Some Aphorisms

A confession: I used to like aphorisms. They're short, punchy, and they aim straight to the point. I acquired this taste not from the pen of Nietzsche, but from the writings of the Frühromantik and the Pre-Socratic sages. However, as age has enabled for me to realize, the favor the form of aphorism enjoyed from me is a favor derived from immaturity. The speed and brevity that characterizes our present times has conditioned me to prefer the aphorism instead of other forms of wisdom, devaluing them implicitly. This is an unwarranted presumption on my part, and one that has barred my way towards truth.

Since then, I have learned that truth does not come ready-made, and it does not come from the outside. This, however, does not mean that it is the obverse: that one can easily search for the truth by means of meditation and self-introspection (as my second blog post might suggest at first glance). No — what must be first brought to the foreground is the way, not the location, of our object. The way of truth and wisdom is frustration and pain, of walking through the highway of despair all by your lonesome. The nature of this path has already been glimpsed upon by Hegel and Marx (and, in a certain sense, Derrida): the method of the dialectic. Truth asks us no less than to submit ourselves to the dialectic.

It is often said that necessity is the mother of all inventions. What isn't asked is: who is the father? History gives us an answer: Imperialism—or, what amounts to the same thing, Capital—is the father of all inventions.

Isn't it odd that we cannot approach truth as-is? Doesn't it make you curious that Plato, in his allegory of the cave, described the prisoner's first encounter with truth as that of unbearably scorching heat, of almost going blind? Doesn't this mean that not only the way to truth but, also, the object that we call "truth" itself is painful? What are we to do with this knowledge?

Staying with the topic of Plato's allegory, what is even stranger is that the prisoner returns to the cave to inform the other prisoners about what she found. The others rebuked her and called her mad, casting her out from the group; the chained prisoners were contented with the play of shadows on the wall, which are nothing but pale imitations of the truth that the prisoner grasped. This tells us two things: (1) that the way of truth is a solitary path, and that (2) we cannot communicate truth as-is. In the same manner that truth burns our eyes, truth also burns our tongues. Truth is incapable of being communicated in plain language. The next best thing is to communicate it in fiction, of realizing that the only way truth can be intelligible and be made universal is to bury it within a story. Truth, then, has the structure of a lie. This is why Plato wrote allegories and dialogues, not treatises.

What is philosophy? Philosophy is the art of asking the right questions. And the right questions doesn't necessarily align with what you are curious about.

Heidegger and Lacan, two thinkers with many differences and some surprising parallels, agreed on one thing: the current threat to the world at large is "the American way of life" (Lacan) / "Americanism" (Heidegger). Why they arrived at the same conclusion is not in question, but what is in question—a riddle for the ages, perhaps?—is this parallelism, of how they arrived at this conclusion.