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Quote by Arthur Schopenhauer
English (Source)
Everyone can study science - one, harder another, easier. But from art everyone receives only as much as he himself is able to give. What, for example, will the works of Mozart give to a man who does not understand music? What do most people see in Raphael's Madonna? And do many people appreciate Goethe's "Faust"? Art does not, like science, deal only with the mind; it deals with the deepest essence of man, and therefore everyone understands in art only as much as the value he carries in himself allows him. The same applies to my philosophy, which is philosophy as art. Everyone will understand in it exactly as much as they deserve. In general, this philosophy will be accessible only to some and will be the philosophy of the paucorum hominum (those few). It seems to me that after the failure suffered for 3000 years by philosophy as a science, built i.e. according to the laws of the ground, it is already seen that, from a historical point of view, this is a wrong way. He who only knows how to find connections between ideas, to draw consequences from causes, may be a great scientist, but he will be as little a philosopher as he can be a painter, a poet or a musician. For an artist and a philosopher know things in themselves, Platonic ideas; and a scientist knows only the phenomenon, that is, the law of causality as such, because a phenomenon is nothing but the law of causality itself. Plato's expression is thus fully justified: the crowd is not capable of philosophy.