Translation - Anthology: Kostas Nisiotis
What does the scientist and master of witticisms and aphorisms Georg Christoph Lichtenberg aim for? "To find our own way through the heap of foreign things, so that we begin to perceive for ourselves, to speak for ourselves, and, I dare say, to exist for ourselves." This is the message that his Notebooks send with the speed of light, even though we often feel that our time is light-years away from them.
His original observations are expressed in a way that evokes an emotion that remains undiminished in memory. One of the most significant thinkers-scientists of the Enlightenment. A polymath and a jack-of-all-trades, a true child of the Enlightenment, Lichtenberg wrote biographies (of the astronomer Copernicus and the seafarer James Cook), scientific essays, satires and epitaphs, theatrical critiques and travel impressions, linguistic observations and thorough analyses of the engravings by the English engraver William Hogarth.
However, it is the Notebooks that have been underlined with their pencil by his contemporaries, such as Goethe and Kant, as well as later figures like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Freud, who even considers him "perhaps a more remarkable psychologist than a natural philosopher." Neither deny everything nor believe everything.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
