Aphoristic Mixed Dips 2 (2001)

For everyone who's been encouraging me for years to go public with the aphoristic bits and pieces I used to write lots of - today a little more of a selection. I'm putting them up with hesitation, after fiddling round with them for too long - I think maybe because, looking back with the benefit of many years' hindsight, they seem imitative and a touch antiquated - harking back, as they do, to the days when I wrote on the assumption that it was possible to make WEIGHTY PRONOUNCEMENTS about LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING without charging your pen with any of the masterful concept-laden opinions that ten years' labour have made known to me under the names of Adorno, Weber, Redner, Boehme.

The model I can hear and see most in the background in retrospect is G.C. Lichtenberg - the problem with CS the 25-year-old aphorist is not just that he is antiquated but that he was a bit of an antiquarian to start with. There's the hunchback professor, unmistakably second-hand, everywhere - in the tone of the pieces and in the way they compiled themselves: by chance, in scrapbooks, quarantined from diary-writing, university labour and from any impulse to form them into a philosophical system or a comprehensive account of himself. - Neither of those are flaws in themselves maybe, though what is a flaw is that in writing "philosophy by half-measures" like Lichtenberg I borrowed a touch too easily from his self-conception - that of an amusing, bemused character who made an art, or an arty hobby at least, of doubting his experiences : "Alas, he exclaimed when things went wrong" - says Lichtenberg, thinking clearly of himself - "if only I had done something pleasantly wicked this morning I would at least know why I am suffering now!" - which is surely the problem of theodicy inverted and reduced to the pea-sized. Or take one of his earlier fantasies:

"Zezu Island. This island had remained undescribed for so long because the foolish customs of its inhabitants gave publishers everywhere the idea that an account of it was a satire on their own country. . ."

- which always reminded me of Australia, and was penned a mere three years before European settlement. . .

In any case - ten years after they were whipped up, a second serve of mixed dips - hopefully not stale, inedible or completely off. Time maybe to shut the bottom desk-drawer where they've been mouldering for so many years and get the best of GCL down from the top shelf again? CS

Philosophy by Half-Measures

The idea of God shares with good fiction and bad philosophy the attribute of being infinitely interpretable - which might be a reason for thinking it a half-way house between the two.

The mindset of many of many intellectuals has really centred on the question whether lack of intellect is a sin.

The realm of the spiritual is fundamentally an answer to sickness-unto-death and paralysing heartache. People's sense for the spiritual will diminish the more we socially conceal from ourselves the experiential possibility of sickness-unto-death, but it can never be properly concealed and paralysing heartache can hardly be either, so spirituality will always remain, increasingly as an incompletely concealed tantalising possibility on the margins of experience.

The only evidence I can think of for the X'n world-view is the existence in paint catalogues of colours whose names are arbitrarily concocted by their manufacturers to appeal to the vapid sensibilities of the hordes of interior decorators.

Marx could only be considered a philosopher in a world that had descended into its own ninth circle via political theory.

If you asked my to come up with a picture of truth then I would suggest one whose paradoxicality took on a sort of logical form. "This was once a paradox, but now the times prove it true," says Hamlet. And subsequently the times proved it a tautology.

Unless we actually build up a strong-minded picture of our weaknesses we are incapable of liberality towards ourselves or being cheerful about ourselves in a sense which differes from simply going easy on ourselves. Going easy on yourself in this sense is the stream in which all our weaknesses flow faster and to more dramatic effect.

At the root of much of the religious sentiment of today is a nostalgia for the certainty and coherence which the days of the primacy of religion are thought to have had. But it is another question altogether whether the era of religion was actually marked by anything we could recognise as certainty and coherence. Coherence and certainty, in short, are probably far rarer things than the existence of vigorous religious movements is likely to suggest. What exists of them in the world - except to the extent that the world is seen in the warm regretful light of religious nostalgia - is constitutionally more sickly and subtle than we would like to acknowledge. The very availability of the notions of certainty and coherence gets us into this mess in the first place. The existence of the concepts makes them seem attainable, because in essence we are wishful beings.

Philosophy, it seems to me, is the great unnatural cure for melancholy. - Question from one my readers: What does that make the great natural cure for melancholy? The answer of course is sex, combined with a heightened sense of the natural.

Everything is capable of being treated as a fact, or at least according to its value as fact, however everything and nothing is capable of being treated as heavenly intervention in the affairs of the world.

Those who constantly have at their disposal a few substantial little ideas live best. Life in the company of one big idea is enough to make any human being obtuse, having many big ideas makes for gloominess and ruined nerves, many little ideas are hard to keep in sight let alone catch hold of all the time. Life in the company of ideas of no substance is by definition null and void, willed idea-less is humbug, although it has to be said that thinking in clichés is usual and lack of presence of mind can be irresistible.

Goethe simply ought to have said - morality is no more and no less than staring down one's demons.

The real meaning of the remark that irony is the modern mode is that irony is the best modern weapon of knowledge.

If you are going to be a moralist - no doubt the fate of many - then the least you can do is be inscrutable.

If aphorisms are like definitions then there is no tradition of the aphorism in English because in England it was always assumed that the definitions of words and thoughts must state something basic and common to everything coming under the definition, whereas a definition can also set out the rarest things and those that leave us a prey to fears. We think of definitions as a well-considered jump into the light, but they could just as well be a fitful jump in the dark.

The opposite of philosophy is not thoughtlessness but pure contemplation of images.

Self-knowledge is the alpha and omega of all knowledge, the silver fetter preventing knowledge from disbanding by means of its own centrifugal force.

Too much contemplation of the sources of inspiration tends to turn inspiration aside. Unceasing reverence for the same thing becomes by its nature lugubrious and dull.

La Rochefoucauld says that to be known well things must be known in detail, but as detail is almost infinite, our knowledge is always superficial and imperfect. But the argument in the opposite direction works just as well. To be known well things must be known in all their interconnections with other things. Although getting to known them well may in part have to do with acquiring the necessary details, it is mainly a matter of comparing them with a wide range of similar and differnt things, as well as a constant process of obtaining a perfectly apt picture of them from fewer and fewer details.

The clearest sign that a man or woman is incurably in love is that they can only bear seeing the loved one on their own very strict terms. Lovesickness is the co-existence of a state of inspiration and shattered nerves.

The only intelligent modern-day contributions to classical wisdom are ironic ones.

No so-called moral problem can be solved satisfactorily without reference to moral authority, and the fountainhead of moral authority is always metaphysics, of varying degrees of phoneyness. So really the closest you can get to a "solution" that avoids all phoneyness is a question-mark, that is to say - a clear-minded statement of the problem itself. But that is just as clearly not a solution - and honest moral philosophy, which doesn't deliquesce into art or something else, bites its own tail ad infinitum.

Historical

The nineteenth and twentieth century's partiality for literary and philosophical fragments is among other things a continuation of the neo-classical veneration of ruins.

Historians 500 years from now will be at one in thinking that the French Revolution did not inaugurate an age of revolutionary transformation so much as an age of the cult of revolutionary transformation. The volume and multiplicity of interpretation of the French Revolution will count as one of its principle effects.

The total process of life is in a fundamental sense a process of aestheticisation. In rationalising man the eighteenth century gave him a nice little touch-up. Nowadays our psychological categories turn up as aesthetic ones, but once we have left off idolising well-fuelled narcissism, amusing neurotics and exciting psychopaths, once the brilliant sheen of these flashy conceptual instruments has worn off, the world may again appear in a benign light.