Nothing typifies our age more than the sound-bite: the one-liner which describes, prescribes, questions, quotes, announces, points or mocks. Like the "sight-bite," the arresting image which conjures up worlds without actually depicting them, it is found in politics, advertising, art, the media, and generally in the contemporary penchant for the eclectic, the fleeting, the gestural.
Our love affair with the fragmentary, has, we suppose, uniquely modern reasons: the need to cope with and be noticed, amid ever-shorter attention spans and ever-proliferating voices, choices and data. Also, our epoch has repudiated anything, outside natural science, that aims to be systematic, total, ultimate; its taste is for the partial and the open-ended.
But the sound-bite, along with much that is good and bad about modernity, existed in ancient Greece. There, in the form of the aphorism-quite simply, a highly condensed thought-it found the two principal uses to which it has been put ever since: first, to formulate and disseminate established wisdom; second, and much more interestingly, to explore great philosophical or scientific ideas about the fundamental nature of life, love, nature, gods, and the like. One might call the first use "pedagogical," aimed at instruction, and the second "experimental," aimed at probing the boundaries of knowledge. Although these two uses are in a sense contradictory-the first defines what is widely accepted and the second goes beyond it-they are both directed, typically for the Greeks, at one larger question: how to live a flourishing life in harmony with the laws of nature. In early Greek thought, around the 5th century BC, the pedagogical use is best exemplified by Hippocrates, and the experimental use by Heraclitus.
Hippocrates, the "father of medicine," was concerned to encode and transmit a core of theoretical and practical rules for medicine. He did not trust every medic to master the complexities of diagnosis and prescription, and so he reduced them to simple formulae such as: when blood collects at the breasts of a woman, it indicates madness; those with an impediment in their speech are very likely to be stricken by protracted diarrhoea; eunuchs neither get gout nor grow bald.
Heraclitus, by contrast, bequeathed us aphorisms which are brooding, opaque, and vast in their scope. Where Hippocrates's style is clear and practical, Heraclitus's is riddling and exploratory. Where Hippocrates focuses on medicine, Heraclitus ranges over cosmology, theology and ethics. Where Hippocrates's prescriptions are specific, Heraclitus's allude enigmatically to a necessary unity between the inner realm of the human psyche and the wider natural cosmos. Thus: the sun will not transgress his measures, if he does, the Furies, ministers of justice, will find him out. Or, lifetime is a child at play, moving pieces in a game-kingship belongs to the child.
The differences in style and purpose which distinguish these two fathers of the aphorism are repeated all the way down to the present day. Thus, during the Renaissance, when the aphorism, together with so many other ancient idioms, was reinvigorated in Europe, we find the pedagogical approach employed by Erasmus and Thomas More; while the experimental approach is championed by rebels such as Bacon and Montaigne. As the early modern period dawns, in the 17th century, the pedagogical approach gives way to the experimental-hesitantly in the case of the French moralists, from La Rochefoucauld to Joubert, drastically in the case of the Germanic-Nordic aphorists of the 18th and 19th centuries, from Lichtenberg, Schopenhauer and Schlegel down to Nietzsche, Hebbel and Kierkegaard. Indeed, with these Germanic writers, the experimental aphorism, as a genre, becomes overtly literary, as well as strictly philosophical or scientific. This blending of disciplines enriches the range of meaning which aphorisms are capable of expressing, and is brilliantly developed in the early 20th century by, above all, German-speaking Jewish writers such as Kafka and Canetti, Kraus and Wittgenstein. (The aphorism's particular success in Germany and Austria is, perhaps, no coincidence; it may be a reaction to the painful opacity of some of their greatest thinkers.)
During the course of this long history, aphorisms have sometimes also been called "maxims," especially where their style is clear, urbane and categorical (as with La Rochefoucauld). Or they have simply been called "sayings," like the humorous quips of Oscar Wilde ("The world is a stage; but the play is badly cast.") When they express common or orthodox thoughts in uncommon or attention-grabbing styles, they are often known as "adages" or "proverbs," and their function then is to make these thoughts easily digestible by a wide popular audience. Or they can be called "epigrams," "precepts," "apophthegms"-which are more or less the same thing, and over the meaning of which it is not worth quibbling. In all these cases they tend to be isolated, fragmentary statements; yet any author's aphorisms, taken together, are likely to possess an underlying thematic and temperamental unity, and in that sense to be systematic in spirit if not in scope or organisation.
Although both experimental and pedagogical aphorisms chime with our times, the former is more deeply attuned to it. There are many reasons for this, and indeed for the overdue revival of the experimental aphorism (to which I hope my new book, The Pocket Philosopher: A Handbook of Aphorisms, makes a modest contribution).
One reason is that the experimental aphorism, especially in the hands of writers such as Nietzsche and Kafka, is often highly elusive, allusive and inconclusive-precisely the qualities which, to the contemporary mind, truth itself seems to possess. Truth seems to us provisional, partisan-and aphorisms, with their isolated stabs at truth, can reflect this partial experience of the world. (To believe that there is no final or complete truth does not, however, entail the widespread misconception that there is no such thing as truth. Hence my aphorism: "One of the errors fostered by truthfulness is to stop believing in truth.")
Another reason for the return of the aphorism is that it is in the nature of a short, suggestive statement that it can hint at much more than it literally says. Or, as Wittgenstein would have put it, it can simultaneously "show" and "say." The combination of an abrupt, declarative style with a high degree of generalisation and incompleteness-of precision with imprecision, or closedness with openness-is one way in which the aphorism can do this. (For example: "All haste wears a death mask." Or: "Affirming engages; justifying estranges.") Another is the deliberate use of paradox or ambiguity. (For example: "Sincerity is the easiest virtue to fake." Or: "Insincere compliments should always be returned.") Yet another is the symmetrical construction. ("Not all impatience is a vice, but all vices may be forms of impatience.") Or there is the unexpected distortion of a commonplace, such as "Those who keep running into brick walls cannot see one without writing on it." Metaphor, too, has a crucial role, as in "To many who are hungry for love, poison tastes sweetest of all," or in Nietzsche's aphorism: "When virtue has slept, it will rise refreshed." And it is a trademark of many aphorists to personalise their nouns, as La Rochefoucauld does when he quips that "Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue." Although continuous prose can also achieve these effects, the inherent compression and allusiveness of the aphorism can pack an easier punch. Thus Pascal's famous dictum, "The heart has its reasons of which Reason knows nothing," has a force that pages of explanation would be hard pressed to muster.
These two features of aphorisms-reflecting the inevitable incompleteness of our claims to truth and pointing to more than they say-were surely in the mind of Karl Kraus, the great Viennese satirist of the early 20th century, when he claimed that "an aphorism never coincides with the truth: it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths." And these two features enable aphorisms to address a related dilemma: we need concepts and languages to say anything true at all, yet those very concepts and languages seem to be insurmountable barriers to truth. This is akin to the old wisdom that the deepest truths may be better discerned non-verbally, such as in music and dance, or even in silence. Because of its brevity, the aphorism not only recognises the necessary modesty of words by quite explicitly using the minimum number possible; it can also make a virtue of this necessity by playing on imprecision, and on all that is, and must remain, shadowy and indefinable. The aphorism is suspended between language and silence-between striving to say it all and striving to say nothing.
Finally, aphorisms can spark reflection and dialogue more freely (and enjoyably) than longer texts can-because of their variety, because they beg diverse interpretations, and because their compactness makes them such clear targets for agreement or disagreement. Indeed for Socrates who, like Jesus and the Buddha, never published a word of philosophy, dialogue was the royal route to knowing ourselves and to approaching truth. His venue-the origin, in many respects, of western philosophy, and perhaps where it is destined to return-was the marketplace, not the university lecture hall.
In the west, at least, the aphorism has been oddly neglected since the second world war-as it happens, just the period over which the sound-bite in politics, advertising and the "self-help" industry came into its own. This neglect is due, among other causes, to the retreat of philosophy into specialised academia, the widespread demand (inimical to reflection) that thought be instantly therapeutic, and, not least, the destruction inflicted by Hitler on the German-speaking cultures in which, for the preceding two centuries, the aphorism had most spectacularly flowered. If we are on the brink of a revival of the aphorism we might expect, this time round, that it will be nourished by its counterparts elsewhere in the world, not least in the Confucian societies, where its history is every bit as long as in the west-stretching from the Analects of Confucius himself, written in the 5th century BC, and the Tao Te Ching, the classic of Taoism, through the Koan tradition of Zen Buddhism, up to the concision of haiku poetry in modern Japan. In the new century, the aphorism should find its place in the thought and life not just of the west but of the new global order. For-to paraphrase Nietzsche-why not try to express in a sentence what usually occupies a book?
