66 Maxims on the Mind

And the Decline of the Aphorism

It is one thing to reason about intelligence, or to intelligently reason about the world, but it is quite another to see either reason or intelligence as they are in the world, in context, which means to see what reason and intelligence really are, and how are used; aptly or inappropriately, elegantly or clumsily, wisely or wickedly. This power, less of accuracy, more of insight, tends to appear not as a collection of facts carefully drawn together by inference and deduction, and then presented as literal argument, but as a single observation of quality which is then expressed, as all quality must, as non-literal metaphor. The metaphor might appear in a poem, myth or joke, which string metaphors together into a story, allegory or tableaux of allusive images, or, standing alone as a self-contained insight, they might appear in the literary form we know as the aphorism.

The aphorism challenges all manner of things in the world, but its primary challenge is to language itself. In matters of fact, thought must be clear, clean, impersonal and bounded by hard and definite edges, but when we speak of insight, language demands a lighter, more enigmatic, touch. This isn’t to say that mind cannot reason to its own limits,¹ but to capture the inability of the abstract mind to go beyond such limits demands speech (or gesture, or silence) elusive to reason, and to this the aphorism, which seems to occupy a space between fact, poem and joke, is well suited. Aphorists are often scientists,² frequently worldly, sometimes extremely serious, but insofar as they capture a truth with contains reason, they are critical of it; critical of its limitations, its blindness, its inhumanity, its lack of humour and its inability to capture that which it sets out to find, the paradoxical truth.

Naturally, such truth is either invisible, or to the extent it pokes into awareness, irritating to the self-contained self and to its literal mind, which understands reality to be entirely made up of non-paradoxical, mind-graspable things, which takes myth and metaphor literally (or dismisses them as entertainment or as mere imagination), which believes that intelligence is what you know, and not how you behave when you don’t know, which is unable to see that fact, certainty and completeness are the corpse of meaning, in various stages of decomposition, and which, therefore, dismisses, without profound reflection, insights into reason, intelligence, cleverness, stupidity, learning, folly and logic, particularly insights which express consciousness of, and therefore something other than, the merely formal, or factual idea.

Insights such as…

Experience offers proof on every hand that vigorous mental life may be but one side of a personality, of which the other is moral barbarism.
(George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft)

There is something the poor know that the rich do not know, something the sick know that people in good health do not know, something the stupid know that the intelligent do not know.
(Gerald Brenan, Thoughts in a Dry Season)

Intelligence is not all that important in the exercise of power, and is often, in point of fact, useless.
(Henry Kissinger)

We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.
(Ludwig Wittgenstein)

Learning can be compared to a heavy suit of armour, which indeed makes the strong man quite invincible, but to the weak man is a burden under which he breaks down completely.
(Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol 2)

Stupid sons don’t ruin a family; it is the clever ones who do.
(Mr. Tut-Tut, A Night’s Talk)

His soul will never starve for exploits or excitements who is wise enough to be made a fool of. To be ‘taken in’ everywhere is to see the inside of everything.
(G.K. Chesterton)

The irrational is not necessarily unreasonable.
(Sir Lewis Namier, Personalities and Powers)

The best lesson we can learn from witnessing the folly of mankind is not to irritate ourselves against it.
(William Hazlitt, Characteristics)

There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.
(George Orwell)

Reason’s last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it.
(Pascal, Pensées)

You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.
(G.K. Chesterton, The Man who was Orthodox)

We decide to regard those things as real which play an important role in the kind of life we prefer.
(Paul Feyerabend)

He that knows little often repeats it.
(Thomas Fuller)

A man who uses an imaginary map, thinking that it is a true one, is likely to be worse off than someone with no map at all; for he will fail to inquire whenever he can, to observe every detail on his way, and to search continuously with all his senses and all his intelligence for indications of where he should go.
(E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful)

Subtlety is not a proof of wisdom. Fools and even madmen are at times extraordinarily subtle.
(Alexander Pushkin)

The more scholastically educated a man is generally, the more he is an emotional boor.
(D.H. Lawrence)

Nothing is more characteristic of a man than the manner in which he behaves toward fools.
(Henri-Frédéric Amiel)

Most fools think they are only ignorant.
(Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanak)

It is the property of fools to be always judging.
(Thomas Fuller)

You look wise. Pray correct that error.
(Charles Lamb)

The law for the development of the self with respect to knowing, is the more the self knows, the more it should know itself. If this does not happen, the more knowledge increases, the more it becomes a kind of inhuman knowledge, in the obtaining of which a person’s self is squandered, much the way men were squandered on building pyramids.
(Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death)

Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.
(Lichtenberg, The Waste Books)

Learning hath gained most by those books by which the printers have lost.
(Thomas Fuller)

A hard intellect is a hammer that can do nothing but crush. Hardness of intellect is sometimes no less harmful and hateful than hardness of heart.
(Joseph Joubert, Pensées)

Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation.
(Bertrand Russell)

He is a fool that has nothing of philosophy in him, but not so much as he that has nothing else but philosophy in him.
(Samuel Butler, Prose Observations)

Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like playthings by the bedside of a child deathly sick.
(Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

Sometimes it proves the highest understanding not to understand.
(Gracian, The Art of Worldly Wisdom)

If science tends to thicken the crust of ice on which, as it were, we are skating, it is all right. If it tries to find, or professes to have found, the solid ground at the bottom of the water, it is all wrong.
(Samuel Butler)

[Man] must look through [nature] and beyond her. To look at her is as fatal as to look at the head of Medusa. It turns the man of science to stone.
(Henry David Thoreau)

There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little.
(Sir Francis Bacon, Of Suspicion)

A really intelligent man feels what other men only know.
(Montesquieu)

It is always observable that the physical and exact sciences are the last to suffer under despotisms.
(Richard Henry Dana)

He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.
(John Stuart Mill, On Liberty)

For any serious purpose, intelligence is a very minor gift.
(G.H. Hardy)

Great wisdom is generous; petty wisdom is contentious. Great speech is impassioned, small speech cantankerous.
(Chuang Tzu)

...the considerable knowledge amassed by ordinary scholars is dead, because even when it does not consist in mere words, as is often the case, it consists in nothing but abstract thought.
(Arthur Schopenhauer)

Rationality is not logic, cleverness is not intelligence, knowledge is not understanding and experience is certainly not wisdom.
(Barry Long)

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings—always darker, emptier, and simpler.
(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science)

Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.
(Henri Poincaré)

Colleges hate geniuses, just as convents hate saints.
(Ralph Waldo Emerson, Public and Private Education)

A woman’s guess is much more accurate than a man’s certainty.
(Rudyard Kipling)

No instrument smaller than the world is fit to measure men and women: Examinations measures Examinees.
(Sir Walter Raleigh, Laughter through a Cloud)

Science is a cemetery of dead ideas.
(Miguel de Unamuno)

How we hate this solemn Ego that accompanies the learned, like a double, wherever he goes.
(Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals)

I find science analytic, pretentious, superficial, largely because it does not address itself to dreams, chance, laughter, feelings or paradox – all the things I love the most.
(Luis Bruñuel)

Those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.
(T.H. Huxley)

If falsehood, like truth, had but one face, we would be more on equal terms. For we would consider the contrary of what the liar said to be certain. But the opposite of truth has a hundred thousand faces and an infinite field.
(Michel de Montaigne)

The more unintelligent the man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.
(Arthur Schopenhauer)

You can’t discuss the ocean with a well frog—he’s limited by the space he lives in. You can’t discuss the Way with a cramped scholar—he’s shackled by his doctrines.
(Chuang Tzu)

Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.
(Ludwig Wittgenstein)

The highest level that can be reached by a mediocre but experienced mind is a talent for uncovering the weaknesses of those greater than itself.
(Georg Lichtenberg)

Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western World. Simplistic popularisation of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence.
(William Golding)

Truth in her dress finds facts too tight. In fiction she moves with ease.
(Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds)

Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.
(Sir Arthur Eddington)

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence, nor imagination, nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love: that is the soul of genius.
(Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart)

There is in us something wiser than our head.
(Arthurt Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena)

They all pose as if they had discovered and reached their real opinions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic, while at bottom it is an assumption, a hunch, indeed a kind of ‘inspiration’—most often a desire of the heart that has been filtered and made abstract—that they defend with reasons they have sought after the fact.
(Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All Too Human)

All sensible talk about vitally important topics must be common­ place, all reasoning about them unsound, and all study of them narrow and sordid.
(C.S. Peirce)

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.³
(Bertrand Russell)

All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed waste-paper baskets, unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing.
(D.H. Lawrence, Pansies)

Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
(John Kenneth Galbraith)

I think people have had too much to think and ought to flex their magic muscles.
(Captain Beefheart)

The owl of Minerva takes flight only at dusk.
(George Hegel)

To pursue learning one increases daily.
To pursue Tao one decreases daily.
(Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching)

Sometimes it seems that all great philosophy is really a series of insightful aphorisms connected up as elegantly or as haphazardly as the author feels appropriate. Trudging through, to take one examples, Kierkegaard’s poorly written Concluding Unscientific Postscript or even through one of Hateful Hegel’s books, is a painful experience largely because they didn’t seem to realise this. On the other hand Nietzsche’s refusal to connect up his million aphorisms into a totality speaks against the depth of his perception more than it does for it and although the celebrated aphorist George Lichtenberg is one the world’s finest and most fascinating thinkers, somehow in storms of the brilliant jewels he rains down the reader we feel that we are not quite in the presence of true majesty.

This helps explain why the epigram can be dismissed in the same way a poem can be, as a trivially aesthetic attitude, and why they are tolerated by closed minds more than a sustained and rigorous argument is, because they can so easily be decontextualised. Nevertheless, it is because of the pristine truth that the aphorism contains that its decline⁴ goes hand in hand with the decline of literature itself (not to mention of morality, comedy and the rest of culture), which can no longer penetrate into actually existing qualities, and give them the metaphorical form that great art and aphoristic insight demands. Instead we have mere books, mere philosophies, mere dialectics. How many brilliant epigrams, challenging apophthegms, wise proverbs and subversive maxims can you pick out of the last essay you read? The last celebrated polemic? The last prize-winning novel? Is it more than none?

Writers just aren’t intelligent any more.

1. Philosophers such as Socrates, Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard showed that rational thought can take us to the very limits of the known, offering critiques of reason that have not, nor can ever be answered. To take one example, defenders of reason have had nearly three centuries to answer David Hume’s problem of induction—which argues that we can never observe causation itself, only conjunctions of events—and they have failed. This doesn’t invalidate speculation about causes and effects, but it does undermine the reality of such speculation.

My own account of the limits of mind can be found here.

2. The term originally referred to a statement of scientific principle.

A stupid man's report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something that he can understand.

3. Bertrand Russell

4. Some of my own aphorisms are collected in the final chapters of Ad Radicem and my forthcoming book, The Fire Sermon.