A Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter

"My last choice is not a book most professional philosophers will come across. It’s A Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter by Andrew Hui . He’s a professor of humanities, not a card-carrying philosopher, which probably liberated him to write about something which is very prominent in the history of philosophy but gets largely neglected in philosophical teaching, which is the aphorism . We’re often told that philosophy is a matter of giving arguments, of presenting reasons and conclusions, of teasing out the implied premises and all the logic of building up a case. It might be system building, like Sartre or Hegel or Kant: one of these people who’ve got these grand systems. In the history of philosophy the aphorism is something quite different from that. Andrew Hui actually captures this in something that could also become an aphorism. He says that, “aphorisms are before, against, and after philosophy.” ‘Before,’ in the sense that people like Heraclitus were writing aphorisms before philosophy. ‘Against,’ in the sense that it’s one of the easiest ways to attack philosophical systems, to come up with neat aphoristic intuitions about what’s wrong with them. ‘After’ is more controversial, but there’s a sense in which post-systematic philosophy, you can’t plausibly build up huge arguments. All you have is a lot of fragmented thoughts. This is not an easy book to read from cover to cover, partly because each aphorism mentioned is capable of multiple interpretations. Every aphorism is an invitation to stop and think and there are a lot of them quoted in the book. Obviously he’s selected interesting ones, like ‘nature likes to hide’, which is a very famous one. You stop and you think, ‘What does that mean?’ And he talks you through some of the possible interpretations, putting it in context and so on, but there may be others as well. It’s very difficult not to engage with the aphorisms when you’re reading them. So that’s part of the joy of the book, that it’s very, very rich in thought-provoking, isolated thoughts. “In my view, this book is groundbreaking. There should be a lot of other books about aphorisms because it’s such a rich area” What the book also does is draw attention to this important aspect of the history of philosophy, which is conveniently omitted from most stories people tell, apart from when they get to Friedrich Nietzsche. Then they’ll allow that Nietzsche made some contributions through aphorisms, but they’ll still tend to concentrate on more prolonged passages in his writing. The book’s subtitle is ‘from Confucius to Twitter’ and Confucius is the main non-western philosopher who appears in the book. Andrew Hui also zooms in on Heraclitus, the Gospel of Thomas, Erasmus, Bacon, Pascal—another great aphorist—and Nietzsche. So it’s very selective. There’s no Kierkegaard, who is one of the greatest aphorists in the history of philosophy. Wittgenstein only makes a small appearance very early on, even though much of his writing was decidedly aphoristic. “Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent” is the famous aphoristic conclusion of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus . Wittgenstein’s philosophical investigations break down into aphoristic comments at certain points, where a lot is left for the reader to piece together or to understand the significance of the particular points that he’s making. In my view, this book is groundbreaking. There should be a lot of other books about aphorisms because it’s such a rich area. There’s an assumption in the way philosophy is often taught—in the West at least—that aphorisms are a quirky, awkward bit of philosophy that we’ll admit is there but we won’t focus on. I think it’s time other philosophers started thinking seriously about how aphorisms work. Are aphorisms part of philosophy? If they’re not, are you saying that you can restrict the ways in which people communicate? Because historically, an aphorism like ‘You can’t step in the same river twice’ has been more powerful than many complete works of philosophy. It’s certainly more generative of thought than many books. How do we deal with it? With Heraclitus we’re dealing with fragments, we don’t know the context, we don’t know what he meant. But with many aphoristic writers there is a sense in which the possibility of multiple interpretations is part of the reason they wrote in that more poetic style. Going back to Eric Schwitzgebel, he’s got a rant against obfuscation in philosophy. It’s an interesting question, whether aphorisms are a form of obfuscation, whether they’re a barrier to understanding what the thinker really meant and force you to do a lot of work to try and understand it. But I think they’re different. I think you find obfuscation in a writer like Slavoj Zizek , where much of it is just a smokescreen. In contrast, many of the best aphorisms have the quality of great poetry. The interpretations of them are profound, or at least interesting and stimulating. Hui does provide some historical context for understanding Pascal, and shows some of the richness of interpretation. But the book is just scratching the surface. Somebody could write a big history of the aphorism in philosophy. It’s yet to be done definitively. It’s weird that it hasn’t happened yet. This book is a start. It’s a particular individual’s take on some key aphoristic thinkers. It’s a really interesting and entertaining book and that’s why I’ve included it. It’s not a typical philosophy book, but it’s writing about something that is very important and deep and not discussed much in philosophy. I think aphorisms present a problem for people who like their interpretations clear-cut. I’m torn here, because I think the clarity of someone like David Hume , who is harder to misunderstand than Kant or Hegel , is a great virtue. But I wouldn’t want to preclude the possibility of doing serious philosophy through aphorisms that are designed to make you think and offer different interpretations to different people at different times. I think we need to find room for a poetic philosophy that makes us think in a different way about the nature of who we are, what our obligations are, and other big philosophical questions—and not be too restrictive about the styles in which people write, because clearly for some people this unleashes huge creativity. The other great thing about aphorisms is that they’re so portable—much easier to carry around than a pile of books. If you’ve got a good memory, you could remember thousands of them. And you can get them out at any moment: while you’re waiting at a bus-stop, or as you’re sitting on the tube. One little aphorism could be as nourishing intellectually as a whole book. I have to confess I like short books. I was a judge of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction last year and I was appalled by how long many of the books on the longlist for that prize were. Sometimes there was an unwillingness to edit and get to the point, a kind of laziness, I felt. So this year there were a number of interesting short books published that didn’t quite make this list. I liked Angie Hobbs’s Plato’s Republic . Although it’s a Ladybird book, it isn’t a Ladybird book in the sense either of being a book for young children or one of those ironic Ladybird books about Brexit. It’s part of a new genre of Ladybird book—which I don’t think the public has quite latched onto yet—which is the Ladybird Expert Book. It’s 50 pages long, but roughly 25 of those are illustrations. So it’s a very, very short book which brilliantly summarises the main arguments of Plato’s Republic and engages with some of them. So I’d recommend that. Another shortish book, a bit longer, about 70 pages, is John Sellars’s Lessons in Stoicism which is a neat introduction to Stoicism as a practical philosophy of life that you can live. A quite old book, which saw a new edition published this year, is Quentin Skinner’s Very Short Introduction to Machiavelli . I thoroughly recommend that, it’s a brilliant book partly about another brilliant book. Quentin Skinner is a top historian, political philosopher, and thinker. Machiavelli’s The Prince , as well as his other writing, has to be understood in the context of Renaissance Italy and Skinner is authoritative on that, but also excellent at showing you the meanings of key ideas. So I think it’s the ideal companion to reading Machiavelli. Lastly I wanted to mention a longer book that has only just been published: How to Teach Philosophy to your Dog , by the novelist Anthony McGowan. It’s shouldn’t be possible to write 300 pages on the whimsical basis of the author strolling around London explaining philosophy to his dog, but it works brilliantly because Anthony McGowan is an excellent writer. Yes, it doesn’t presuppose any knowledge of philosophy. It’s done with a light touch and a great sense of humour. It’s very well-crafted. It would be a nice stocking filler for Christmas. Another good stocking filler would be Stephen Law’s What Am I Doing with My Life? which gives a philosophical angle on a range of frequently asked questions on Google."