Althouse: "Slamming doors, banging walls, bellowing strangers and whistling neighbors were the bane of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s existence."

September 17, 2013

"Slamming doors, banging walls, bellowing strangers and whistling neighbors were the bane of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s existence."

"But it was only in later middle age, after he had moved with his beloved poodle to the commercial hub of Frankfurt, that his sense of being tortured by loud, often superfluous blasts of sound ripened into a philosophical diatribe. Then, around 1850, Schopenhauer pronounced noise to be the supreme archenemy of any serious thinker."

Yeah, that poodle needs to simmer down.

9 comments:

jr565 said...: The guy who went on the killing spree in DC Fired his rifle at the ceiling and into his upstairs neighbors aroartmwng while she was in the apartment because she was making too much noise.
He must have been reading Schopenhauer.; 9/17/13, 7:53 PM
Paddy O said...: I so identify with Schopenhauer.

My experience with apartment living in Pasadena.

Maybe extreme introversion makes for a good philosopher but a crabby neighbor.; 9/17/13, 8:24 PM
SomeoneHasToSayIt said...: As with Tesla, most people have no idea just how great a thinker Schopenhauer was.

I've read just about everything he wrote, and he was very very close to precisely articulating these three later ideas:

1. Einstein's "all matter is really energy"

2. Freud's theory of the unconscious

3. Darwin's (and Wallace's)theory of evolution by Natural Selection

Oh, he also corrected Kant's (few) mistakes.

Not bad.

Was a big anti-animal cruelty person , too.; 9/17/13, 9:37 PM
Craig said...: The sound of gunfire is the shortest distance between will and idea.; 9/17/13, 10:56 PM
David said...: Just had a hearing test. This is becoming less and less of an issue for me.; 9/17/13, 11:11 PM
Bob_R said...: I live in a suburban house and work in a building with windows that don't open. The aural atmosphere is very uniform. At work, the HVAC is loud (over 80 dB SPL) but it's white noise, so it probably drowns out the type of sounds that distracted Schopenhauer.

Paddy O - No question that extreme introversion and mildly autistic characteristics are an advantage for philosophers, mathematicians, theoretical physicists. Walk into any large university math department and see for yourself.

It's probably a bad reflection on my intellectual level that whenever I see the word "Schopenhauer" I hear Michael Palin saying, "He's the one that starts with an 'S.'"

If Althouse starts a thread on live organ transplants I'll never forgive myself.; 9/18/13, 5:54 AM
Peter said...: Schopenhauer comes across as gloomy and unhappy in his works, so it's no surprise he might have been gloomy and unhappy in life.

One can only imagine how distressed he would have been if he'd lived in an age of electronic sound amplification.; 9/18/13, 8:37 AM
jr565 said...: David wrote:
"Just had a hearing test. This is becoming less and less of an issue for me."
But more and more for your neighbors.; 9/18/13, 2:25 PM
tim maguire said...: He hates ambient nose so he moves to a major metropolis?

He may have been smart, but he didn't make smart choices.; 9/19/13, 6:02 AM