Aphorism and Anti-Aphorism: Language and Aesthetics

Authors

Nicholas Romanos, University of OxfordFollow

Abstract

Karl Kraus, the great Viennese satirist, poet, and aphorist, is still little read in the Anglophone world. This article argues that Kraus’ innovative ideas about aesthetics and language, generated in response to the problems of modernity, are of great interest to the contemporary philosopher of aesthetics. Kraus’ writing is discussed here as a basis for a theory of the aphorism, which is shown to be a literary form uniquely concerned with its own form (and thus with literary and linguistic aesthetics). Kraus uses the aphorism to ‘serve language’ and, along with quotation, it constitutes the foundation of his style. This vision of the aphorism is then tested on the style of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which, it is concluded, is not aphoristic but ‘anti-aphoristic’, closely related but antithetical to the aphorism. This forms the opposing pole of our understanding of the aphoristic style, the value of which is then briefly discussed.