The allure and difficulty of aphorisms
Aphorisms, i.e. short pithy statements, usually of a
philosophical bent, appeal to almost everyone (except me; well…). When a person uses an aphorism he or she can
move people to think more deeply.
Somehow it seems that there is an immediate connection to a deeper, more
profound truth than the mere words only suggest.
In my Master’s thesis I compared Lev Shestov (the “Russian
Kierkegaard”) to Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician, Renaissance man and
philosopher. Because Shestov despaired
of “the Wall”, i.e. Reason (read Enlightenment Kantian or Hegelian Reason), he
tended to align himself with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Underground Man and later,
after Edmund Husserl pointed him in Kierkegaard’s direction, Kierkegaard’s
Knight of Faith (Abraham). Shestov had a
brilliance for using aphorisms to make his points, though his technique is not
always clear. Also despite his denial of
“Reason”, he does reason, i.e. use arguments, and even the arrangement of aphoristic
sayings is in itself a type of argument.
Why would one write at all if there was no point to discursive logic?
Shestov and Pascal are likely to inspire one to make slips
of paper with pithy quotes and stick them on your cork board (or in these
electronic days to make banners and headers on your computer screen with them).
Shestov, Pascal and Kierkegaard are all in a tradition, which could be called
fideistic intuitionalism. Fideistic
intuitionalism means that one would decry “reason” and discursive logic, and
emphasize choices of the will over the intellect. One “feels” the truth of the aphorism. One cannot argue for it. Or so it might seem…
Pascal died relatively young in his thirties. He wrote much in his lifetime: pamphlets,
books, letters, etc.. He had a very
dramatic conversion to Christ as a young adult.
His sister, who was a nun in the Port Royal Abbey in France, became
involved in a revival movement in which Pascal was taken up. His short poem, “Fire”, which describes his
conversion, was written on a small piece of paper which he sowed into his coat
lining.
"The Memorial":
The year of grace 1654
Monday, 23 November, feast of Saint Clement,
Pope and Martyr, and of others in the Martyrology.
Eve of Saint Chrysogonus, Martyr and others.
From about half past ten in the evening until
half past midnight.
Fire
'God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob,' not of
philosophers and scholars.
Certainty, certainty, heartfelt, joy, peace.
God of Jesus Christ.
God of Jesus Christ.
My God and your God.
'Thy God shall be my God.'
The world forgotten, and everything except God.
He can only be found by the ways taught in the
Gospels.
Greatness of the human soul.
'O righteous Father, the world had not known
thee, but I have known thee.'
Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.
I have cut myself off from him.
They have forsaken me, the fountain of living
waters.
'My God wilt thou forsake me?'
Let me not be cut off from him for ever!
And this is life eternal, that they might know
thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.'
Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ.
I have cut myself off from him, shunned him,
denied him, crucified him.
Let me never be cut off from him!
He can only be kept by the ways taught in the
Gospel.
Sweet and total renunciation.
Total submission to Jesus Christ and my
director.
Everlasting joy in return for one day's effort
on earth.
I will not forget thy word. Amen.
Accessed Aug
24, 2013
This poem of Pascal’s is so well know, as you can imagine,
that one can find it in second on the internet.
It is probably quoted most often by Evangelical Christians from his
larger work,
The Thoughts or
Pensees. Since
The Thoughts is
his most well known work it is often referred to by the French title. One can get the whole text on
www.ccel.org or
www.gutenberg.org
The Thoughts were written by Pascal over the course
of several years. He was very ill. He could sometimes only concentrate for short
times. Thus, some of “Thoughts” are very
short and aphoristic. Other of the
“Thoughts” are longer, sometimes up to a dozen pages.
Pascal had been involved in a long argument with the Jesuits,
who were determined to stamp out the Port Royal revival movement. The movement was started by a bishop named
Jansenius, Bishop of Ypres. Jansenius
revived a sort of Augustinianism (teaching of St. Augustine), which emphasized
predestination and other doctrines which the Jesuits didn’t like. Since the Jansenist or Port Royal movement
was Augustinian, it has appealed to Reformed Protestants, and indeed the
Jesuits considered the adherents of the Jansenist movement to be closet
Protestants. Jansenius was himself
interred in a tower of what is now a part of the Catholic University of Leuven
(Louvain) in Leuven, Belgium for two years.
The Provincial Letters, in which Pascal defended the
Port Royal Movement from the Jesuits’ charges, took a lot out of Pascal whose
health was frail. When he was ill or
recuperating he would jot down his “thoughts”.
When he died he left behind hundreds of these aphoristic “thoughts” and
some longer bits. He had succeeded in
organizing some of them himself and left indications of how the rest might be
organized. There are two editions of The
Thoughts. One edition tries to follow Pascal’s ordering or numbering
system and arranges those he did with the titles he gave. It then tries to
organize the rest according to the editor’s conceptions for titles and content,
generally organizing them by type. The
more scholarly edition organizes them by the numerical order in which they were
written without titles or headings. Most
editions have both numbers, the number of that edition and the number which the
other editor has assigned, at the bottom of the entries as they have arranged
them.
That was probably more than you wanted to know about The
Thoughts. However, all this is to say that when one has a pile of wood it’s
possible to build almost any sort of house (except maybe brick). The Thoughts are often fodder for
someone to spin off into outer space attributing all sorts of things to Pascal
that he likely didn’t think. When a
“thought” is one line with no context, it’s almost impossible without a deeper
knowledge of Pascal’s overall thought to understand just what he meant.
Let’s take an extremely well known “thought”:
The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.
The quote has been used to say that Pascal is a fideistic
intuitionalist. That might be true. The
statement seems to pit “reason” against “the heart”. Those of an intuitive or emotional bent (they
aren’t the same) like this sort of idea.
But what does Pascal mean by “heart” and what does he mean
by “reason”? We are not free to decide
for ourselves without context.
“A Text without a Context is a Pretext for a Proof Text.”,
says an old adage we learned when we took New Testament Exegesis, i.e. the
science of interpreting the New Testament.
This adage, though, applies in general to any literary interpretation.
But how do we get a context for an aphorism? I finally come to the point! ;-) If there is
no obvious context, e.g. surrounding paragraphs or the context of a letter or
chapter, we must look at the overall arguments of the book and compare and contrast
places where the words are used.
Pascal uses the word “reason” frequently in The Thoughts.
He always seems to use it in contrast to “the heart”. However, Pascal’s Thoughts reveal that
he was anything but an irrationalist. He
was a mathematician and a scientist. He
developed a calculator and a city public transport system. He was not an anti-rationalist.
What he was was opposed to Rene Descartes. Pascal felt that Descartes “rationalism”
would result in atheism. Pascal said,
76
To write against
those who made too profound a study of science: Descartes.
77
I cannot
forgive Descartes. In all his philosophy he would have been quite willing to
dispense with God. But he had to make Him give a fillip to set the world in
motion; beyond this, he has no further need of God.
Pascal wasn’t against science. He was against the hubris, the pride of the
new science that felt (even if it hid it) that it could proceed without
God. The context shows that Pascal was
not opposed to reason per se, but pride in human ability to succeed
without God.
So what are the “reasons of the heart”? They are not
irrational. Rather they are those which
modern science (I’m use “modern” to mean the strict sense of Descartes’ era)
rejected. Pascal isn’t so much against
reason as its misuse.
But what about Pascal’s famous argument against the
metaphysical proofs for God’s existence? Does Pascal mean any rational
demonstration of God’s existence is impossible or worse detrimental?
He writes of “proofs”
But at least learn your inability to believe, since reason brings
you to this, and yet you cannot believe. Endeavour then to convince yourself,
not by increase of proofs of God, but by the abatement of your passions.
Reason apparently has its place. It is a heuristic. It shows you what your problem is, though it
can’t cure you of it. It shows us that
our problem is not reason, but passion, i.e. lust.
People in Pascal’s time where involved in one of two
pursuits, i.e. wealthy people: either “science” like Descartes (very few) or
self-indulgence (most). Everyone in
France was a “Christian”. Everyone had
been baptized, etc.. However, few knew Christ personally. They thought that by some simple observances
of religious rules they could attain salvation.
They weren’t interested in change of heart, but only “fire insurance”, assurance
of eternal salvation without effort. Pascal goaded them to true religion, i.e.
faith in Christ.
All of this has been a digression from what sparked this
epistle. A week or so ago I watched for
the second time the recent movie “The A-Team”, which stars Liam Neeson among
others.
While incarcerated B.A. Baracus has seen the light and
become non-violent. If you don’t value non-violence, it is a humorous
scene. B.A. Baracus is a huge man who
can easily pick up an opponent and lift him over his head and break the enemy’s
back, which he does later in the movie.
Baracus says when questioned by Col. Smith whether he will
join their effort,
"Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for
it is momentary."
This is a quote by Gandhi, which Smith recognizes.
Smith then goes on to quote Gandhi to Baracus,
It is better to
be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of
non-violence to cover impotence. Violence is any day preferable to impotence.
There is hope for a violent man to become non-violent. There is no such hope
for the impotent.
It would seem then that Gandhi allowed for violence. How one is to reconcile these two quotes is
not explored in the movie. It seems that
the film writer wants us to see that Gandhi recognized a right time to use
violence, which is of course the film’s point (and seems almost always to be
Hollywood’s point, unless it’s an art film or a documentary).
But what was Gandhi actually saying? Was he self-contradictory? Does Gandhi mean to pit intuition or heart
against reason?
Another commentator quotes Gandhi
Non-violence, which is a quality of the heart, cannot come by an
appeal to the brain.
And he expounds on the quote as follows:
Quite so. One can only thank Gandhi for being so frank as to admit
that the doctrine of non-violence can not be arrived at and successfully
defended through rational argument.
Scott H.
Accessed Aug 24, 2013
Personally I sincerely doubt that Gandhi meant to be
irrational. I think this is a case of someone taking an aphorism (as the movie
did) from a book of famous quotes which did not provide context and
interpreting it with free license.
I went looking for the movie’s quotes of Gandhi and I found
a source
http://www.mkgandhi.org which
made it clear to me that it would take me at least a week to find the source I
wanted (Gandhi wrote many, many, many letters, books, pamphlets and
addresses). I also realized that there
probably was plenty of context if I could find it.
Still I thought I don’t who (Gandhi or Scott H) means that
there is no way to argue for non-violence rationally. But, whoever says such a thing is being
disingenuous. We do argue. It’s
not merely an intuition. Gandhi wrote his many, many, many pieces to
convince us that non-violence is rational.
Doesn’t Gandhi mean that non-violence is a matter of
character and not rationalizing of war and its goals? We can always rationalize
what we want. However, reasoning is not
rationalizing.
So, let’s return to Col. “Hannibal” John Smith and B.A.
Baracus. Smith seemingly provides
Baracus a statement from Gandhi himself which will justify Baracus’ use of
violence.
It is better to
be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of
non-violence to cover impotence. Violence is any day preferable to impotence.
There is hope for a violent man to become non-violent. There is no such hope
for the impotent.
What does Gandhi mean to say?
Using what little I know of Gandhi as context and generally
what I know of non-violence I would interpret this statement to mean that what
Gandhi is trying to say is that someone who is “non-violent”, because he is
“impotent”, i.e. has no means to succeed militarily, is worse than the violent,
since at least the violent is not deceiving himself into thinking he is
something that he is not, i.e. non-violent.
That is, the impotent says he is non-violent when in fact he is only
powerless. A violent man who thinks
violence would achieve his goal, however, may be converted to non-violence when
he realizes the foolishness of thinking that violence will change hearts and
minds.
I think my interpretation is consistent with many, many
other times when Gandhi emphasized non-violence over violence. Gandhi realized that violence only bred
violence and did not change hearts, did not drive out hatred, did not free
people from greed or pride.
So, aphorisms can be a useful tool (a heuristic) to point us
to a deeper truth, but by themselves they can be easily abused to prove a
point.
Almost any quote from any book,
article, etc. can be taken out of context to prove a point. A correct interpretation depends on context whether
the obvious context of paragraph, chapter or book, or the context of a broader
body of literature and life as it is lived by the author.
When I was in college I studied Russian and Soviet
History. During the Soviet era any
scholar who wanted to publish a book or article had to quote Marx or Lenin and
show how Marx or Lenin agreed with him.
If one couldn’t show that Marx or Lenin thought the same way, he could
end up a refusnik, i.e. someone who was rejected and persecuted by the
Communist world.
I remember reading an article about Soviet
historiography. I think the author’s
name was Barg. He spent several pages
quoting Marx and Lenin to show that his thesis was correct.
When he got to the end of those several pages his real
argument started. I remember thinking
that most of what he’d quoted by Marx and Lenin had nothing to do with what he
wanted to say. However, he had to do
it. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been able
to publish his article.
The practice of having to please the censor has been with
mankind a long time. Descartes had to
please his Jesuit censors. While Pascal
perceived Descartes as a false Christian, Descartes at the beginning of his
work, the Meditations, gives two proofs for the existence of God, which
satisfied the censors. One scholar of
Descartes noted that any student of formal logic can see that these arguments
are fallacious. However, somehow they
fooled the censors (or the censors could point to them to fool those above
them).
Sometimes we behave like this Soviet historiographer or
Descartes, we quote a Bible verse either to prove our point or to “gain
admission” when in fact it’s ripped from its content. Probably the worst thing
we can do with the Bible or Jesus’ teaching is to quote short sayings out of
context. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t
quote the Bible or Jesus, but it means that we better be very sure that we are
quoting these briefer bits in a way that is consistent with other things God or
Jesus or Paul wanted to say.
“A Text without a Context is a Pretext for a Proof Text”
