Aphorism

Abstract

Aphorism Andrew Hui (bio) 1.) The aphorism comes before, against, and after philosophy Heraclitus comes before and against Plato and Aristotle, Pascal after and against Descartes, Nietzsche after and against Kant and Hegel. The philosopher creates and critiques continuous lines of argument; the aphorist composes scattered yet lapidary lines of intuition. One moves in a chain of discursive logic; the other by arrhythmic leaps and bounds. Much of the history of Western philosophy can be narrated as a series of attempts at the construction of systems. Conversely, much of the history of aphorisms can be narrated as an animadversion, a turning away from such grand systems through the construction of literary fragments. Before the birth of Western philosophy proper, there was the aphorism. In ancient Greece, the short sayings (gnōmai) of Anaximander, Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Heraclitus constitute the first efforts at philosophizing and speculative thinking, but they are also something to which Plato and Aristotle are hostile because of their deeply enigmatic nature. The dicta of these early Greek thinkers (or what used to be called the "Presocratics") often elude discursive analysis by their refusal to be corralled into systematic order. No one would deny that their pithy statements are philosophical, but Plato and Aristotle were ambivalent about them for they contain no sustained ratiocination, just scattered utterances of supposedly wise men. Pascal's fragments as preserved in the Pensées are, in a large part, a direct consequence of his rejection of the Cartesian insistence on order and clarity. Pascal's principal criticism of Descartes is that he reduces philosophy to a rational, all-too-rational system. For Pascal, the proposition "I think, therefore I am" rests on shaky grounds, for this self that Descartes posits to be the foundation of all reasoning is but an impoverished thing: "What a novelty [nouveauté], what a monster, what chaos … weak [imbécile] earthworm; repository of truth, and sewer of uncertainty [End Page 417] and error; the glory and garbage of the universe!"1 The glorious heap that makes up the Pensées might then be conceived of as a monumental rejection to Cartesian reason's supreme confidence in itself. In the struggles against German idealism, Schlegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche all used the microform to grapple with how to do philosophy after Kant. The Jena circle's production of the self-conscious fragment is a response to Kant's relentless system-building. On the one hand, as an Athenaeum Fragment holds, "All individuals are systems at least in embryo and tendency."2 On the other, "a dialogue is a chain or garland of fragments."3 Hence "it's equally fatal for the mind to have a system and to have none. It will simply have to decide to combine the two."4 "I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity," Nietzsche declares.5 "The aphorism, the apophthegm, in which I am the first master among Germans, are the forms of eternity. My ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book—what everyone else does not say in a book."6 2.) The aphorism oscillates between "fragments" and "systems." In the section "Transcendental Doctrine of Method," a methodological reflection in the final, hard-won parts of Critique of Pure Reason, Kant writes, "By an architectonic I mean the art of systems. Since systematic unity is what first turns common cognition into science, i.e. turns a mere aggregate of cognition into a system, architectonic is the doctrine of what is scientific in our cognition as such; and hence it necessarily belongs to the doctrine of method. … Now the system of all philosophical cognition is philosophy."7 The notion of a system for Kant forms the foundation of scientific knowledge. Indeed it is this "systematic unity" that makes knowledge possible at all and that which would necessarily exclude aphorisms. In the closing pages of the first Critique, Kant narrates the history of Western philosophy, from Plato to Aristotle to Locke to Leibniz to himself, as a series of attempts to construct such architectonic systems. It is not difficult to see how the aphorism is against the...