A few weeks ago, Jonathan Bi posted a video on X explaining why Heidegger, Nietzsche, Girard, and Augustine were terrible scholars. He received a lot of criticism for seemingly “dunking” some of the most influential minds in Western history. However, upon watching, I realized that Bi was not crazy at all. The first eighty percent or so of his video is pretty spot-on and aligns with Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy.
Bi argues that these great thinkers were bad scholars because they did not engage properly with their material or do the prerequisite work that would qualify it as scholarship under today’s standards. While he is somewhat correct on this point, he correctly identifies the distinction between a scholar and a thinker. A thinker thinks whereas a scholar re-thinks the thoughts of others.
Schopenhauer argues that this is the exact problem with reading. When someone reads, they are not thinking for themselves; they are thinking the thoughts of others. The thoughts “are as foreign to its mood and direction at the moment of reading as the signet is to the war upon which it impresses its seal.”1 The mind is forced to do something. It thinks compulsory thoughts by subjecting itself to the words of others.
When someone spends all their time reading, and no time alone with their thoughts, their mind is robbed of its elasticity “as the continual pressure of a weight does a spring… the surest way of never having any thoughts of your own is to pick up a book every time you have a free moment.”2 Reading is good. It is pleasurable, but it is inferior to thinking. The bookworm is not known for his great writings until he starts thinking, writing, and reading and has distinct categories. Confusing the two is somewhat like eating food someone else chewed for you.
Schopenhauer argues that it is far more rewarding to reach a conclusion independently than to read a book and have it explained to you. Few feelings are more gratifying than that lightbulb “aha!” moment we all experience from time to time. You will get more of those from thinking than you will by reading.
This is not to say that you should not read at all. However, it would be strange for Schopenhauer or me to recommend this, as we both communicate with the reader through writing. “You should read only when your own thoughts dry up,” Schopenhauer recommends.3
One who spends all their time reading and recycling is a scholar, not a thinker. A thinker makes something new or makes something old into something new. This is no easy task. It is not something I claim to do. But I certainly do not want to fall into the third option: sophistry.
Thinkers can be divided into those who think in the first instance for their own instruction and those who do so for the instruction of others. The former are genuine thinkers for themselves in both senses of the words: they are the true philosophers. They alone are in earnest. The pleasure and happiness of their existence consists in thinking. The latter are sophists: they want to appear as thinkers and seek their happiness in what they hope thereby to get from others.4
This passage digs into me. It should dig into you too, especially if you are writing here on Substack or posting on X. What are you doing it for? Are you posting disinterestedly what you wrote for your gratification, or are you posting for the sake of clout and congratulation from others? Sometimes, I get too caught up in the numbers. Why is my open rate down 0.01%? This is not healthy. This is not what I write for; it should not be what you write for either. But it is a perverse byproduct of environments created for thinkers.
Schopenhauer describes how few things are more gratifying than cultivating new ideas after an hour of sitting alone and thinking. An hour. Who can do that today, between the pining smartphone, the doomscrolling, and the essential responsibilities of life? We are so afraid of thinking for ourselves that even our intellectual activity has become a game of re-thinking the thoughts of others.
Thinking for yourself is very hard. Even if you or I went out in nature and stared at the trees or sat inside and stared at the wall, our minds would still be polluted by some TV show or advertisement. Our minds would also be polluted by the phone it grafted itself to. It will take a while to get to the point where we can think real thoughts about the world instead of the information we consume.
It is difficult, but you probably already enjoy it. We even have a term for it: shower thoughts.
We like to think. We want to be alone with our minds, but we will not do it unless forced into an environment where it is the only option. How unfortunate.
So, read less. Not so you can waste more time doomscrolling the timeline, but so you can truly think.
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Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Thinking for Yourself,” in Essays and Aphorisms, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1970), 89.
Ibid, 90.
Ibid.
Ibid.
This is good advice for a lot of the people on this platform. Substack, Wikipedia, audiobooks, podcasts, etc. make it possible to constantly consume information during most of our waking hours. This satisfies the craving we have for novel information, but it has done to our minds what mass-produced carbohydrates have done to our bodies. It’s easy to overindulge.
Daily 30 minute to hour rucksacks do wonders for this,