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Updated: June 19, 2025
The one great opponent of the whole sentimental tendency, whose censure of Sterne’s disciples involved also a denunciation of the master himself, was the Göttingen professor, Georg Christopher Lichtenberg. In his inner nature Lichtenberg had much in common with Sterne and Sterne’s imitators in Germany, with the whole ecstatic, eccentric movement of the time.
Moreover, the most successful delineations of love, such, for example, as Romeo and Juliet, La Nouvelle H�loise, and Werther, have attained immortal fame. Rochefoucauld says that love may be compared to a ghost since it is something we talk about but have never seen, and Lichtenberg, in his essay Ueber die Macht der Liebe, disputes and denies its reality and naturalness but both are in the wrong.
Or what psychologist would believe Lichtenberg when he claims: “All men are equal in their mental aptitudes, and only their surroundings are responsible for their differences”? He observes better when he says: “An insolent man can look modest when he will, but a modest man can never make himself look insolent”; or when he remarks: “Nothing makes a man old more quickly than the thought that he is growing older”; or “Men do not think so differently about life as they talk about it”; or “I have always found that intense ambition and suspicion go together”; or “I am convinced that we not only love ourselves in loving others, but that we also hate ourselves in hating others.” Often his captivating psychological words are spoiled by an ethical trend.
Lichtenberg is an example of the first class, while Herder obviously belongs to the second.
'The time will come, said Lichtenberg, in scorn at the materialising tendencies of modern thought; 'the time will come when the belief in God will be as the tales with which old women frighten children; when the world will be a machine, the ether a gas, and God will be a force. Mankind, if they last long enough on the earth, may develope strange things out of themselves; and the growth of what is called the Positive Philosophy is a curious commentary on Lichtenberg's prophecy.
A later German writer, of whom I will speak in a moment or two, Schopenhauer, has some excellent remarks on Self-reflection, and on the difference between those who think for themselves and those who think for other people; between genuine Philosophers, who look at things first hand for their own sake, and Sophists, who look at words and books for the sake of making an appearance before the world, and seek their happiness in what they hope to get from others: he takes Herder for an example of the Sophist, and Lichtenberg for the true Philosopher.
The philosopher Lichtenberg wrote, "One man brings forth a thought, another holds it over the baptismal font, the third begets offspring with it, the fourth stands at its deathbed, and the fifth buries it." Mr.
On the other hand, in the biographies or in other records of the personal utterances of almost all great writers, I find complaints of the pain that noise has occasioned to intellectual men. For example, in the case of Kant, Goethe, Lichtenberg, Jean Paul; and indeed when no mention is made of the matter it is merely because the context did not lead up to it.
The fame which vanishes, or is outlived, proves itself thereby to be spurious, in other words, unmerited, and due to a momentary overestimate of a man's work; not to speak of the kind of fame which Hegel enjoyed, and which Lichtenberg describes as trumpeted forth by a clique of admiring undergraduates the resounding echo of empty heads; such a fame as will make posterity smile when it lights upon a grotesque architecture of words, a fine nest with the birds long ago flown; it will knock at the door of this decayed structure of conventionalities and find it utterly empty! not even a trace of thought there to invite the passer-by.
Lichtenberg, writing from London in 1775, tells us that Garrick played Hamlet in a suit of the French fashion, then commonly worn, and that he was blamed for it by some of the critics; but, he says, one hears no such criticism during the play, nor on the way home, nor at supper afterwards, nor indeed till the emotion roused by the great actor has had time to subside.
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