Category: Aphorisms by Others

Advice for the Oversensitive

Baltasar Gracian (1601-1658), The Art of Worldly Wisdom (Doubleday, 1992, tr. C. Maurer, # 173):

Don't be made of glass in your dealings with others. Even less so in friendship. Some people break very easily revealing how fragile they are. They fill up with resentment and fill others with annoyance. They are more sensitive than the pupils of the eyes, which cannot be touched, either in jest or in earnest. They take offense at motes: beams aren't even necessary. Those who deal with them must use great caution, and never forget their delicacy. The slightest slight annoys them. They are full of themselves, slaves to their own taste (for the sake of which they trample on everything else), and idolaters of their own silly sense of honor.

Don Colacho’s Aphorisms

Ah, the webbiness of the Web!  I used an aphorism of Nicolás Gómez Dávila three days ago for purposes of logical analysis and received a comment from one 'Stephen' who is the proprietor of an interesting site devoted to translations of Don Colacho's aphorisms.  The blog is appropriately entitled Don Colacho's Aphorisms.  Please do check it out if you are a lover of aphorisms.  His are even better than mine, if I do say so myself.  Here is an example:

“Social” is the adjective that serves as a pretext for all swindles.

Excellent! If I may be permitted to supply an example: social justice.

Another good aphorist is Deogolwulf, proprietor of The Joy of Curmudgeonry.  Here is an example of one of his fewtrils:  "The common man is never so clever as the politician says and never so stupid as the politician believes."

Fruitful Conversation

E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered, p. 163:

Conversation is fruitful only between minds given to consolidating their perplexities.

A brilliant aphorism. Philosophy, as Plato remarks (Theaetetus 155) and Aristotle repeats (Metaphysics 982b10),  has its origin in wonder or perplexity.  Fruitful philosophical conversation, rare as it is and must be given the state of humanity, is therefore a consolidation and appreciation of problems and aporiai, much more than an attempt to convince one's interlocutor of something. Herein lies a key difference between philosophy and ideology.

Life Without Questioning

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book One, Section Two (tr. Kaufmann):

. . . to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors [discordant concord of things: Horace, Epistles, I.12.19] and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and the rapture of such questioning, without at least hating the person who questions, perhaps even finding him faintly amusing — this is what I feel to be contemptible . . .

My sentiments exactly.

Emile-Auguste Chartier

Alain Emile Chartier (1868-1951) was a French professor of philosophy among whose students were Raymond Aron and Simone Weil. Chartier's sunny disposition, however, did not rub off on the brooding Weil. Under the pseudonym 'Alain,' Chartier published thousands of two-page essays in newspapers. What follows is a striking sentence from the essay "Maladies of the Mind" in Alain on Happiness, F. Unger, 1973, p. 25:

An old man is not a young man who suffers from old age; a man who
dies is not a living man who enters into death.

Aphorisms Good and Bad

These, by Nicolas Gomez Davila, tr. Michael Gilleland, are good:

With God there are only individuals. (I, 16)

Continue reading “Aphorisms Good and Bad”

On Owning Land

Blaise Pascal, Pensées #113 (Krailsheimer tr., p. 59):

It is not in space that I must seek my human dignity, but in the ordering of my thought. It will do me no good to own land. Through space the universe grasps me and swallows me up like a speck; through thought I grasp it. 

Pascal is right:  what good will owning acres and acres of land do me? In the end a man needs only — six feet.  And before the end I should be seeking truth, not lusting after land.  So I remind myself when the urge to buy land grips me.

Neither Angel Nor Beast

Blaise Pascal, Pensées #329:

Man is neither angel nor beast; and the misfortune is that he who would act the angel acts the beast.

The first half of the thought is unexceptionable: man is indeed neither angel nor beast, but, amphibious as he is between matter and spirit, a hybrid and a riddle to himself.

The second half of Pascal's thought, however, is unfair to the beasts. No beast can act the beast the way a man can. No beast is bestial in the way a man can be bestial. The difference is that while the beast acts according to his nature, man freely degrades himself contrary to his nature. Having done so, he allows his freely indulged passions to suborn his intellect: he constructs elaborate rationalizations of his self-degradation.

It is not our animality that corrupts us but our free misuse of our animality, a misuse that derives from our spirtuality.

Salvation Through Art? Comments on Some Aphorisms of Wallace Stevens

Herewith, comments on some aphorisms of Wallace Stevens from Adagia, aphorisms that sum up much of the aesthetic attitude  I am concerned to oppose. (To be precise: I am out to oppose it in its imperialistic ambitions; I have nothing against art properly chastened and subordinated to the ultimate dominatrix, Philosophia.) I have bolded Wallace's lines.

Continue reading “Salvation Through Art? Comments on Some Aphorisms of Wallace Stevens”

Some Aphorisms of Otto Weininger

Otto Weininger, Ueber die Letzten Dinge (Wien und Leipzig: Wilhelm Braumueller Verlag, Neunte Auflage, 1930), pp. 65-72. Translations by BV.

Grundzug alles Menschlichen: Suchen nach Realitaet. Wo die Realitaet gesucht and gefunden wird, das begruendet alle Unterschiede zwischen den Menschen.

The quest for reality is a fundamental characteristic of human beings. Where reality is sought and found, however, explains all differences among them.

Der gute Aphoristiker muss hassen koennen.

The good aphorist must be able to hate.

Der Transzendentalismus ist identisch mit dem Gedanken, dass es nur eine Seele gibt, und dass die Individuation Schein ist. Hier widerspricht der Monadologische Charakter der kanstischen Ethik schnurgerade der "Kritik der reinen Vernunft."

Transcendentalism is identical with the thought that there is only one soul, and that a plurality of souls is an illusion. Here the monadological character of Kant's ethics straightaway contradicts the Critique of Pure Reason.

A fruitful thought, though roughly expressed. But what do you want for an aphorism? The idea is that there is a tension between the Critique of Practical Reason, which presupposes the thinkability, if not the knowability, of a plurality of metaphysically (and thus transcendently) real noumenal selves capable of acting freely, and the Critique of Pure Reason in which the subject of experience and phenomenal knowledge is a mere transcendental (not transcendent) subject, a consciousness in general (Bewusstsein ueberhaupt to use a phrase later made famous by neo-Kantians) that is neither mine nor yours but common to us all. It is a crude approximation, however, to refer to this transcendental subject as a soul, as Weininger does. This aphorism would have made a good motto for my doctoral dissertation, which deals with similar problems.