Category: Aphorisms by Others

Misattributed to Socrates

I am a foe of misquotation, misattribution, the retailing of unsourced quotations, the passing off of unchecked second-hand quotations, and sense-altering context suppression.  Have I ever done any of these things?  Probably.  'Suffering' as I do from cacoethes scribendi, it is a good bet that I have committed one or more of the above.  But I try to avoid these 'sins.'

This morning I was reading from Karl Menninger, M.D., Whatever Became of Sin? (Hawthorn Books, 1973).  On p. 156, I found this quotation:

Our youth today love luxury.  They have bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect for older people.  Children nowadays are tyrants.  They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.

At the bottom of the page there is a footnote that reads:  "Socrates, circa 425 B. C.  Quoted in Joel Fort, The Pleasure Seekers (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969)."

I was immediately skeptical of this 'quotation.'  In part because I had never encountered the passage in the Platonic dialogues I have read, but also because the quotation is second-hand.  So I took to the 'Net and found what appears to be a reputable site, Quote Investigator.

Therein a pertinent post entitled Misbehaving Chidren in Ancient Times? Plato or Socrates? It turns out that  the answer is neither.  The above quotation, or rather something very close to it,

. . . was crafted by a student, Kenneth John Freeman, for his Cambridge dissertation published in 1907. Freeman did not claim that the passage under analysis was a direct quotation of anyone; instead, he was presenting his own summary of the complaints directed against young people in ancient times. 

Roger Scruton on the Art of the Aphorism

Speaking Neatly. Excerpt:

FALSE APHORISMS are not as rare as one might think. More significant than Wilde's, on account of its influence, is Marx's dismissal of religion as "the opium of the people." For this implies that religion is adopted purely for its ability to soothe the wounds of society, and that there is some other condition to which humanity might advance in which religion would no longer be needed. Both those implications are false, but they are boiled into a stock cube as tasty as any that has been seen on the intellectual menu. How many would-be intellectuals have dissolved this cube into their prose and given their thought, in the manner of Christopher Hitchens, a specious air of wisdom?

Permit me a quibble.  Should we call a striking formulation lifted from a wider context an aphorism?  I don't think so.  An aphorism by my lights is a pithy observation intended by its author to stand alone.  Accordingly, Marx's famous remark is not an aphorism.  The wider context is provided here.

Some Aphorisms of Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

LecI have discovered the aphorisms of Stanislaw Jerzy Lec via a reference in a book by Josef Pieper.  Here are a few that  impressed me from More Unkempt Thoughts (Curtis Publishing, 1968, tr. Jacek Galazka), the only book of Lec's I could easily lay hands on.

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible. (9)

Why can't you believe in paradise on earth when you know there is hell on earth? (10)

When they blow the horn of plenty this loud, it must be empty. (15)

In him there is a void filled to the brim with erudition. (18)

Do not greet people with open arms.  Why make yourself easier to crucify? (19)

Take good care of yourself: Property of the State. (22)

Cannibals prefer men who have no spines. (28)

To keep fit fame needs the massage of applause. (31)

Ladies, do not complain about men:  their aims are as transparent as your clothes. (36)

The strongest brakes fail on the path of least resistance. (37)

Percussion wins every discussion. (38)

You cannot rely on people to remember, or, alas, to forget. (42).

In some countries life is so open you can spot the Secret Police everywhere. (42)

Not every shi- can age gracefully and become valuable guano. (48)

America! We gave you Kosciuszko and Pulaski; please send us some used clothes. (48)

Woe to those who have more hate than enemies. (49)

Who created the world? So far only God admits to it. (52)

When reasons are weak, attitudes stiffen. (52)

He had a clear conscience. Never used it. (53)

Bread opens all mouths. (56)

You may give a barbarian a knife or a gun, but never a pen.  He will turn you into barbarians as well. (56)

How did they get a permit to create the world? (57) 

To Doctor Empiric

When men a dangerous disease did 'scape
    Of old they gave a cock to Aesculape
Let me give two, that doubly am got free
    From my disease's danger, and from thee.

Ben Jonson (1753?-1637) from Epigrams and Epitaphs (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), p. 27.

At the very end of the Phaedo, having drunk the hemlock, Socrates is reported by Plato as saying to Crito, "I owe a cock to Asclepius; do not forget to pay it." (tr. F. J. Church) Asclepius is the Greek god of healing.  Presumably, Socrates wanted to thank the god for his recovery from the sickness of life itself.

Nietzsche comments at the the beginning of "The Problem of Socrates" in The Twilight of the Idols:

Concerning life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is no good.  Always and everywhere one has heard the same sound from their mouths — a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness of life, full of resistance to life.  Even Socrates said, as he died: "To live — that means to be sick a long time: I owe Asclepius the Savior a rooster." (tr. W. Kaufmann)

Susan Sontag on the Art of the Aphorism

At any given time I am  reading twenty or so books.  One of them at the moment is Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1964-1980, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2012.  In the midst of a lot of stuff, there are some gems.  Here is one:

Aphorism is aristocratic thinking: this is all the aristocrat is willing to tell you; he thinks you should get it fast, without spelling out all the details.  Aphoristic thinking constructs thinking as an obstacle race: the reader is expected to get it fast and move on.  An aphorism is not an argument; it is too well-bred for that. (512)

The last line is the best.  There is something plebeian about argument.  The thought is pure Nietzsche.  See "The Problem of Socrates" in Twilight of the Idols (tr. Kaufmann):

Section 4: Socrates' decadence is suggested not only by the admitted wantonness and anarchy of his instincts, but also by the hypertrophy of the logical faculty . . . .

Section 5: With Socrates, Greek taste changes in favor of dalectics. [. . .]  What must first be proved is worth little.  Wherever authority still forms part of good bearing, where one does not give reasons but commands, the dialectician is a kind of buffoon . . . . Socrates was the buffoon who got himself taken seriously . . . .

Whether or not argument is plebeian, it has no place in an aphorism.  As I put it:

An aphorism that states its reasons is no aphorism at all. But the reasons are there, though submerged, like the iceberg whose tip alone is visible. An aphorism, then, is the tip of an iceberg of thought.

and

Aphorisms and poems have this in common: neither can justify what they say while remaining what they are.

The Sontag-Nietzsche view seems to be that one needn't have reasons for what one aphoristically asserts;  mine is that one should have them but not state them, leastways, not in the aphorisms themselves.

Addendum, 4:30 PM:  That indefatigable argonaut of cyberspace, the ever-helpful Dave Lull, librarian non pareil, friend of bloggers and the just recipient of their heart-felt encomia, sent me a link to a post by James Geary entitled  Susan Sontag on Aphorisms. 

Geary rightly demolishes the silly conceit of another blogger who, commenting on Sontag, characterizes aphorisms as "the ultimate soundbitification of thinking."  That is truly awful and deserves to be buried in the deepest and most mephitic nether regions of the blogosphere.

But Geary says something that contradicts my claim above that argument has no place in an aphorism:

And aphorisms are arguments. That’s why they are so often written in declarative or imperative form. An aphorism is only one side of the argument, though.

It appears that Geary is confusing a statement with an argument.  Consider Nietzsche's "Some men are born posthumously."  This is a declarative sentence but certainly no argument.  An argument requires at least one premise and a conclusion.  To argue is to support a claim with reasons.   Nothing like this is going on in the one-sentence aphorism just quoted.

A Reason Why Germany Had to Lose the War

Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night, tr. A. Dru, Pantheon, 1950, p. 172, entry #579 of 10 September 1941:

A year ago today the official propagandist, Fritsche, talking on the wireless, said of the bombing of London: 'Once upon a time fire rained down upon Sodom and Gomorrha, and there only remained seventy-seven just men; it is very doubtful whether there are seventy-seven just people in London today.'  I already know many reasons why Germany will not win the war.  Fritsche's speech is one.

See the eponymous category for more from his pen.

Concluding punctilious postscript:  I added a hyperlink to (Dru's translation of) Haecker's text.  That bit of contextualization enriches and thus modifies the sense of his text.  Worth noting if not worth worrying about.

Politicians

Paul Brunton, Notebooks, vol. 9, Human Experience, p. 126, #520, emphasis added:

Politicians — more interested in their own careers than in sincere public service, ambitious to gain their personal ends, unwilling to rebuke foolish voters with harsh truth until it is too late to save them, forced to lead double lives of misleading public statements and contradictory knowledge of the facts, yielding, for the sake of popularity, to the selfish emotions, passions, and greeds of sectional groups — contribute much to mankind's history but little to mankind's welfare. 

Dead on in substance, but also stylistically instructive.  A good example of how to write a long sentence. Interesting because most of the content is sandwiched between the dashes.  The thesis flanks the dashes with the supporting considerations between them.

Few read Brunton.  But I read everything, ergo, etc.