Only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power.
Arthur Schopenhauer
The meaning of the quote
In July 1837, Charles Darwin opened a fresh notebook marked B. On page 36 he drew a small branching tree and wrote 2 words above it, I think.
He had come home from 5 years on HMS Beagle with boxes of specimens and notebooks full of observations. The tree came from setting those facts side by side, Galápagos birds next to their cousins on the mainland and giant fossils next to the armadillos still living in South America. By 1859, the sketch had grown into the only diagram in On the Origin of Species.
Facts you have only collected sit in your head like loose papers. The quote says they become yours once you check each new one against everything else you know and see where it fits and where it clashes.
Schopenhauer opens the same passage with 2 libraries. A huge library piled up in heaps helps you less than a small one where every book has its place.
You can only use what you can find.
In a history class, 2 students read the same chapter. One highlights every date. The other asks how the causes of this war compare with the last one the class studied. When the exam asks a question the textbook never covered, the second student can still work out an answer, because she already compared the 2 wars and turned information into knowledge.
Action steps
Putting the quote to work takes the facts you already have and the habit of comparing them.
- Link each new idea to an old one. When you read something new, write one line in the margin about what it reminds you of and how the 2 differ. George Steiner believed a real reader keeps a pencil in hand, ready to answer the book.
- Chase the clashes. When 2 of your beliefs don’t agree, don’t shrug and move on. Work out which one is wrong or what both are missing.
- Draw it. Write a topic in the middle of a page and branch out everything you know about it. Then draw lines between the branches that connect, and the gaps and loose ends show up fast.
Darwin’s sketch on page 36 came after years of comparing what he had found.
Yours can start tonight with one topic and a pencil.
About the author
In the summer of 1820, a 32-year-old lecturer at the University of Berlin asked for his classes to run at the same hour as those of G.W.F. Hegel, the most famous philosopher at the university. Hundreds of students went to Hegel. Only 5 signed up for the newcomer, and the next semester nobody did.
That lecturer was Arthur Schopenhauer.
Schopenhauer (1788–1860) was a German philosopher best known for his gloomy idea that people are pushed along by a blind urge he called the will. He had set it all out at 30 in The World as Will and Representation, which barely sold. After the empty lecture hall, he left university teaching for good.
For the next 3 decades he kept reading and filling notebooks with ideas that didn’t fit his big book, while hardly anyone bought his work.
In 1850 he finished turning those notes into 2 volumes of essays called Parerga and Paralipomena, Greek for side works and leftovers. His usual publisher said no. A small Berlin firm printed 750 copies in 1851 and paid him nothing but 10 free copies.
Those leftovers made him famous across Europe in the last decade of his life.
Darwin took 22 years to turn his notebooks into a book, and Schopenhauer took about 30. In one of those essays, On Thinking for Yourself, you can find this quote, along with his warning that reading is no substitute for doing your own thinking. Today the essay is collected in Essays and Aphorisms.
Resources
- Essays and Aphorisms (Book)
- Thinking for Oneself, free full text (Book)
- Schopenhauer on how to organise (Podcast)
- How to think for yourself (Article)
- Schopenhauer vs Hegel (Article)
- Information only becomes knowledge (Article)
- Arthur Schopenhauer (Wikipedia)
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