“Aphorisms Tell Philosophy’s History as Fragments, Not Systems | Aeon Essays.” Accessed June 5, 2020. https://aeon.co/essays/aphorisms-tell-philosophys-history-as-fragments-not-systems. Written by Andrew Hui [[2020-06-05]] - Aphorisms are against systematic thinking. Romantics rebelled against Kant's systematic philosophy. - Plato vs Heraclitus. Descartes vs Pascal. Kant vs Nietzsche. - Nietzsche studied Greek fragments as a philologist, and then became the ultimate writer of aphorisms himself. - They force the reader to interpret and thus do the philosophical work themselves. - Etymologically, the word aphorism means "away from horizon". They are acknowledgements of the limits of thought and language. #wordhoard - Aphorisms are the perfect covid-19 reading. >The dialectic between aphorisms and philosophy reaches its apex in 19th-century Germany. After Kant, thinkers as varied as Friedrich Schlegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard and Nietzsche all used the microform to grapple with how to do philosophy after systems. The Romantics loved ruins, the unfinished, shadows. Think of Caspar David Friedrich’s landscapes, Franz Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, or the obsession with classical antiquity. This cult of the fragment is a response to Kant’s relentless system-building. Confronted with how to adequately represent the unity of transcendental knowledge, the Romantics insist that the only possible way of doing so is in parts. Thus, aphoristic thinking : systematic thinking :: the micro : the macro. The gem that I discovered in this article is Pierre Hardot's definition of nature as origin. I've always wondered what was a universal way of defining nature. And I really like the idea of nature as origin. [[Nature as origin]] [[A Theory of the Aphorism]] [[These notes are snapshots of interest]]