{"id":3607,"date":"2019-09-11T19:56:28","date_gmt":"2019-09-11T19:56:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2019\/09\/11\/the-notebook-and-its-ideal-entry-the-aphorism\/"},"modified":"2019-09-11T19:56:28","modified_gmt":"2019-09-11T19:56:28","slug":"the-notebook-and-its-ideal-entry-the-aphorism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2019\/09\/11\/the-notebook-and-its-ideal-entry-the-aphorism\/","title":{"rendered":"The Notebook and its Ideal Entry, the Aphorism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Susan Sontag on<\/a> Elias Canetti:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

The notebook is the perfect literary form for an eternal student, someone who has no subject or, rather, whose subject is \u2018everything\u2019. It allows entries of all lengths and shapes and degrees of impatience and roughness, but its ideal entry is the aphorism. Most of Canetti\u2019s entries take up the aphorist\u2019s traditional themes: the hypocrisies of society, the vanity of human wishes, the sham of love, the ironies of death, the pleasure and necessity of solitude, and the intricacies of one\u2019s own thought processes. Most of the great aphorists have been pessimists, purveyors of scorn for human folly. (The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well,\u2019 Canetti has noted.) Aphoristic thinking is informal, unsociable, adversarial, proudly selfish. \u2018One needs friends mainly in order to become impudent \u2013 that is, more oneself,\u2019 Canetti writes: there is the authentic tone of the aphorist. The notebook holds that ideally impudent, efficient self that one constructs to deal with the world. By the disjunction of ideas and observations, by the brevity of their expression, by the absence of helpful illustration, the notebook makes of thinking something light.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The first two sentences sound for all the world like a description of this here weblog.  Or as I put it above:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

. . . this weblog is just one philosopher's online journal, notebook, common place book, workshop, soapbox, sandbox, literary litter box, and online filing cabinet.    A lot of what I write here is unpolished and tentative.  I explore the cartography of ideas along many paths.  Here below we are in statu viae<\/em>, and it is fitting that our thinking should be exploratory, meandering, and undogmatic.  Nothing human, and thus nothing philosophical, is foreign to me. <\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Susan Sontag on Elias Canetti: The notebook is the perfect literary form for an eternal student, someone who has no subject or, rather, whose subject is \u2018everything\u2019. It allows entries of all lengths and shapes and degrees of impatience and roughness, but its ideal entry is the aphorism. Most of Canetti\u2019s entries take up the … Continue reading “The Notebook and its Ideal Entry, the Aphorism”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-matters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3607\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}