On the usefulness of aphorisms
On the usefulness of aphorisms
Should writers write funny little ‘quotable’ sentences?
By João Ruy Faustino
Reviewed:
Maxims and Reflections, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1833)
Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche (1886)
In the introduction to the book Maxims and Reflections by Goethe, editor Peter Hutchinson manages to fit a rather extensive reflection on the aphoristical form. Hutchinson notes how the playwright himself wasn’t much of a fan of aphorisms. He, however, found them quite useful and hard not to leave in the corners of his notebooks. Goethe’s doubts over his and others’ maxims ends up haunting the reader throughout the whole work. It is possibly the most valuable insight contained within it. All the aphorisms collected throughout years of reading are suddenly appreciated—their form and their usefulness put in question. This challenge is only more pertinent due to the total banalisation of the epigram in recent years. After all: something is either part of serious literature, or motivational quote trash.
Quotes can prove funny, insightful, and often even brilliant in and of themselves. Marshall McLuhan, for example, has a famous quote that is particularly germane for this discussion over aphorisms:
It is a pleasure to give advice, humiliating to need it, and normal to ignore it.
– Marshall McLuhan
In a single sentence, that is the problem with the aphoristical form. When reading a collection of maxims – or in Nietzsche's case an Epigrams and Interludes chapter – the reader can’t help but ask: Where are these coming from?
This is owing to the fact that many of the pieces in these books seem to not even follow an author-reader trajectory… Instead, they seem to have the pretension of being ‘universal rules’, or theses. There’s also the ever prevailing question of glaring arrogance. Often the answer to “Where does it come from?” is simply: pedestal.
In all fairness, an author’s short and direct reflections have one useful function. When discussing the works of Nietzsche, public intellectual Vlad Vexler noted how it is advisable for a beginner to engage with the works of a great philosopher as someone enters a cold swimming pool: just the feet first and retreating when needed. For that the Interludes are indeed useful. Nevertheless, accessibility is just a secondary objective, an indirect outcome. An author writes with the intent of communicating and hopefully changing the reader. How does the epigram fare in that?
Through the virtue of often being slogans, aphorisms have the attribute of being quite memorable and therefore portable. The reader can keep an isolated sentence in the back of their mind moments after they read it—and might quickly recall it when they find it appropriate. In this sense, aphorisms are often reassuring, much like Nietzsche’s “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” In Beyond Good and Evil there are many examples of these type of epigrams, which might having the effect of rationalising many avoidable behaviours:
Whenever you reach a decision, close your ears to even the best objections: this is the sign of a strong character. Which means: an occasional will to stupidity.
– Friedrich Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil
These are without doubt the most popular maxims around, even though their value is arguably inversely proportional to their demand.
If a reflection is going to linger with a reader, it shouldn’t be something merely comforting. There’s much more value in aiming aphorisms like arrows—to insist on their destructive value. Both Nietzsche and Goethe attain this often, the advantage of having an excess of snippets touching on a variety of topics is that it inevitably reveals the complexity of the author’s mind. The reader is sporadically surprised by the opinions that didn’t fit their vision of the figure.
These ‘outlier’ quotes are frequently used and abused by biographers and researchers. Marcel Lepper points out in this week’s Times Literary Supplement how Goethe’s remarks on Judaism and Jews are currently being tirelessly searched in order to reach a definite conclusion on the playwright’s views. Lepper concludes his article by simply stating that Goethe was unfortunately not sufficiently “clear” and that no judgement can be reached. Goethe should have left in his notes another McLuhan quote: “I don’t necessarily agree with everything I say.”
With the ease and quickness that one writes a note on a piece of paper, it should be obvious that by the end of a long life that any compilation would be inconclusive. The panoply of observations might as well point to all possible directions! The fundamental weakness of the aphorism thus seems to be precisely that: It’s a thought that did not seem to need further work, that might as well have been made in passing, and that can be taken anywhere by the reader.
It’s for this reason that the German faculty of bildung is not enough to save the aphorism as a means of literary expression. Thorough reflection is such an individual act that even if one begins with an epigram, one will most likely reach the end of a walk in the field thinking about something else entirely—the merit of the author hence is limited.
There’s an inescapable promise in the aphoristical form, and it lies in its aforementioned potential destructive value. It seems that authors often hope that with a single sentence they’re planting a small cog in our previous understanding and making us alter it altogether. A funny internet personality has once said that Beyond Good and Evil is not a book but “a collection of bombs.” It may have been when it was published, however today – with special regard to the Interludes – it looks as if these have been diffused. Nietzsche’s “bombs” didn’t destroy anything, they gathered a mass of followers. None of his aphorisms compare to the rest of the book, and the ones that get closer to it are precisely the thoughts that are further developed in his oeuvre.
The collectability of aphorisms encourages a consumerist attitude towards them. They’re much more likely to reinforce beliefs than to change them—that’s why they should just be called observations. In an aphorism we merely see our world reflected, and ignore every other sentence that doesn’t apply, or that often feels strange and foreign to us.
Are there things that one can only say, and write, aphoristically? It’s certainly possible, but also not advisable. If an author wants to write something in one sentence only it should stick to the comedic one-liner, or learn from Kafka’s great short stories. Meanwhile, we can possibly realise that the question over the usefulness of aphorisms is really over the uselessness of aphorisms.