aphorisms
We live in a ‘written’ or textual culture (with some peculiar electronic characteristics), and so aphorisms have been denigrated to the level of RSS-feed quotes of the day and those lame proverbs that we all hated hearing as ‘youngsters.’ And yet it seems that anyone with even a tinge of orality within them – and we all have this tinge to a greater or lesser extent – must still love aphorisms, or they would simply die a peaceful death. I don’t know if anyone else does this, but I come up with aphorisms all the time and go over them again and again in my head. The compression of a complex thought into a brief statement like this is inevitably reductive, but through constant mental revision I feel myself coming closer and closer to the ’singularity’ of thought which constitutes the real core of the idea. For me it’s a useful exercise, and however pretentious it may seem I just couldn’t give a fuck about that. Occasionally I have the chance to write them down before I forget them; usually these are the ones that have stuck in my head the longest, having been revisited and revised through constant repetition.
Apart from the joy of wordplay for-itself, I find that aphorisms, by condensing a thought into a brief and memorable statement for meditation, allow us to approach something like ‘truth,’ in this case best defined in terms of some kind of aletheia or progressive unveiling. As Nietzsche argues in the Genealogy of Morals, the best aphorisms are a pure space for interpretation, to which we can return again and again finding new truths. This is as much through ‘rereading’ as ‘rewriting,’ or revising these thoughts in one’s own mind: simulated orality in action through text, resulting in a mode of discourse with oneself which demands no interpretive ‘fidelity’ or dogmatic repetition.
The ‘truth’ of an aphorism is certainly not of a correspondence variety, in any case, since aphorisms can ‘feel’ equally true even when contradictory: thus ‘many hands make light work,’ even though ‘too many cooks spoil the broth,’ and ‘distance makes the heart grow fonder’ even though ‘out of sight’ often really is ‘out of mind’ (That last couplet is a great aphoristic commentary on the metaphysics of presence if there ever was one). I came up with a fun one some evening in the bathtub, and so I decided that I needed to start writing down these Archimedean revelations. Since aphorisms don’t really ‘work’ when they’re sitting in a text file on the computer, I post them up here and add to the page as I devise new ones. And I also have the benefit of access to this file at any time via internet, so I might get some more good ones written down, for whatever obscure purpose they might ultimately serve. They might seem a little silly, and they certainly can’t approach the koan-like beauty of the best, but I have fun with them.
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(my first and favourite;) Language is sovereign: we are all its subjects, and all of us are its objects.
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‘Phallic symbol’ is a pleonasm.
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This one is really just a condensed paraphrase of Benjamin: “Fascism is the aestheticization of politics combined with the instrumentalization of polis; Communism is the politicization of aesthetics and of instruments.”
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‘Everyone learns what they want to learn at the pace they can handle. Education just shapes what we want to learn and what pace we can handle.’
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“Intelligence is the raw speed and accuracy of mental computation; Wisdom is accumulated knowledge about where and how to apply intelligence.”
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“Every supposedly rational argument presupposes an irrational belief.”
and in the same vein:
“Every concept has its roots in conceit.”
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“We are at our wisest in finding the flaws of others, and at our most foolish in believing to have found our own virtues.”
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“At any given time, we know much less than we think we know, and much more than we know we know.”
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“Dogmatic religion believes that it can never learn anything new from science, while dogmatic science believes it’s done learning new things from religion. True reason, perpetually forgetting its dogmata, is always prepared to learn something new.”
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“There’s no good reason to get upset, except when others are upset for no good reason.”
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