133. Gustav Theodor Fechner

Gustav Theodor Fechner.

I just think that his experimental aesthetics are concerned with the exact measurement of things that are generally accepted as trivial truths; like trying to determine “exactly” how the rising and falling action in tragedy can be expressed in terms of time using numbers. The interesting thing about these things does not go as far as where measurement is possible, because that is where, more often than not, the triviality begins.

The overestimation of achievements such as Fechner's is ultimately based on a fundamental trait of the human mind, which, as a rule, is not satisfied with truths that can be fully understood in their derivation, but which wants truths that are based on deductions where the method is considered correct, but otherwise the result arises from the assumptions with a kind of natural necessity, like the sum of the addends that cannot be seen. The same is the case with all mathematical truths. There is always something like philosophical cowardice and faint-heartedness in such a way of thinking. One does not want to determine the truth from within oneself, from one's own personality, but through something else that is removed from the influence of the subjective: the method. One has too little intellectual backbone, so one creates a staff in the method to hold on to. This is nothing more than a relinquishment, a giving up of the subjective and the personal. The method is a crutch for lame thinkers.

Strong minds of noble thought know no method, only themselves and the object. Nothing comes between the two for them.