This is KZSU, Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison, and we're coming to you
from the Stanford campus.
When virtuous slept, she wakes up all the more refreshed.
Is that a proverb, a maxim, or an aphorism?
Who knows, but you've heard it before?
And it means that entitled opinions
is back on air after a long hiatus.
Our show today is about the aphorism.
You want aphorisms?
We have aphorisms.
Let's start with this one.
Life maintains itself through expenditures
that increase rather than deplete the reserves of vitality.
Life is in excess, the self-extecy of matter.
Mm-hmm.
Just as humanity begins where there is already an ancestor,
so language begins where it has already begun.
Nothing in the universe be at the newborn infant,
or the universe itself is without age.
If a phenomenon does not age, it is not of this world,
and if it is not of this world, it is not a phenomenon.
Nature is not our slave.
It does not need our acknowledgement.
By the same token, it is not our master,
and cannot acknowledge our humanity.
And finally, just because you're dead,
it doesn't mean you can't hear.
That's right.
They're out there listening to entitled opinions
beyond the grave, the dead ones.
They need this show as much as you do.
(upbeat music)
The dead dig guitar solos, too.
(upbeat music)
A truly dead language is one that has no dead language
at its core.
(upbeat music)
Just for the record, all those aphorisms are by yours truly.
That's right.
I called them from various books I've written.
They were not originally intended as aphorisms,
but if you isolate sentences from their discursive context,
as I just did, they may take on a new aphoristic life
of their own.
In fact, most aphorisms, as we'll learn today,
arose through such a process of culling and compiling.
And who knows?
Maybe one day some fan of entitled opinions
might be inspired to cull and compile,
some of the more pithy pronouncements buried
in the great haystacks of these radio shows.
The dicta of entitled opinions
that would make for a lasting life's blast.
(upbeat music)
I have with me in the studio an old friend of the show,
Professor Andrew Huey.
He joined me back in 2012 for a conversation
about pet truck and pet truckism.
At the time, he was a teaching fellow
in Stanford's introduction to the humanities program.
That same year, 2012, he received an offer from Yale to become an assistant professor of literature at Yale NSU College
in Singapore, where he now teaches.
His first book, The Poetics of Ruins and Renaissance Literature,
was published by Fordham University Press in 2016.
His second book called The Theory of the aphorism from Confucius to Twitter
will be published by Princeton University Press in 2019.
And it's that fascinating second book of his,
about the aphorism that we're going to be talking about today.
So let me welcome Andrew Huey back to his favorite podcast,
Andrew, thanks for joining us again on entitled opinions.
- Hi Robert, it's great to be back.
- Yes, you came here from Singapore,
actually you were down in LA for the comparative literature
and the annual conference and then yesterday you gave a lecture here on,
well it was about the Jesuits and Confucianism and the--
- Just how to reach in China and so forth.
- And that's a whole other topic that is not either the one of your first book nor of this one
that we're going to talk about today, but--
- I think about many things.
- Yeah, so a future show for that one.
So the last time you were on the show,
we were talking about your book about Ruins and Renaissance Literature.
And I gather that from Ruins you started thinking about fragments,
and that fragments got you thinking about aphorisms,
which are in some way related to fragments, at least as far as your concern.
So let me read something that you write in the introduction to your book,
quoting you, "Though an aphorism by definition is succinct,
it almost always proliferates into an innumerable series of iterations.
By nature the aphorism, like the hedgehog, is a solitary animal,
striving to cut out all verbiage, it's not so secret wish,
is to annihilate its neighbor so that its singular potency would reign supreme.
Yet aphorisms also have a herd mentality,
indeed from the wisdom literature of the Sumerians and Egyptians onward,
they find strength in the social collective of anthologies.
So we might want to start with that quote there,
and maybe you can unpack this strange by valence in paradox.
Right, so if not a paradox, it's by valence that it duality.
Yeah, it duality a form.
If I understand you properly, the aphorism wants to gather within itself
and achieve its own sort of autonomy as a verbal unit.
Yet at the same time it opens itself up to dissemination and networks and so forth.
Sure. Well again, thank you so much for having me back.
It's always a joy to be back at the farm and to see my old mentors and colleagues.
Yeah, so let me just for a moment step back and kind of explain to you
and the listeners what was kind of underlying my thinking here, as you said.
So the aphorism has a bivalent or ambiguous or binary existence or nature.
And I got to think about this because there's this very famous fragment from
Arquilicus ancient Greek poet and your listeners will know this.
And it goes, the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.
Of course this has been rendered into a famous essay by Isaiah Berlin.
But I think what's interesting about this quotation and how, as an aphorism,
it really reflects on its own nature because the hedgehog is the aphorism itself.
Right? And Friedrich Schlegel, the 18th century German romantic philosopher,
has a definition of the aphorism that is basically playing with this idea of the hedgehog
and the multitude of foxes.
And his formulation goes something like this and it's rather elegant.
A fragment ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art
and complete in itself like a hedgehog.
Right? So that's where he's playing with.
So my interpretation of both the Greek poet and the German philosopher is that, look,
the aphorism as a singular body, where it seeks to distill, condense, and reduce, right?
The multitudinous phenomenon of the world, or it seeks to kind of minimize the clutter,
tries to clear up the clutter of thinking.
Yeah, declutter.
Right? declutter.
But we have never known an aphorist that's famous for just one aphorism.
Right?
aphorisms tend to proliferate.
Right?
Jesus said a lot of stuff, Confucius, Buddha, right?
Or even the Hochov-Kov, or Lectemberk, when it comes to modern authors.
They had notebooks and notebooks filled with them, and they often had trouble finishing them.
So simply put, I find it really ironic that though a singular aphorism might be a
hegemonic hedgehog, as it were, a collection of aphorisms like its anthology, right?
It tends to morph into this multitude of cunning little foxes, right?
Right?
Right.
So there's a singularity and there's a multiplicity.
For me, parallels the poetic anthologies, or the consunietis in the Italian tradition.
Remember, our last show was on Petra or Confucius, and you could say, could you not
that the lyric poem strives for the same sort of self-defining, self-inclosed autonomy of
the complete speech act contained within its bounds, if it's a sonnet and 14 lines,
and then you put them together in a collection, and it becomes now a consunietis, where
in case of Petra, for example, it's 365 poems.
Each one is interrelated, but each one is presumably also autonomous.
Right.
It has its own poetic unity.
So you see the aphorism as aiming for the same sort of on the one hand, self-concentration,
and also then interrelation with the others.
Yes and no.
I mean, let's go back to, let's go back to Petra for a moment.
You quoted the Italian name for the and it's consunieti, right?
But in Latin, as you know, it's Varum Vogarium fragmenta, right?
So I'm interested in what anthology of fragments are.
Well, it's also called the D'Eme's Spanish say, right?
So again, you have this idea of collecting the fragments of the past into the unity of the
poetic body, right?
There is the tormented scattered consciousness of the lyric self, Petra, the poet as a persona,
but then in a way, Petra, the philologist, right, is also that collects the poetic fragments
of his past and makes it into a body of work.
Now, that's true for a self-conscious author like Petra and, you know, I replied to your
question as saying that, yes and no, because for so many of the ancient authors in the
wisdom tradition, for example, Confucius, Buddha, or Jesus, they never set down to write
their own aphorisms.
They were preserved by their disciples, and I think that's very interesting, right?
Why their disciples wanted to gather them and edit them and what?
Basically, the ideological foundations of so many of these schools are founded on the
dicta, right, of the wise teachers.
Did you say then that there's a distinction between the author of aphorisms and an
aphorist?
In the sense that Buddha, Jesus, Confucius, you say, I take you to be saying that they did
not set out to write aphorisms or to speak aphorisms, it turns out that the way their
sayings and their preaching was received by the disciples and then compiled and disseminated
turn them into aphorists, but they were authors of the aphorisms, but they were not aphorists.
I would say they're the authority of their aphorisms.
There are teachers, but their goal in life is not to be literary artist, like aphorists,
for example, like La Hochua Coe, or, you know, many of the others that we can both think
of, but they're teaching their wisdom or best conveyed through aphorisms, right?
So their primary aim is not to craft exquisite and polished aphorisms, but it ended up
being that way because of the tradition of transmission.
So your book has, what I think, six or seven chapters.
So you start with Confucius and then Heraclitus is another major one, Jesus, and then
you go into the modern period, I guess, with the Resmiths and Francis Bacon.
Pascale.
Nietzsche.
Yeah.
So Confucius, where you know a lot more about that tradition than I do, is the body
of Scripture, they're largely aphoristic?
They're aphoristic in the sense that they're non-systematic, non-argumative treatises,
right?
Other early Chinese philosophers, for example, is like Menchis, right?
They write in, what is, you know, more or less kind of argumentative structure, right?
But interestingly, Confucius as the founder of, you know, the Chinese intellectual tradition,
his saying, "Survive in these pithy dicta."
And what's interesting about the analex is that they're basically textual recordings of
original oral scenes of instruction, right?
So Confucius says this to this particular disciple, right?
So on the one hand, you have, it's a transcript of that original moment, but then the way
Confucius, as the authoritative figure, is transformed into what is called Confucius-Nizom,
right?
The school of commentary that surrounds each singular utterance, right?
So you can't have the aphorism without its armature, without the apparatus of commentary,
right?
And the same people who wrote these commentaries are the ones who gathered and annotated
them.
And, you know, virtually all pre-modern printing of Confucius analex, you never just get the aphorisms
themselves.
They're surrounded by this body of commentary, much like the Hebrew Bible.
Right.
And in your book, you think that this commentary tradition is crucial to the, well, the
full dissemination of the aphoristic.
Yeah, I mean, with the ancient figures, I'm really fascinated by Mox Weber, he was very
interested in early Chinese thinking and produced a couple books about it.
And as a sociologist, what he's interested is the transformation of charismatic authority
into bureaucratic institutions.
And I take it what he means by that is first you have this really charismatic but anti-establishment
firebrand like Jesus the Buddha, right?
They're trying to overturn some paradigm, right?
But then once you overturn them, how do you build, how do you sustain this charisma?
And his idea is that it sustains through later derivative epigony figures like the scribes
and the clerics who ironically make this anti-establishment charismatic teaching, make
it congeal into something that's institutional and doctrinal.
And I think that's really interesting, right?
How you maintain charisma but then I think charisma is something that burns out very quickly,
right?
It kind of consumes itself but then in the process of congealing and making it institutional,
it becomes calcified.
So you claim that the Afro-Ris genre has to be thought in relation to philosophy because
it's in an uneasy relationship to say the least.
That's right.
You say that it both proceeds, vise with and supersedes, the philosophical tradition.
And therefore, and what I like about your concept of the aphroism is that it is a thinking,
a community of unidive speech that some kind of thought has been condensed in the aphroism.
In that sense, it's not just a proverb or a maximic or some kind of prescription or injunction.
However, and while I can see in the case of Confucius that he was a philosopher,
A. Lee's and empedically's and Heraclitus clearly, these are aristocratic philosophers
and same with Pascal and others.
Now, but you're talking about Jesus and the Buddha, do you take Jesus also to be in some
kind of implicit dialogue with any kind of philosophical tradition or does he stand outside
of that?
I think he's in implicit dialogue with the teachings of the prophets.
Yeah.
I think the authors of the canonical Gospels, they're implicit dialogue with the ancient
sub-piential tradition in the ancient Mediterranean.
That's why the beginning of John in the beginning was the word.
That's very Hellenic.
So Logos.
So Heraclitus in Jesus share within them this concern with what Logos is, what discourse,
argument, word.
Going back to the early point, yeah, I mean, the theory of the aphroism I have in this book
in one sentence is that aphroisms come before against an after philosophy.
So that's the theory.
Now, how do I find empirical evidence to back up this theory?
Look, Heraclitus comes before and against Plato and Aristotle.
Pascal comes after and against Descartes, Nietzsche after and against Kant and Hegel.
So this is in a way that dialectics of doing philosophy.
First, you have the system builders, like Kant and Hegel with their critiques and their
phenomenologies and even showmen how.
And then you have these people coming in trying to blow it all up, right?
And they blow it up through these aphroisms and so these aphroisms in a way are the dynamites.
Well, except that in the case of Heraclitus, he proceeds Plato and Aristotle.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
I mean, he doesn't blow them up.
Aphroisms are before, before against an after philosophy.
So Heraclitus comes before Plato and Aristotle.
And what's really interesting is that Plato was very hostile to Heraclitus.
There is this passage in Theatatus, which is a platonic dialogue.
And do you mind if I just read this because I think it's really interesting and it really
captures what I'm trying to figure out that is the relationship between philosophy and
literature, which I'm sure your listeners are all interested in.
So, okay, this is what someone in Plato's Theatatus says.
If you ask any of them the Heraclitus a question, he will pull out some little enigmatic
phrase from his quiver and shoot it off at you.
And if you try to make him give an account and the Greek here is a low-gone, of what he
has said, you'll only get hit by another full of strange turns of language.
Again, full of strange turns of language.
You'll never reach any conclusion with them ever.
Indeed, they'll never reach any conclusion with each other either.
And so they're very careful not to allow anything to be stable, either in an argument
or in their own souls.
What I take this to mean is that Socrates and Plato are really frustrated by Heraclitus
because even though he seems to be doing some sort of speculative thinking, the way he
does it is resolutely monologic and they're in the discontinuous unit.
What platonic dialogue demands is the art of dialectic.
A continuous probing dialogue with two people, trying to arrive at some certainty, whether
it be the platonic forms or eternal beauty.
Here he's saying, "One of Heraclitus's most famous saying is you could never step into
the same river twice."
So it's precisely this Heraclitus flocks that the "circuodic method" as well as the
platonic theory of the forms is resolutely against.
Let's look at some of those other aphorisms of Heraclitus because he's really well known
for being the most...
He's here.
Or "racular."
Yeah, he's...
Yep.
And in the Greek context, we have to go back to Delphi because many of the pronouncements
at Delphi have an effort to quality.
So what do we have here?
So the name of the bow, Beos, is life, Beos, but its work is death.
Yeah, what the hell does that mean?
Well, yeah, you can think about it ponder, that's exactly what Heraclitus wants to do.
I can understand Plato's frustration because I find aphorists sometimes to be impenetrable.
Not impenetrable, I think.
Self-referential.
Grandstanding deliberately in a way that the...
Okay, are you smart enough to figure me out now?
You've worked...
I quoted a number of my own kind of things where paradox is, if you're going to be a really
good aphorist, you have to exploit the logic of paradox.
So the Lord whose oracle is the one in Delphi neither speaks nor hides but gives signs.
Now let's dwell on that one for a moment because we talked about the oracle and here
he's referring to the fact that neither speaks openly.
So, it's not apophantic nor does it hide but give signs.
This seems to be auto-referential in a certain way.
Absolutely.
That's exactly how his aphorism is work now.
Yeah, I mean Robert, I think you're right to suggest that Heraclitus' Pong Sei, as it
were, is in the milieu of the divinatory and oracular practices in Ancient Greece and also
in the ancient Mediterranean.
I see him as a pivotal figure that transitions from these oracular announcements that
are produced by gods to one of clear rational thinking done by philosophers like Plato.
Right, so far.
Right, the so far.
But I think at this cultural moment we can't get to systematic philosophy except through
first thinking in, not necessarily fragments but certainly pithy sayings and I think and
that is the crucial transition for me.
And I think Heraclitus is self-consciously obscure because he wants to go to his readers or
listeners into thinking.
He's not dogmatic.
It's hard to pin him down and that's precisely what I like about him.
He gives us this hermoononic opening, this aperture for us to begin the process of thinking
itself.
He's not dogmatic, he's not authoritarian.
Right.
No, that's definitely correct.
And I think his language is also obscure because he thinks the nature of the world itself
is obscure.
And so he wants his philosophy, he wants his language to mirror the ambiguity, the chaos,
the paradox of the world, which is why there is this kind of semantic pun right of
bow and life.
He's trying to figure out what the relationship, right of language within each other and
language to its referent.
And now when we turn to the second one, the Lord whose oracle is the one in Delphi, neither
speaks nor hides but gives signs.
Let's just look at the subject for a moment.
The Lord whose oracle is the one in Delphi.
Now this is what classical scholars called the Epi-Coric name for the God and what Epi-Coric
means is that this is a local regional cult rather than what classical scholars called the
Hanhellenic God, a universal Olympian one.
But even the very subject itself is a parryphrases, right?
He could have just said Apollo, neither speaks nor hides but give signs.
And so in a way he conceals the local name of Apollo.
Well, he's giving signs.
Right, exactly.
He's giving signs.
Because I mean for a thinker who's as interested in paradoxes and big uities and etymology,
he kind of says, "The God who was born in de-loss neither speaks nor hides but gives signs."
But that would be contrary to the meaning because what de-loss means is phenomenon, right?
To shine, to appear.
Right.
Well here is he then saying the Lord whose oracle is the one in Delphi, he's distinguishing
between the oracle and the God.
In other words, he's breaking up the identity between those two.
I don't think so.
I think the Lord is speaking through oracles.
We're living in the post-homeric age where gods don't speak to us one to one.
There has to be some sort of medium.
That's why there are the cult of the priests.
And so, yeah, I get that.
What I'm saying is that there seems to be this self-reflexive reference to a mediation.
Right.
The voice of the God through the oracle in Delphi.
Therefore, this is what he's giving signs, I could say that what you get from the
Delphi oracle is the signs.
You're not really getting the gods' direct speech.
That's right.
Yeah, I agree with that.
And I think that's deliberate because part of the business of oracles is interpretation.
You have to figure out that's the reception of the oracle.
Right.
I mean, if you invade the Persians a great empire would fall, right?
That's one oracle.
And it's up to you to interpret, well, which empire is going to fall?
Yours or your enemies?
Right.
And so, this sort of hermeneutics, this interpretation, I would say, is already on the way to
speculative thinking and by extension philosophy because the burden of meaning is dependent
on us and not just some divine authority.
So here, it's, again, this divine revelation, but Heraclitus wants us to think for ourselves.
He wants a human logos.
Right.
Well, yes.
But this idea that the Vatican sofos, Heraclitus is actually positioning himself as someone
through whom the god is speaking because he's speaking in the same way as the Delphi oracle.
And even if it's not completely explicit, it seems to be implied because the philosopher
or in ancient Greece was the spokes, there was a presumption that that was the highest ideal
of the philosopher was to be the messenger of the gods, to interpret the interpreter of
the gods, the one who's, through whose words you could bring forth this higher stage of wisdom.
And even Plato did not veer from that ambition.
He also, I think there's a kind of theophony expectation that there's a theophony taking
place within the discourse itself, the logo.
But in a different kind of logos.
I actually have a different way of looking at the development of Greek philosophy.
I think Heraclitus is trying to do it the other way around.
He wants to take interpretation from the divine Roman turn it into the philosophical
one because he says thinking is common to all, right? Everybody has logos but the stupid people
just don't recognize that and they don't do anything with it.
Well, he says it's a little more specific if I remember correctly because he says that
each person when he goes, he or she goes to sleep, goes into his own private world.
But that in the logos is common to all.
So when you wake up and you're in the public world, the logos is something that I have to
go through the logos in order to speak to you because I cannot speak to you in my idiosyncratic
dream language.
Just what Wittgenstein says is that there is no session as a private language.
So that's where I sympathize with the character and the Theatitas who says, okay, now we're
in the sphere of the logos.
You have to tell me what you mean and don't hide your meaning or don't pretend that
you have a higher wisdom that I can't understand because we're committed to yours of the
logos.
It's like when I was a graduate student in Cornell, when everyone in my department was trying
their hardest to be a very dramatic deconstructionist that the whole point was to say something
without ever being clear about what's being said because if you were ever God forbid
communicated clearly, then it would be a profanation of the higher.
Yeah, no, I mean, point taken and look, Robert, the classical tradition is with you
in that they agree that Heraclitus is obscure.
And Greek philosophy does not culminate with Heraclitus.
And my whole point is that yes, it anticipates philosophical thinking, but it is not
philosophy as you and I conceive it to be.
We can also talk about Plato and Socrates and their relationship to the gods.
And that's very, very complicated, but I will just say that very interestingly in the
apology, what gets Socratic philosophy started?
What's the catalyst is him trying to decipher the oracle in Delphi which says, no man
is wiser than Socrates.
But that's in a way, I mean, this is a long word, but there's no better word for it, but
it's a secular reading of this Vatican voice.
And so he does his own dialectic, which is based on what is common to everybody, human
logo rather than divine prayers or incantations.
Yeah, no, I get it.
And I'm glad we're clarifying it because I know where basically my tendencies lie towards
that logos in the full day.
But that said, I mean, Heraclitus and the other, the other
softness like, you know, an axamander, the protagonist, Pythagoras, they were really
constitutive to philosophical thinking because all of Aristotle's treatises, whether
it be the physics or the metaphysics begins with, oh, these are what other people have
said, let's try to test it out, let's try to test them out.
And then so they're seen as the foundation, which, okay, you might disagree with you that
want to topple, but still, you need to.
No, no, I don't want to topple or disagree.
I just want to say that and I do want to give credit to your credit is to, I mean,
axamanders fragments that, but you've written about beautifully.
Yeah, from when things have their origin there, they must pass away according to the order
of necessity and pay penalty for having come into beautiful stuff.
But the, and also Heraclitus and the other, and the self, the unexamined life is not worth
living, these kinds of, yeah.
And also, you have these really Vatican pronouncements from the orchos and divination, but
inscribed on the walls outside are things that are very clear, you know, to what every
student of philosophy, you know, is, know thyself, know yourself, and now they sell
time, right?
And following that is nothing in excess.
Now, know thyself that already is an invitation to discovering what, what the self is, right?
Whether there's a continuity of the self, right, what the principle of individualization
is, and what the promise of self knowledge and its own good, does that liberate us from
the dogmas or the bondage of authority or the past?
So let me ask a question that will get us now back to the Gospels.
Okay, great.
But within the domain of Greek, the wisdom tradition, if I think of the corpus of Plato,
I don't have any aphorisms that jump out as being the repositories of whatever Plato's
wisdom amounted to.
I mean, you have a few things like the unexamine life, it's not worth living.
What is most, let's say, present in the legacy are the myths, his stories, not even
his reasoning and rasiosenation and his philosophical arguments that are conducted in the
dialogues.
It's the allegory of the cave.
It's the myth of the winged chariots in the feedress.
Or the soul with its own wings or the myth of Ur and the end of the public.
Or the music making Socrates, right, at the end of the apology.
So had Plato not been an ingenious myth maker and used the power of myth to make a myth
of philosophy, I don't think he would have been such a great philosopher.
Yeah, I agree with the end of the story.
And very nine ago has been beautiful.
Right, exactly.
And we've had a show on every note where we talk about that.
And so now when we go to the Gospels, it's true that many of the sayings of Jesus, the aphorisms
are very present as something that we associate with Jesus.
Render under Caesar is what is Caesar's unto God, what is God, or the kingdom of God
is within you.
Yet at the same time, what seems to have had the most purchase in the everyday practice
and appropriation of the Gospels are the narratives, the stories.
It can be the parables, well, the parables, the miracles as well as the the Nativity stories,
the passion cycle, the passion cycle, the resurrection.
It's true that you get a beautiful aphorism from the angel when the Marys go after and
find that an Easter morning and the tomb is empty.
And the angel says, why do you seek the living among the dead?
That's beautiful aphorism.
It is aphoristic or he'd known as he is not here.
So yet at the same time, it's the stories that seem to have more power when it comes to
the popular imagination rather than the dicta.
Sure, but I see a kinship between parables and aphorisms because both demand interpretation.
That's the burden placed on the believer and in a way as the journey of faith.
Right?
In a way, Jesus asked all of us to be literary critics, literary critics of his own stories.
And the disciples themselves are really baffled why he speaks in parables, right?
He says, well, there are those who will not understand.
And he says even I speak in parables so that those who are not supposed to understand
will not understand.
Exactly.
And so, like, actively, excellently.
Yeah, so that people who think they're clever, right?
Like the Pharisees and so forth.
So I don't want them to twist my words.
Which is why I think sometimes there are these cultic practices or these closed groups
when it comes to religious interpretation because there are some people who say, oh, I really
get the secret teachings.
Right?
Yes.
I mean, in the Gospels as we have them in the New Testament canon, they're nicely woven
narrative, the chronology of Christ, the genealogy of Christ that begins Matthew, the
Christmas story that begins Luke and this philosophical inquiry that begins John in the beginning
was the word in the word, was it the word, and the word was made flesh.
But interestingly, all of this came after all the desperate other Gospels of Jesus, right?
One that I talk about is the Gospel of Thomas.
Yeah, tell me you really have a thing with the Gospel of Thomas which is fascinating.
Yeah, and a lot of people need to be instructed.
I love the Gospel of Thomas.
And I mean, in short, it's part of this corpus of writings called the Naghamadi.
And it's named of the Naghamadi because it's this small town in Upper Egypt.
And the Naghamadi scriptures were unearthed by a couple of shepherd boys in the desert
in 1947.
And that really changed the course of biblical scholarship because in this excavation, we
have uncontaminated by tradition, some of the earliest writings of the Christians or people
like they call them the Jesus movement because this is before the institution of Christianity
as a doctrine.
Now, in this body of work, they're all like these really enigmatic sayings of Jesus, right?
And my hypothesis of why they were suppressed and put and buried literally in the ground
for thousands of years is precisely the were too enigmatic.
They're too mysterious.
If anybody gets their hand on them, that creates too much liability.
Can you give some example?
Sure.
This is how the Gospel begins.
And it goes like these are the hidden sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Judas Thomas
took twin recorded, whoever discovers the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death.
That's some pretty damn powerful lines here, right?
So what's interesting is that these are the hidden sayings.
And this sense of hiddenness is pervasive in so many of other, let me just read you a couple
because it all has to do with this sense of hiddenness.
All things are disclosed before heaven.
For there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed and there is nothing covered that
will remain undisclosed.
There will be days when you will find and seek me and you will not find me.
But then there is another one which says, one who seeks will find, for the one who knocks,
it will be opened and seek and you shall find, right?
We see that in the canonical Gospels.
And in fact, that's the simplest and most beautiful invitation of Jesus to believe.
And this one that I'm going to share gets us back to the incubate, the beginning of the
Gospel, whoever drinks for my mouth will become one like me.
I myself shall become that person and the hidden things will be revealed to that person.
So as a literary critic, I take this as literary criticism is a vehicle to salvation,
whoever discovers the interpretation and the Greek here is Hermannaya,
right?
Hermannutics of these things will not taste death.
Interpretation is life-giving.
Yeah, but whoever drinks for my mouth, do you take that to mean interpretation?
I take it as an image of whoever will receive my word, whatever is coming out of my mouth,
to have to be the words that are, the words, whoever drinks from whoever imbibes my words.
Whoever imbibes my words and is imbibing the words of Christ the same thing as interpreting
them as a plastic tradition.
And we would all be saved in 2,000 years of commentary on the Bible.
OK, well, it's imbibing, but it's also digesting.
And it's an rumination, as you know, or from the Cal stomach, right?
And it takes a long time to kind of ruminate.
OK, you just listen, but then it can't be in one ear out the other, right?
It needs this temporal, it has done with lentil, as Nietzsche says, of the art of reading, right?
Just like you listen to a parable, you're not going to get it the first time, you have to think about it.
And it's this process of thinking that is the somatic metaphor for digestion.
Yeah.
Well, I would be a little--
Because like, seek and you shall find, like, you have to do seeking.
It's a process, right?
It's not just instantaneous like eating and drinking.
And again, I mean, what fascinates me about this is that, hey, there are some things
that are hidden to you, which is OK, but other things that are revealed to you, and it's your job to find out what the transparency of that is.
Right.
Well, it's interesting dynamic between what's hidden and what is actually--
Exactly.
And so, in front, you're right.
This is also then--
I mean, this is very Hellenic, you know, from what we saw in Heraclitus.
Yeah.
It's both Hellenic and Hebraic, because there are many moments in the Old Testament where it says,
the children of Israel, they have sinned themselves so much that I'm God, and he says, I'm going to hide my face from you.
Right.
Well, I tell you what, why don't we take a jump historically, because we don't want to run at times before we say at least a word about Nietzsche.
But how about Pascal, because he's a big one.
And the Paul Sei is a Paul Sei, the same thing as an aphorism.
I tend to agree that when it's really condensed, a Paul Sei, a thought of Pascal is aphoristic.
Some of his most famous Paul Seis, however, were kind of long short essays, very extended things.
Right.
It's very extended, like his wager or the disproportionate of man.
Yeah, the true infinities and tomoshinities.
So, but what are some of the quintessential, paradigmatic aphorisms of Pascal?
Sure.
I mean, just one, many people would probably know.
The heart has its reasons of which reason does not know.
So that can be seen as like a hallmark Valentine card.
Right.
But that's it.
I think this is something very interesting.
And there's a lot we can say about this.
Here is a very famous one.
I think this one you've talked about in your show.
Right.
The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.
My spoken French is not that good.
So you can read the French.
Like...
Yeah, Lucilos et ternél, there says a spas en fini méfre.
Yeah.
Which is terrifies me.
It frightens me.
Yeah.
And then there are some that are more...
Okay.
You want to talk about this?
Yeah.
I want you to talk about that.
Okay.
Before I talk about this, let's think about, again, the word Ponguei, because Pascal did
not self-tidal.
Exactly.
His work.
I mean, these were actually fragments that he was writing really at the time of his death.
And they were in a way, kind of like Patrick, they're kind of discontinued pieces that he
wanted to form into the single body, which is what he calls the Apologia for Christianity.
Right?
His apology for Christianity.
And...
But he died at a very young age, 37, I think.
And what we have of the Pongueis are recreations by later editors.
Right?
And every century invents their own version of Pascal.
There is the Epikurian Pascal.
There is the Poy-Hael Pascal.
There is the Cartesian Pascal.
There is the Enlightenment Pascal.
There is the Scientific Pascal.
And then there's the Postmodern Pascal.
Right?
So part of what's underlying my theory of the aphorism is that a philology of the aphorism
is as crucial to the philosophy of aphorism.
Okay.
That said, let's go back to this.
The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.
There's a lot you can say with this.
First, of course, the question is, why is this an aphorism?
Or is it an aphorism?
Because I think there's a case one could make that it's not aphoristic.
I would like to hear that.
Well, I would say that to begin with it has a first person singular.
Therefore it's confessional.
And I take the aphorism to typically, at least classically, exclude that sort of first person
If you're not too creative in order to achieve that sort of universal autonomy and
trans-cultural trans-historical validity across barriers, whereas here you could say that
this is a confessional statement about a subjective state of mind.
Or maybe this me is collective.
You can interpret it like that.
Yeah, you could push it.
But okay, assuming it is an aphorism, what did it make you think of?
What makes me think of it?
God is provoked in your mind when you read that.
Well, Pascal, early in his career was a mathematical genius and he made signal contributions
to calculus and geometry.
Later on in his conversion to the movement of, that's called, Jansenism, he turned his
thoughts entirely to God.
And for Pascal, there are two types of God.
There's the God of the philosophers.
And then there's the God of Abraham, Jacob, and Isaac.
Now, the way I interpret, the sis-es-mas-a-fini is the eternal silence.
That's the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, right?
Because it's silence, right?
The very silence of God, the hidden God, is deafening and we're all searching, right?
It's the voice and the wilderness, right?
We're always searching, but God doesn't speak.
And so this is the tragic condition of the post-lapseering man or the questing Christian,
right?
We pray and we seek God, but yet he is silent.
And then, as Pascal, if any, I take that as to be more the Cartesian God.
Because this is a post-capernicus, post-capular sense of the early modern period in which
you no longer have this beautifully closed, tallamake cosmos, but this infinite expanding
world.
And this creates this existential free zone, this terror in us, right?
And so where is man caught between infinity and nothingness?
And even, let's look at the poetics of this one sentence.
Look how long the subject is, right?
And in fact, it kind of follows the rules of French porosity in the Alexandrean, right?
Laus-Cilons et d'Arnèle, right?
Ses-es-mas-a-fain-i, right?
He's perfect heme-stish, divided by the C-zero of the der.
But then, mythway, the 'm', right?
The 'me', even that word is elided, you know?
And so you have this puny one letter that stands for the individual and this huge, enormous
enormity of the infinite cosmos.
Yeah, well, I think the poetics of this is this ingenious.
Well, I think it's ingenious up until the last word, because for some reason I find that
it falls flat, proesotically, by the fact that mythre only has two syllables.
And Laus-Cilons et d'Arnèle, this is a spas-sefain-i, is a perfect symmetrical, since we're
a separating the two.
But then you would say, imagine if it were Laus-Cilons et d'Arnèle, this is a spas-sefain-i,
the tédé-fé, or something that you would have more syllables.
I think the scanning would be different.
But I think that precisely because it's cadence is, there's this equilibrium, right?
And so, I mean, the subject is that we are terrified and this causes this kind of dread
in us and, proesotically, the line mimics that.
Okay, that could be the case.
So, let me go back to your interpretation of this Cilons et d'Arnèle, because you
associate it with the Abrahamic God of a God who is silent and yet the subject of this
sentence is not the infinite spaces.
Although you're right, it's the infinite, it's the infinity of a post-Gapernican world,
which has all of a sudden become relative.
Right.
There is nothing but relativity.
Exactly.
Because we've lost the containment and the sub-roomedries.
Floating in space, we can't find our way.
We can't find our way.
And that infinity of space means that there's an infinity of the large, the infinity
of the small, the atom.
We have lost our orientation and basically we've lost our bearings and that could be
very terrifying.
However, that's not the subject of the sentence.
That is the subject of the sentence.
No, the subject of the sentence is the eternal silence.
Oh, okay.
I had big difference, huh?
Because what does the eternal silence mean?
It's not the silence of God.
It's that the pre-Gapernican cosmos was full of music because the spheres embedded one into
the other end.
The music of the spheres were so harmonized by the creator who had created a self-contained
universe and when Dante goes into those heavenly spheres, he's always hearing the sound of this
harmony.
Now, because of the infinite unbounded nature of space, the universe itself has gone silent
and it's that silence that terrifies him, not the infinity of space.
And we know that interstellar space has a silence of a vacuum that is nothing on Earth
could come anywhere near of having the kind of total abyssal silence of interstellar space.
So that makes this on the one hand a comment on the post-Gapernican state of mind of a subject
who now has to find a way to belong or to fit into this new cosmos and can't find it
because there is no response out there.
There's no sound coming back and therefore there's a certain kind of terror on the body.
I think that reading is ingenious and I'm very grateful for you for sharing that with me.
So yeah, I kind of buy it now.
But that said, the music of the spheres for mortal bodies, it's inaudible.
Dante hears it because he's been purged in Pudgatoru, but whereas we, you know, what
Shakespeare and Marcia Venice that are still in the muddy vesture of our decay.
But that's why the word et t'etne is so crucial because he's not talking about the silence
of the provisional silence of us in our bodies here on Earth.
He's talking about an eternal silence that even if there is a salvation or thing
that the universe will remain silent forever.
So do you read Pascal then as this utter pessimist?
How do we get, how do we hear the voice of God?
Well, I see the subjective confessional content of this aphorism as coming from a self that
does not know how to fit itself into the new cosmos and doesn't know its place of belonging
and is bewildered.
And this is the kind of post-coperanican dread of a universe that's gone completely cold.
And I think in the post-coperanican world the only way we can express the physics of infinity
is through the politics of the fragment because writing in unity does not make sense anymore.
So the only way to express this vastness, right, this pure nothingness is through fragments.
Well, yeah, and your book is, as a whole meditation on the relation between the aphorism
and the fragment.
That's right.
Yeah, both fragments that are found like the ancients and the fragments that are created
like with Pascal, you know, case in point here, as well as Nietzsche, right?
So I love this aphorism about aphorism by Friedrich Schlegel.
Many of the works of the ancients have become fragments.
Many works are fragments as soon as they're written.
Actually we can understand this as, you know, in German romanticism, the philology of
classical fragments went hand in hand with the creative production of fragments.
Yeah.
Well, that's great.
I have to say that, you know, your book interests me a great deal and I'll read it in
its entirety when it comes out with, you know, with great interests.
I think it's clear over the last hour of our conversation that might sense abilities
in decline in another direction, then the aphoristic in the sense that I haven't been doing
a radio show for 12 years like this for nothing.
I believe in discourse.
Yeah, yeah.
And in the fact that you let your thoughts air themselves out in ways.
I also do like systems believe or not.
Even though I understand the philosophical systems no longer correspond to certain, there's
out of scaleness, the universe and so forth.
You have a quote of Italo Calvino.
I've always had sensibility problems with Calvino.
Oh, I love Calvinos.
Yeah, but my sensibility is going a different direction of his.
So this aphorism of his where he says, "I dream of immense cosmology, sagas and epics
all reduced to the dimension of an epigram."
How depressing that would be if you could reduce.
I mean, give me immense cosmologies.
Give me sagas and give me epics.
Yeah, yeah.
Don't reduce them to an epigram because then you are, you are impoverishing.
That's interesting.
The only thing that's, that's, so you think this is too reductivist.
I think it's a question of sensibility.
Oh, yeah.
It might be sensibly, but I think I'm attracted by, I think there's something inhibited
of the aphorism.
Right.
I mean, and I prefer the uninhibited.
I think there's something very open about the aphorism and something very flexible and
something very playful.
And I mean, the first question that you asked me when I told you about this project is Andrew,
do you like aphorisms?
And in a way I do.
And I take it what's underlying kind of this suspicion you have is if you are reading
many aphorisms, it's kind of frustrating and you know, it becomes like too much, right?
But for me, the spaces between each aphorism, the blank space on the page is like what
Debussy says about music.
Music is the silence between the notes.
And it's precisely these unpunctuated and disconnected aphorisms and their relationship
to each other that creates the authorial silence in which then the reader can come in with
his own interpretation and the co-production of meaning.
Right.
That's true.
You could take the Debussy quote a little differently, however, by saying that silence is the
precondition of music and of melody.
And you know, if you see that movie, Tulem Matandi Mullins, I've read the novel Pascal
Renan, which is beautiful.
I mean, gorgeous.
And there, at least in the movie version I haven't read the novel, there's Departio
is playing the role of my decision, right?
But I'm Matay, and he's recalling his whole.
And it begins with him saying, this is a beautiful aphorism.
Shakk nott dwafinir amu hong.
Every note has to finish by dying because in its dying, it goes back into the silence.
But if there's not that silence, then the next note will not be in relation to that one.
And then one after that.
And therefore, melody requires these intervals.
But if there's complete autonomy of each note, then you would never get a melody or
let alone a symphony and so forth.
It's been a while since I've read the novel, but if I remember, the musician is, he's
very melancholic, and he's very elegiaic.
You might take that as the tragedy of music, but every note dies, but then the melody is
picked up again.
So there's a rebirth, there's a recreation, just like for Augustine, after you chant
a psalm, there's this cadence.
But then there is also Christ resurrect ourselves.
So there is this kind of dialectic between memory that's always going backwards and hope
that's forever projecting itself to the future.
Right.
Well, I wish we had more time to talk about all the other authors and of authorisms
and other, you know, Hippocrates, for example, I was really fascinated to read the way some
of these medical things are actually aphoristic and nature and so forth.
Yeah, I mean, the very name of aphorisms first appears in the corpus of Hippocrates.
Right.
So that's interesting.
And I don't know if I mentioned the title of your book, yeah, I did mention the title.
No, a theory of the aphorism from Confucius to Twitter.
Twitter.
Next time we can talk about Twitter.
We can talk about Twitter next time.
And I guess I'll leave our listeners with one of the most remarkable aphorisms in my
view and it's Kafka, who could be a more known person.
Oh, of course.
Yeah, I think I know what you're going to read.
A cage went in search of a bird.
Yeah.
Now that you can think about, a long time and never get to the bottom of it.
Yeah.
A cage went in search of a bird.
So thanks Andrew Huey.
We've been speaking with you.
Thank you so much Robert.
Professor Andrew Huey from Yale and S.
Thank you, thank you.
NUS and Singapore.
Yes, Singapore and then back tonight.
And next, I am fellow here at Stanford.
So you take care and we'll see you next time.
Thank you.
Bye, bye.
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