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from PARERGA AND PARALIPOMENA, VOLUME 2
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2015
§244
When we see the many and manifold institutions of teaching and learning and the great throng of pupils and masters, one could think that the human race is quite keen about insight and truth. But here appearance is deceiving. The masters teach in order to earn money and they do not strive for truth, but for its appearance and standing; the pupils do not learn in order to attain knowledge and insight, but in order to babble and give themselves airs. Thus a new generation like this appears every thirty years, a wide-eyed child, knowing nothing and in all haste summarily devouring the results of human knowledge accumulated over thousands of years, and then claiming to be smarter than all the past. For this purpose he attends universities and reaches for books, moreover for the newest ones as his contemporaries and peers. Everything has to be brief and new, just as he is new! Then he gets ready to start judging. – I have not even taken into account here the actual professions.
§245
Students and scholars of all kinds and every age as a rule are only focused on information, not on insight. They make it a point of honour to have information about everything, about all rocks, plants, battles, experiments and especially about every manner of book. It does not occur to them that information is a mere means to insight, having little or no value in itself, whereas it is the way of thinking that characterizes philosophical minds. Occasionally, when I consider the impressive erudition of these know-it-alls I say to myself: oh how little they have had to think about, in order to have been able to read so much! Even when it is reported of the elder Pliny that he was constantly reading, or having things read to him at the table, on trips, in the bath and so on, the question arises for me whether the man was so terribly lacking in thoughts of his own that those of others had to be incessantly transfused to him, just as a consommé is given to a consumptive to keep him alive. And neither his undiscriminating gullibility nor his unspeakably repulsive, incomprehensible, and paper-saving collectanea style does anything to give me a high opinion of his capacity to think for himself.
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