Arthur Schopenhauer on noise and genius
Key points
- Many creative geniuses, not least Schopenhauer and Kant, hated noise.
- Schopenhauer wrote an essay on noise in which he linked noise intolerance with intelligence and creativity.
- For Schopenhauer, genius is nothing but the ability of the mind to concentrate itself on a single point.
In August 1821, while living in Berlin, the 33-year-old Arthur Schopenhauer had an altercation with a neighbour, the 47-year-old seamstress Caroline Louise Marquet. On that day, he was enraged by the noise of three women talking in the private anteroom to his apartment. When he demanded that they leave, two of the women complied but Marquet refused.
Later, Marquet claimed that Schopenhauer kicked and punched her and threw her down the stairs, leaving her paralysed on the right side and unable to work. He countered that he had only pushed her, and that she fell to the ground on purpose so that she could sue him.
Following a six-year legal battle ending in May 1827, he was made to pay her medical expenses along with a maintenance allowance of 60 thalers per annum for the rest of her life. On the day she died in 1842, the great philosopher of compassion recorded in his ledger, in Latin, Obit anus, abit onus [The crone dies, the burden is lifted].
Moral of the story: Don’t make noise around philosophers.
The Case of Immanuel Kant
Schopenhauer built his pessimistic philosophy on that of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who also hated noise. Although gregarious and fond of laughter, Kant needed absolute quiet to write. According to lore, he once moved lodgings on account of a crowing rooster.
In May 1784, Kant, who lived all his life in Königsberg (present-day Kaliningrad), penned a letter to the police superintendent to complain about the “stentorian singing of prayers by the hypocritical inmates of the jail” (in the Iliad, the Greek herald Stentor had a voice as loud “as fifty voices of other men”). He was offended not merely by the noise but also by the insincerity of the prayers, which were offered, he thought, simply to appear God-fearing to the jailor.
Schopenhauer on Noise
In his essay On Din and Noise (1851), Schopenhauer rails hardest not against the nattering of women but the cracking of whips in narrow resounding streets (the nineteenth-century equivalent of revving motorbikes, or those fart-can cars with modified exhausts): “Hammering, the barking of dogs, and the screaming of children are abominable; but it is only [his emphasis] the cracking of a whip that is the true murderer of thought.” To him, the cracking of whips was all the more unbearable for being unnecessary, and, worse than unnecessary, useless.
Schopenhauer links misophonia (noise intolerance, “the hatred of sound”) with intellect and creativity: “Certainly there are people, nay, very many, who will smile at [my predicament], because they are not sensitive to noise; it is precisely these people, however, who are not sensitive to argument, thought, poetry, or art, in short, to any kind of intellectual impression: a fact to be assigned to the coarse quality and strong texture of their brain tissues.”
For Schopenhauer, genius is precisely this: the ability of the mind to remain focused on a single point and object. But as soon as a focused mind is interrupted or distracted, it is no better than an ordinary mind. It is, says Schopenhauer, as with a large diamond, which, if shattered, loses most of its value; or as with an army, which, if dispersed, loses most of its power.
It is not merely a matter of genius but also of happiness, because, as every creative person knows, there is no happiness greater than that of the mind at play. Aristotle famously conceived of God, the traditional fount of all reason, as a mind that turns blissfully upon itself. In contrast, people who are too frightened to put two and two together, or too dense to do so, use noise to occupy and numb/dumb their minds.
What Modern Science Says
Was Schopenhauer being fanciful in linking misophonia with intellect and creativity? In recent years, researchers at Northwestern University have found that real-world creativity may be associated with a reduced ability to filter “irrelevant” sensory information. “Leaky” sensory gating may help our brains integrate ideas that are outside the focus of our attention and thereby promote associative and creative thinking. But if these extraneous ideas are, well, noise, they can also cripple us.
The genius mind is like a high-compression engine, which knocks if fuelled with lower-octane gasoline, i.e. nonsense. Even if he might have overstated his case, Schopenhauer, it seems, was on to something.
Neel Burton is author of the newly published The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.
References
Schopenhauer, A (1851): Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol 2, Ch 30, On Din and Noise.
Zabelina DL et al (2015): Creativity and sensory gating indexed by the P50: Selective versus leaky sensory gating in divergent thinkers and creative achievers. Neuropsychologia 69:77-84.
Source: Psychology Today
