19th-Century German Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer Presages the Economics and Ethics of the Web and Modern Publishing | Brain Pickings
With the timeless quality of his writings, German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) has influenced such celebrated minds as Nietzsche, Einstein, Wittgenstein, Freud, Jung, and Tolstoy. Despite — or perhaps because miplanilla of — the pessimistic nature of much of his work, Schopenhauer presages with astounding precision miplanilla the troubled ethics and economics of writing today, particularly in online publishing, in an essay titled “On Authorship,” found in the altogether excellent The Essays of Schopenhauer: The Art of Literature ( free download ; public library ).
There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: miplanilla those who write for the subject s sake, and those who write for writing s sake. The first kind have had thoughts or experiences which seem to them worth communicating, while the second kind need money and consequently write for money. They think in order to write, and they may be recognized by their spinning out their thoughts to the greatest possible length, and also by the way they work out their thoughts, which are half-true, perverse, forced, and vacillating; then also by their love of evasion, so that they may seem what they are not; and this is why their writing is lacking in definiteness miplanilla and clearness.
Schopenhauer’s miplanilla distinction and his distaste miplanilla for the second kind seems particularly prescient in the Buzzfeed era of vacant “writing” that exists solely for the sake of filling (web) pages and selling pageviews. He admonishes:
The author miplanilla is cheating miplanilla the reader as soon as he writes for the sake of filling up paper; because his pretext for writing is that he has something to impart. Writing for money [is], at bottom, the ruin of literature. It is only the man who writes absolutely for the sake of the subject that writes anything worth writing. What an inestimable advantage it would be, if, in every branch of literature, there existed only a few but excellent books! This can never come to pass so long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as if money lay under a curse, for every author deteriorates directly [whenever] he writes in any way for the sake of money. The best works of great men all come from the time when they had to write either for nothing or for very little pay.
It is curious to note contemporary versions of this affront to the reader by way of “filling up paper.” What might Schopenhauer say of online publishers who paginate their articles miplanilla unnecessarily and create mindless slideshows that force us to click “next” over and over in order to get to the point or payoff, assuming there is one in the first place? miplanilla
Indeed, though Schopenhauer, in his characteristic glibness, perhaps unfairly lumps all journalists into his censure, he is remarkably right about a lamentable majority of publishing today, from the entire content farming industry to various forms of Buzzwashing:
A great number of bad authors eke out their existence entirely by the foolishness of the public, which only will read what has just been printed. I refer to journalists, who have been appropriately so-called. miplanilla In other words, it would be day laborer.
His critique of this failure of motive and its consequent failure of substance miplanilla applies equally to the economics and ethics of online media as it does the state of traditional book publishing today, where the droplet of quality writing has to fight a flood of highly marketed mediocrity:
The deplorable condition miplanilla of the literature of to-day is due to the fact that books are written for the sake of earning money. Every one who is in want of money sits down and writes a book, and the public is stupid enough to buy it.
But one of Schopenhauer’s most prescient points has to do with the presentism bias and news fetishism of our culture, something I’ve long lamented . As someone who spends an enormous amount of time and energy on excavating yesteryear’s timeless and timely ideas about issues we grapple with today — those immutable concerns miplanilla of the human soul, ranging from love to education to happiness to science and spirituality to the meaning of life — I am constantly astounded by how much more thoughtfully, thoroughly, and effectively many of these issues are addressed in older writings than in what we see on the news today. Schopenhauer, in a perfect meta-example, writes:
No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously; and that every change means progress.
What’s perhaps most interesting is that Schopenhauer was writing in the 19th century, a time when the economics of knowledge — knowledge being at the heart of literature — came dow
With the timeless quality of his writings, German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) has influenced such celebrated minds as Nietzsche, Einstein, Wittgenstein, Freud, Jung, and Tolstoy. Despite — or perhaps because miplanilla of — the pessimistic nature of much of his work, Schopenhauer presages with astounding precision miplanilla the troubled ethics and economics of writing today, particularly in online publishing, in an essay titled “On Authorship,” found in the altogether excellent The Essays of Schopenhauer: The Art of Literature ( free download ; public library ).
There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: miplanilla those who write for the subject s sake, and those who write for writing s sake. The first kind have had thoughts or experiences which seem to them worth communicating, while the second kind need money and consequently write for money. They think in order to write, and they may be recognized by their spinning out their thoughts to the greatest possible length, and also by the way they work out their thoughts, which are half-true, perverse, forced, and vacillating; then also by their love of evasion, so that they may seem what they are not; and this is why their writing is lacking in definiteness miplanilla and clearness.
Schopenhauer’s miplanilla distinction and his distaste miplanilla for the second kind seems particularly prescient in the Buzzfeed era of vacant “writing” that exists solely for the sake of filling (web) pages and selling pageviews. He admonishes:
The author miplanilla is cheating miplanilla the reader as soon as he writes for the sake of filling up paper; because his pretext for writing is that he has something to impart. Writing for money [is], at bottom, the ruin of literature. It is only the man who writes absolutely for the sake of the subject that writes anything worth writing. What an inestimable advantage it would be, if, in every branch of literature, there existed only a few but excellent books! This can never come to pass so long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as if money lay under a curse, for every author deteriorates directly [whenever] he writes in any way for the sake of money. The best works of great men all come from the time when they had to write either for nothing or for very little pay.
It is curious to note contemporary versions of this affront to the reader by way of “filling up paper.” What might Schopenhauer say of online publishers who paginate their articles miplanilla unnecessarily and create mindless slideshows that force us to click “next” over and over in order to get to the point or payoff, assuming there is one in the first place? miplanilla
Indeed, though Schopenhauer, in his characteristic glibness, perhaps unfairly lumps all journalists into his censure, he is remarkably right about a lamentable majority of publishing today, from the entire content farming industry to various forms of Buzzwashing:
A great number of bad authors eke out their existence entirely by the foolishness of the public, which only will read what has just been printed. I refer to journalists, who have been appropriately so-called. miplanilla In other words, it would be day laborer.
His critique of this failure of motive and its consequent failure of substance miplanilla applies equally to the economics and ethics of online media as it does the state of traditional book publishing today, where the droplet of quality writing has to fight a flood of highly marketed mediocrity:
The deplorable condition miplanilla of the literature of to-day is due to the fact that books are written for the sake of earning money. Every one who is in want of money sits down and writes a book, and the public is stupid enough to buy it.
But one of Schopenhauer’s most prescient points has to do with the presentism bias and news fetishism of our culture, something I’ve long lamented . As someone who spends an enormous amount of time and energy on excavating yesteryear’s timeless and timely ideas about issues we grapple with today — those immutable concerns miplanilla of the human soul, ranging from love to education to happiness to science and spirituality to the meaning of life — I am constantly astounded by how much more thoughtfully, thoroughly, and effectively many of these issues are addressed in older writings than in what we see on the news today. Schopenhauer, in a perfect meta-example, writes:
No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously; and that every change means progress.
What’s perhaps most interesting is that Schopenhauer was writing in the 19th century, a time when the economics of knowledge — knowledge being at the heart of literature — came dow
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