T.W. Adorno—Thinking in Breaks (1956).
Introduction to Heinz Krüger’s “Studies On the Aphorism as Philosophical Form.”
De l'audace, et encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace!
—George Jacques Danton, speech before the National Assembly, 2 September 1792.1
Introduction to Heinz Krüger’s Studies On the Aphorism as Philosophical Form (1956).
The teacher’s joy at having been able to direct a student’s first work is rivaled only by the sadness it will remain his last. Heinz Krüger succumbed to an illness just weeks after completing his doctorate, an illness that must have been eating away at him for a long time, but which he heroically refused to acknowledge in order to finish what he’d begun in his studies. Studies On the Aphorism as Philosophical Form was conceived as a preliminary stage of a far more comprehensive work, the plan for which has been senselessly shattered.
If we are to remain true to some of what the deceased envisioned, then the specificity of the idea behind the dissertation should be emphasized first and foremost. Its concern is not with the aphorism as linguistic phenomenon or literary genre. The linguistic aspects of the aphorism—concision, pointedness, antithesis, brevity—have long been well-established. Krüger wanted to show that the aphorism has an essential relation to its philosophical content; that, in his own words, the aphorism “is an extremely rigorous and autonomous form of thinking, existing alongside the great orders of faith and knowledge as though it were a buffoonery of disfigured life, in protest against its disfiguration in the system of those orders, insolent and wary at the same time. As philosophizing alongside philosophy in the narrower sense, the aphorism thrives on that discrepancy arising from the fact that being and thinking can seemingly never be brought into perfect alignment.”
In Krüger’s text, the survey of existing literature is followed by an overview of the historical types of aphorism, from Hippocrates, with whose name the word is associated, via Montaigne, Gracián, Pascal and the French moralists up to the romantic fragment.
Both fragmentistic and truly aphoristic thinking are “thinking in breaks” (“Denken in Brüchen”).2 Whereas the romantic fragment thrives in its agreement with language, by virtue of which it means to conjure the infinite within the finite, in the aphorism, critique encompasses language itself. Thinking that breaks off wants with the means of language to heal the inalienable untruth immanent to language itself. “The intention of the aphorism is to render language pervious to insight into truth—one could almost say: to speak it away—without destroying the mediacy of the spoken.”
Krüger develops this exemplary concept of the aphorism through his work on Nietzsche. Because the aphorism relies on language and its logic to present and to convey, but does not bow with respect before the categories and the principles enshrined in grammar as absolute, it shifts into a ‘parodic’ usage of language and logic. This for Krüger is the model of aphoristic thinking. The aphorism uses neither language nor the principles of knowledge as they are meant to be used. Rather, it renders them inauthentic and alien to themselves. The aphorism is the unfolded non-knowledge [Nichtwissen] that presupposes reflexion on knowledge in extremity. In so doing, the aphorism assumes as a rule the form of the exception against which all rules and conceptual systematics founder. The exception functions as corrective: the aphorism “dislodges something from the horizon of consciousness,” putting the deep-seated, even useful, view of the facts of the matter into question. It seeks to rectify some of the deformation inflicted on the mind by reigning spirit. It aims at the negation of conclusive thinking.3 It does not terminate in such judgment. It is rather the concrete form in which the movement of the concept that eludes the system presents itself.
Aphoristic thinking has always been nonconformist. For this reason it has fallen into disrepute among the sciences of the academy and official philosophy. It is defamed as non-committal, irresponsible, feuilletonistic. Just as the persecuted are seldom improved by their persecution, aphoristic thinking too has suffered for having been separated from all intellectual responsibility, divested of the authority of rigorous address. It has in many cases taken on some of the apocryphal traits for which it is accused. By unfolding the philosophical significance of the form in the spirit of a philosophical ‘rescue,’ Krüger not only reinforces its resistance to conformity with traditional forms of consciousness, but also restores to aphoristic thinking the audacity of its method and holds it to its own rigorous standard.
The philosophical work of this author—who was not a philosopher by specialization but, once moved by philosophy, was driven far beyond the confines of his formal education and acquired a real philosophical understanding by virtue of his own thought—champions open and unfettered thinking: it gives the principle that negates principles a name. In this, it offers the reader something more than just an academic contribution: a piece [Stück] of freedom experienced. And this should be as little forgotten as the one who did not let the warmth and strength of such experience simply wither.
[Vgl. Heinz Krüger, Studien über den Aphorismus als philosophische Form, Frankfurt a.M. 1957.]4
For J.E. Morain, the most audacious aphorist I know!
Cf. Adorno’s “Essay as Form.” In: Notes to Literature. Vol. 1. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann, translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Columbia University Press, 1991), 3-32. [link]
conclusive thinking: [abschlußhaften Denkens].
T.W. Adorno, “Zur Einführung in Heinz Krügers “Studien über den Aphorismus als philosophische Form” [1956], GS 20.2 (Suhrkamp, 2003), 474-477. Author’s translation.
Cf. Heinz Krüger, Über den Aphorismus als philosophische Form. Mit einer Einführung von Theodor W. Adorno. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann (edition text + kritik, 1988).