The Magic Mountain: Paradox 2 key examples

While debating with Naphta about the nature of mental illness, Settembrini makes the paradoxical claim that any person horrified by their own hallucinations is actually quite healthy. Posing a hypothetical, in which one of their companions is terrified by a hallucination of their dead father sitting in the corner of their room, Settembrini claims that:

The joke was that this could not happen to any one of these gentlemen, because their minds were healthy. And if it ever should occur, then they would not be healthy, but sick, and instead of reacting like a healthy person [...] they would think it quite normal, join in the conversation, the way people who hallucinate did. The belief that one would be healthy enough to regard one’s hallucination as a horror—that was the failure of imagination of which healthy people were guilty.

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Mocking the charismatic but shallow Peeperkorn to the critical Settembrini, Hans argues paradoxically that “cleverness” is a type of “stupidity.” When Settembrini asks Hans to explain why he has paid more attention to Peeperkorn than to the returned Clavdia, Hans playfully mimics Peeperkorn’s patterns of speech: 

“Yes, yes,” he said, and laughed again. “You find that stupid, Herr Settembrini, and certainly it is vague, which in your eyes is worse than stupid. Ah, stupidity. There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst. Hello! Why, I think I’ve just coined a phrase, a bon mot. How do you like it?”

 “Very much. I cannot wait for your first collection of aphorisms. Perhaps there is still time, however, to ask you to take into account certain observations we have occasionally made concerning the misanthropic nature of paradoxes.”

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