and never quite settled down anywhere. He never married, never finished half the projects he started, and was constantly distracted by new ideas from calculus to metaphysics to improving mining machines. He died alone in Hanover in 1716, surrounded by papers no one could understand, probably still convinced that the universe was made of tiny, thinking substances called monads.Leibniz was the classic example of the "perpetually absent-minded genius" he started a thousand things, wrote about everything from mathematics to law, invented calculators and philosophical systems, and finally died misunderstood, but with complete confidence that he was right about everything. If you are that type of person curious about everything, with more ideas than time know that you are in good company. :)

Thinking Zone. Sunday afternoon in my little Black Sea village, the sea is calm, and I am drinking my Greek coffee while reflecting that the history of philosophy would be considerably poorer in entertainment if philosophers possessed even a fraction of the composure they so insistently recommend to everyone else. Arthur Schopenhauer and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel provide a splendid example of how difficult it can be to apply one's philosophy to the unpleasant discovery that the world does not share one's opinion. Schopenhauer did not hate Hegel merely because they were rivals. He believed that Hegel had turned philosophy into a theatre of obscure language and that the university had rewarded precisely this accomplishment. In Schopenhauer's eyes, Hegel was not searching for truth but for authority, acquired through an imposing system of concepts whose meaning seemed to retreat whenever anyone tried to examine it. History occasionally displays a refined sense of humour by placing two philosophers in the same university and watching as one begins to suspect that the other is the greatest intellectual catastrophe since the invention of empty verbosity. Schopenhauer could never forgive Hegel for persuading almost all of Germany that philosophy ought to become increasingly incomprehensible in order to appear increasingly profound, which struck him as roughly equivalent to claiming that a clock becomes more accurate when nobody can read the time. Thus, when he began teaching in Berlin in 1820, he decided to test not Hegel but the students, scheduling his lectures at the same hours as his rival's, convinced that, presented with truth and error, reasonable people would recognise the difference. Almost everyone entered Hegel's lecture hall. If we are searching for the moment when philosophical pessimism ceased to be a theory and became a personal experience, a more suitable university timetable would be difficult to devise. The exquisite detail is that Schopenhauer had already published The World as Will and Representation, describing human existence as subject to a blind, insatiable will that continually generates desire, rivalry and dissatisfaction. Yet he expected students to demonstrate rational independence from prestige and intellectual fashion precisely when choosing between his lectures and those of Berlin's most celebrated philosophy professor. There is an almost laboratory purity to the experiment: a philosopher who explains the limited power of reason over the human will tests whether reason can defeat academic fashion, then takes personal offence when his own theory receives such convincing practical confirmation. Posterity would treat Schopenhauer more generously than the students of 1820. His influence would extend to Nietzsche, Wagner, Thomas Mann and many others, while his quarrel with Hegel would outlive them both. Yet this changes nothing about the wonderfully human detail that a person can possess an extraordinary intellect, be justified in some criticisms and still select the least promising possible means of demonstrating his superiority. As the afternoon passes beside the Black Sea, I imagine those two Berlin lecture halls, one crowded, the other nearly empty, and consider how differently freedom of thought appears when exercised by actual students, who are under no obligation to fulfil their lecturer's philosophical expectations. What amuses me most is that Schopenhauer could simply have chosen another hour, gathered an audience and developed his arguments in peace. Instead, he turned the university timetable into a remarkable experiment upon his own vanity. Hegel, meanwhile, simply continued teaching, which was probably the most unbearable part of the affair for his opponent.

“God be thanked for books." James Baldwin