On Thinking for oneself

One of the faults of which I am constantly guilty is assuming that my reading will bring new insights. So I was delighted to read this morning the latest post from the marvellous Cultural Tutor

Arthur Schopenhauer is not the sort of person I usually write about in the Areopagus. 

He was a philosopher, after all, and I maintain that philosophers must be treated 

with caution! But, recently, somebody suggested that I read a few of his shorter 

essays. One of them, simply titled “On Thinking For Oneself”, caught my attention. 

Thinking and writing are in many ways synonymous: the better we think, the better 

we write, and vice versa.
So, how does one think for oneself? The thrust of Schopenhauer's advice is that 

we shouldn't rely too much on reading: “Reading is a mere makeshift for original 

thinking”.
That is not to say we shouldn't read, of course. Schopenhauer's point is that we 

mustn't confuse reading (which can be very useful) with thinking:

The difference between the effect produced on the mind by thinking for oneself 

and that produced by reading is incredibly great... reading forces on the mind ideas 

that are as foreign and heterogeneous to the tendency and mood it has at the moment, 

as is the seal to the wax whereon it impresses its stamp.

....the mind is deprived of all its elasticity by much reading as is a spring when a weight 

is continually applied to it; and the surest way not to have thoughts of our own is for 

us at once to take up a book when we have a moment to spare. This practice is the 

reason why erudition makes most men more stupid and simple than they are by 

nature and also deprives their literary careers of every success. As Pope says, they 

remain, "For ever reading, never to be read."

Scholars are those who have read in books, but thinkers... are those who have read 

directly in the book of the world. Schopenhauer uses a rather neat analogy for 

the difference between reading and thinking:

Those who have spent their lives in reading, and have drawn their wisdom from books,

 resemble men who have acquired precise information about a country from many descriptions 

of travel. They are able to give much information about things, but at bottom they 

have really no coherent, clear, and thorough knowledge of the nature of the country. 

On the other hand, those who have spent their lives in thinking are like men who 

have themselves been in that country. They alone really know what they are talking 

about; they have a consistent and coherent knowledge of things there and are truly 

at home in them.

I’m not sure if I totally agree with the thrust of his argument. Our own opinions,

 after all, are generally a reflection of the prevailing social consensus or, as 

JK Galbraith famously called it, the “conventional wisdom”  Christian Lupsa is a 

Romanian journalist who was for the past decade the editor of an interesting 

journal DoR  and now writes a weekly blog (in English) which this week challenges 

the ease with which we sink into these bubbles  

Schopenhauer goes on to argue that we must begin with our own opinions rather than 

those of other people:

Thus the man who thinks for himself only subsequently becomes acquainted with the 

authorities for his opinions when they serve merely to confirm him therein and to 

encourage him. The book-philosopher, on the other hand, starts from those authorities 

in that he constructs for himself an entire system from the opinions of others which 

he has collected in the course of his reading. Such a system is then like an automaton 

composed of foreign material, whereas that of the original thinker resembles a living 

human being.

It isn't easy to find our own opinions, of course, but Schopenhauer argues that 

effort in doing so is entirely worthwhile. These days, of course, we are besieged 

by books offering to help us to think more critically  

Even if occasionally we had been able very easily and conveniently to find in a book a 

truth or view which we very laboriously and slowly discovered through our own thinking 

and combining, it is nevertheless a hundred times more valuable if we have arrived at 

it through our own original thinking. Only then does it enter into the whole system 

of our ideas as an integral part and living member; only then is it completely and firmly 

connected therewith, is understood in all its grounds and consequents, bears the 

colour, tone, and stamp of our whole mode of thought, has come at the very time 

when the need for it was keen, is therefore firmly established and cannot again 

pass away

I shall leave it there for now. Schopenhauer, though he has been accused of many 

things, is rarely accused of not being an original thinker. In an age when the internet 

makes it all too easy to pass our time consuming the words (and, therefore, the thoughts 

and opinions) of others, he offers a timely reminder to step back and put in the work 

ourselves. As always, I recommend reading the essay in full.