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Following are select excerpts from the article 'In praise of aphorisms' by Nigel Warburton, first published at Psyche, a magazine by Aeon.
The sub-title blurts out the central thought: What if we see the history of philosophy not as a grand system of sustained critique but as a series of brilliant fragments? The idea, however, carries well beyond philosophy. It points to possibly a fatal flaw in formal schooling and subsequent pretend-pseudo-scientific conditioning of thinking behind much of formally organised operations, be it economic or political. One clear and common expression of it is found in the insistence that there can be a plan to achieve an outcome. It is modern orthodoxy, which when viewed against the bulwark of traditional wisdom, is an outright, and a dangerous, heresy.
To contrast: an epidemic can be somewhat controlled through a coordinated and planned action; it can never be dominated or eliminated through that mind-set or approach. Seeking logically cogent arguments to understand what are essentially phenomena with embedded permanent uncertainty & flux leads to acts of hubris. Hard wrought reasoning can provide directional guidance, but finally it is repetitive muddling that gets a man to the final destination. All along the way, he is, of course, constantly improvising upon that initial bout of reasoning.
Architecting thoughts has tremendous value, provided the architect, that is our own minds, remain, at all times, never in love with what is architected. Otherwise, it leads to the kind of brahmanisation from which society always struggles to set itself free: whether in the east or the west. Looked at from another angle, the central question for an educationist is always: the distinction between knowledge and know-how, or how to expose the mind to formalised constructs in a restrained and hesitant manner.
Sample this pithy aphorism from the sixth Surah of the Qur'an:
You will never come to piety, unless you learn to leave of things you love.
That Surah is a long one and while reading through it one chances upon this little line, as if it was left there by accidental carelessness. But within this line lies essentially the whole of the message of the Qur'an. But its importance can be fully grasped because it was essentially found embedded in a larger and more systematic construct which made the contrast as clear as can be.
This then is an aphorism if there was one. Acceptance of this way of thinking or intuiting does not mean forsaking any other way: it requires to realise that ultimately the truths that matter the most lie beyond the bounds of formalised systems of reasoning. But those formalised systems, if constructed properly, by providing sufficient openings for the mind to escape their own designs, can and should serve as as strong a launch-pad as there can be one.
It is difficult to find arguments to emphasise the importance of this distinction in the manner of thinking, largely because it really is a reflection of the very manner in which a mind has been constructed. It is, therefore, an endogamous variable: for someone schooled in the opposite way of thinking, it will be excruciatingly difficult to see the other way.
The only way is a through a technique well-known in programming: recursion; or in optics, called reflexivity. In simpler, inculcating the practice of monitoring the way one thinks and when taken to its most rigourous extreme, it can result in disbanding of current structures of thinking. In ancient times, it was called devotion to the sublime (God). In modern times, it is called lunacy.
Much of the history of Western philosophy can be narrated as a series of attempts to construct systems. Conversely, much of the history of aphorisms can be narrated as an animadversion, a turning away from grand systems through the constructions of literary fragments. The philosopher creates and critiques continuous lines of argument; the aphorist, on the other hand, composes scattered lines of intuition. One moves in a chain of logic; the other by leaps and bounds.
Before the birth of Western philosophy proper, there was aphorism. In ancient Greece, the short sayings of Anaximander, Xenophanes, Parmenides, or Heraclitus constitute the first efforts at speculative thinking, but they are also something to which Plato and Aristotle are hostile. Their enigmatic pronouncements elude discursive analysis. They refuse to be corralled into systematic order. No one would deny that their pithy statements might be wise; but Plato and Aristotle were ambivalent about them. They have no rigour at all -- they are just the scattered utterances of clever men.
Here is Plato's critique of Heraclitus:
If you ask any of them a question, he will pull out some little enigmatic phrases from his quiver and shoot it off at you; and if you try to make him give an account of what he said, you will only get hit by another, full of strange turns of language.
For Plato, the Heraclitean's strategem of continual evasion is a problem because they constantly produce new aphorisms in order to subvert closure. In this sense, Heraclitus is opposed to Plato in at least two fundamental ways: first, his doctrine of flux is contrary to the theory of Forms; and second, the impression one gets is that his thinking is solitary, monologic, misanthropic, whereas Plato is social, dialogic, inviting.
Plato's repudiation of his predecessor's gnomic style signals an important stage in the development of ancient philosophy: the transition from oracular enunciation to argumentative discourse, obscurity to clarity, and thus the marginalisation of the aphoristic style in favour of sustained logical arguments. From Socrates onwards, there would simply be no philosophy without proof or argument.
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In the 17th century, Descartes inaugurated modern philosophy by offering rules and directions for clear thinking. Yet a few decades later, Pascal offered a powerful corrective. Perhaps, he wagered, order is overrated. By all accounts, Pascal was a genius of his time. At a young age, he made landmark contributions to geometry and algebra. Plagued by ill health, he had a religious conversion in his late 20s, and spent the last 10 years of his short life in vain attempts to reconstruct a justification of Christianity intended as an 'Apology for Religion', published posthumously as the Pensees (1670).
Pascal's lifelong task became an exercise of endlessly reducing words to their essence, in order to probe a pure nothingness and bring us to its edge. For him, all finite things are fragments, for they are nothing but pieces torn from infinity. All the same, the nature of finitude is such that not even a vast quantity of fragments could ever approach the wholeness, 'a unit added to infinity does not increase infinity at all, any more than a foot added to an infinite length'. The Pascalian lack of order is an acknowledgement of the failure of the human intellect to understand such infinity. As such, the Pensees operate within a poetics of the fragment.
When Pascal died in 1662, there were more than 800 slips of paper in various stages of disorder. These fragments are, in a large part, a direct consequence of his rejection of the Cartesian insistence on order and clarity. The saying 'The heart has its reasons of which reason does not know' is one clear case. Pascal's principal criticism is that Descartes reduces philosophy to an all-too-rational system. For Pascal, the proposition 'I think, therefore I am' rests on shaky grounds, for this self that Descartes posits to be the foundation of all reasoning is but an impoverished thing. This is Pascal's view of the human condition:
What a monster, what chaos ... weak earthworm; repository of truth, and sewer of uncertainty and error; the glory and garbage of the universe!
The glorious heap that makes up the Pensees might then be conceived of as a monumental rejection to Cartesian reason's supreme confidence in itself.
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