RobinZ comments on Rationality Quotes - June 2009 - Less Wrong

8 Post author: pjeby 14 June 2009 10:00PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (168)
Tags: quotes

Comments (168)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: RobinZ 16 August 2010 07:18:06PM *  2 points [-]

Seeking a citation, I found the following:

To see every day how people get the name ‘genius' just as the wood-lice in the cellar the name ‘millipede' - not because they have that many feet, but because most people don't want to count to 14 - this has had the result that I don't believe anyone any more without checking.
- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Lichtenberg: Aphorisms & Letters (1969), 48, translated by Franz H. Mautner and Henry Hatfield.

...on this horribly-formatted website. Google Books verifies.

(P.S. Note that the original is in German.)

Comment author: Unnamed 16 August 2010 07:40:37PM *  1 point [-]

My source was this Roger Kimball article. I just found the book that Kimball references on Google Books and it doesn't seem to contain any version of that quote, so for now I'd guess that your version is more accurate. Ideally we'd want to find the original German version.

Comment author: FAWS 16 August 2010 08:07:01PM 1 point [-]

The German version a quick google search finds in a few places on the web, all unsourced, is very close to the first version, except that Tausendfüß(l)er literally means millipede, centipede would be Hundertfüß(l)er.

Comment author: RobinZ 17 August 2010 07:51:59PM 0 points [-]

I found a site which purports to offer Notebook F, from which the quote is supposed to be taken - the text there reads:

Ich kann nicht leugnen, mein Mißtrauen gegen den Geschmack unserer Zeit ist bei mir vielleicht zu einer tadelnswürdigen Höhe gestiegen. Täglich zu sehen wie Leute zum Namen Genie kommen, wie die Keller – Esel zum Namen Tausendfuß, nicht weil sie so viele Füße haben, sondern weil die meisten nicht bis auf 14 zählen wollen, hat gemacht, daß ich keinem mehr ohne Prüfung glaube.

which appears to conform with the Mautner & Hatfield text.

It could be that Moritz Carrière is to fault. In his Aesthetik, he quotes Lichtenberg as claiming people cannot count to sixteen.

Comment author: RobinZ 16 August 2010 08:05:56PM 0 points [-]

The Lichtenberg reader (1959) also contains the same essay and is available at my local library - I'm not invested enough in the issue to try to track it down, though.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit