If you search the Internet for “aphorisms,” you’ll find a mix of authors, from Lao Tze to Jean Baudrillard.<\/p>\n
Some are\u00a0literary figures who are eminently quotable–good at writing\u00a0short, memorable passages that stand on their own even if they were originally\u00a0composed for longer poems or\u00a0continuous narratives. Oscar Wilde, Dorthy Parker, and Emerson are just a few examples of people called “aphorists” because they are pithy and witty.<\/p>\n
Other books of aphorisms are lists of\u00a0sentences or very short passages that are\u00a0intended to be serious and wise. The biblical books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, the Greek collections of accumulated sayings\u00a0attributed to Pythagoras and the Delphic Oracle,\u00a0and the sutras<\/em> of\u00a0the Hindu tradition are examples. When these statements take the form of imperative sentences (“Enter not into the path of the wicked, and go not in the way of evil men”), they can be called maxims. When\u00a0they sound more like generalizations about the world (“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven”), they are better named\u00a0proverbs.<\/p>\n A philosophy professor friend of mine once disclosed his profession to the person sitting next to him on an airplane. \u201cOh, you are a philosopher,\u201d the neighbor said. \u201cWhat are your <\/span>sayings<\/span><\/i>?\u201d He was thinking of traditions in which philosophy means explicit wisdom, and wisdom is succinct and quotable. Needless to say, that is not what professional philosophy is today.<\/span><\/p>\n Once collections of short, pithy sayings are treasured as wisdom (a thesaurus<\/em>\u00a0means a “treasury”),\u00a0it becomes possible\u00a0to write collections\u00a0that look like proverbs\u00a0but\u00a0<\/span>are more idiosyncratic, personal, and perhaps ironic or subversive. La Rochefoucauld exploits\u00a0the subversive potential of the genre when he writes in the format of\u00a0the biblical Book of Proverbs but\u00a0gives advice like, “If we had no faults we should not take so much pleasure in noting those of others.” \u00a0Erasmus collects real wisdom in some of his books\u00a0<\/span>(Adagia, <\/span><\/i>Apophthegmata<\/span><\/i>), but he puts strings of quotable falsehoods in the mouth of the Fool in the Praise of Folly<\/em>. It is never clear where the author\u00a0stands.\u00a0<\/span>James Geary<\/a> collects\u00a0current\u00a0examples of aphoristic writers in this tradition.<\/p>\n By the way, the root of\u00a0“aphorism” is the Greek verb\u00a0for dividing, defining, or setting limits\u00a0(ultimately from horos<\/em>, boundary). In the New Testament, the verb aphorizo\u00a0<\/em>is used for dividing the damned from the saved and for\u00a0excommunicating sinners. I think “aphorism” means division because each one is disconnected from the next (not because their content is necessarily about distinctions). In contrast,\u00a0the Sanskrit word sutra<\/em> means “string” or “thread.” Both traditions refer to\u00a0distinct fragments of text that are loosely strung together without explicit transitions. The Greek word emphasizes the distinction among these items; the Sanskrit stresses their connectedness.<\/p>\n Francis Bacon and Friedrich Nietzsche epitomize a different\u00a0tradition. They are highly critical empiricists who use\u00a0the aphoristic form to\u00a0shake their readers’ assumptions and demand their readers’ creative attention.<\/p>\n Bacon begins<\/a>\u00a0his book Novum Organum<\/em> (“or, true suggestions for the interpretation of nature”) by decrying two categories of thinkers. On one hand, some have “presumed to\u00a0dogmatize on Nature,” inventing or borrowing a\u00a0theory, trying to explain everything in terms of that theory, and “bringing others to their [preconceived] opinion.” On the other hand, some have succumbed to the “despair of skepticism” and are known only for their “complaints and indignation at the difficulty of inquiry.” The third course is to observe and experiment with nature, one piece at a time, striving always to challenge our\u00a0prior assumptions. Having proposed that course, Bacon then offers a series of numbered “Aphorisms on the Interpretation of Nature and the Empire of Man.”<\/p>\n Why aphorisms?\u00a0Arguably, because Bacon is highly suspicious of grand theories that\u00a0organize everything neatly and prevent us from noticing what is actually happening. So he is suspicious of the logical connective tissue that would turn individual propositions into larger\u00a0arguments. He\u00a0prefers to list specific propositions and encourage the reader to consider each one on its merits and to\u00a0put them together only tentatively. We must stop to think about the logical relationship, if any, among Bacon’s thoughts.\u00a0The form thus\u00a0befits its\u00a0substance.<\/p>\n Nietzsche’s earliest works are\u00a0essays distinguished by their highly quotable passages yet\u00a0also connected into rhetorically powerful wholes, with beginnings, transitions, and conclusions. With Human All Too Human<\/em> (1878) Nietzsche shifts to a new genre that then occupies almost all of his energy for the rest of his life: collections of aphorisms. Like all his later books except\u00a0Zarathustra<\/em>,\u00a0Human All Too Human\u00a0<\/em>is a set of numbered passages that range from a single sentence to a few pages in length.<\/p>\n Although Nietzsche’s style is influenced by aphoristic\u00a0authors after Bacon (La Rochefoucauld, whom he cites in aphorism #35; Pascal; Lichtenberg, and others), the opening of Human, All Too Human<\/em>\u00a0takes us back to\u00a0Bacon. Nietzsche, too, wants to shake his readers out\u00a0of their “habitual opinions and approved customs.” He too is\u00a0fascinated by people’s cognitive biases and limitations and suspicious of generalizations. In the very first aphorism<\/a> of his first aphoristic volume, Nietzsche\u00a0writes:\u00a0“in fact, I myself do not believe that anybody ever looked into the world with a distrust as deep as mine.” I think he is hinting why his\u00a0book will not offer a connected argument. A string of distinct ideas\u00a0avoids the pretentiousness or na\u00efvet\u00e9\u00a0implied by a larger whole.<\/p>\n Here Nietzsche almost\u00a0sounds like one of the skeptics whom Bacon decries for dropping the effort to understand nature because\u00a0they understand our\u00a0limits all too well. But they are just complainers. Nietzsche, echoing\u00a0the distinctions of\u00a0Novum Organum,\u00a0<\/em>insists that he takes\u00a0“pleasure in externals, superficialities, the near, the accessible, in all things possessed of color, skin and seeming.” That is not the same as Bacon’s path–striving to understand the phenomena–but\u00a0Nietzsche sees it as the next step. He is moving beyond Baconian empirical science into his own “gay science.” (And in Ecce Homo<\/a>, Nietzsche insists, “We do not know half enough about Lord Bacon\u2014the first realist in all the highest sense of the word\u2014to know what he did, what he willed and what he experienced in his inmost soul.”)<\/p>\n A final tradition consists of authors who have left collections of numbered and loosely connected passages–string-like sutras<\/em>–because death or some other contingency prevented them from pulling these fragments into more coherent works. An inspiration for Bacon may have been Hippocrates, the ancient physician who called for close observation. Hippocrates’ writings (other than the Hippocratic Oath) read like aphorisms for a contingent reason: he didn’t write them. They are collections of fragmentary Greek texts about medicine wrongly attributed to him.<\/p>\n I am not sure to what degree Novalis<\/a>\u00a0wanted to write\u00a0connected arguments, but\u00a0we have his fragmentary notes\u00a0in the condition\u00a0that he left them when he died of consumption; both his tragic youthful death and his aphoristic style\u00a0seem to match the content of his thought. A century later, Kafka also died of TB, leaving\u00a0109 aphorisms on\u00a0philosophical topics.<\/p>\n And then there’s Wittgenstein, all of whose major works consist of short numbered passages without explicit connections. After he died, Elizabeth Anscombe and Georg Henrik von Wright\u00a0published <\/a><\/p>\n a collection of fragments made\u00a0by Wittgenstein himself and left by him in a box-file. They were for the most part cut from extensive typescripts of his, other copes of which still exist …<\/p>\n Often fragments on the same topic were clipped together; but there were also a large number lying loose in the box. …<\/p>\n We … came to the the conclusion that this box contained remarks which Wittgenstein regarded as particularly useful and intended to weave into finished work if places for them should appear. Now we know that his method of composition was in part to make an arrangement of such short, almost independent pieces as, in the enormous quantity that he wrote, he was fairly satisfied with.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n They published this book under the title Zettel<\/em>, which I think it an unpretentious work for snippet\u00a0or cutting. But a cutting\u00a0is also what\u00a0an aphorism is. A\u00a0clipped-together packet of snippings from\u00a0typescript also bears a distant resemblance\u00a0to a string of beads, a sutra.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n The word “cutting” could also have a more organic sense. In his 1948 poem “Cuttings,” Theodore Roethke evokes their generative potential:<\/p>\n Sticks-in-a-drowse over sugary loam, One nub of growth
\nTheir intricate stem-fur dries;
\nBut still the delicate slips keep coaxing up water;
\nThe small cells bulge;<\/p>\n
\nNudges a sand-crumb loose,
\nPokes through a musty sheath
\nIts pale tendrilous horn.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n