"The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time"
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Schopenhauer is poking at a problem that still defines public life: people crave clean binaries, but reality keeps arriving as a messy both-and. His “difficulty” isn’t abstract epistemology so much as social friction. The “multitude” signals his trademark contempt for mass opinion, the crowd that wants certainty packaged as identity. He’s not flattering anyone into nuance; he’s complaining that nuance is hard to sell.
The line works because it weaponizes a paradox without becoming mystical. “True and untrue at the same time” points to the way claims can be locally accurate yet globally misleading: a fact that holds under one framing collapses under another; a principle that guides in theory fails in practice; a story that captures emotional truth distorts literal events. Schopenhauer’s subtext is that most people mistake consistency for intelligence. They want logic to behave like law: one verdict, one outcome, no appeals.
Context matters. Writing in the long shadow of Kant and in the early decades of mass newspapers and political mobilization, Schopenhauer watched Enlightenment promises about Reason collide with the unruly machinery of will, desire, and persuasion. His pessimism wasn’t merely personal; it was diagnostic. If human beings are driven less by rational deliberation than by impulse and vanity, then teaching contradiction becomes more than a classroom task. It’s a cultural re-education against our favorite narcotic: the comforting lie that the world is obliged to be simple.
The line works because it weaponizes a paradox without becoming mystical. “True and untrue at the same time” points to the way claims can be locally accurate yet globally misleading: a fact that holds under one framing collapses under another; a principle that guides in theory fails in practice; a story that captures emotional truth distorts literal events. Schopenhauer’s subtext is that most people mistake consistency for intelligence. They want logic to behave like law: one verdict, one outcome, no appeals.
Context matters. Writing in the long shadow of Kant and in the early decades of mass newspapers and political mobilization, Schopenhauer watched Enlightenment promises about Reason collide with the unruly machinery of will, desire, and persuasion. His pessimism wasn’t merely personal; it was diagnostic. If human beings are driven less by rational deliberation than by impulse and vanity, then teaching contradiction becomes more than a classroom task. It’s a cultural re-education against our favorite narcotic: the comforting lie that the world is obliged to be simple.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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