Why Do We Love Aphorisms? - Reviews

Perhaps not everyone loves short aphorisms, preferring the colorful verbosity of novels. Let's not argue about tastes. Let's try to answer another question. But what if we look at aphorisms with the “polydisciplinary” view of physicists and psychiatrists? What will we see?

It is no secret that almost all and quite numerous in our time collections of aphorisms are built on a thematic basis: "About love", "About friendship", "About women", etc. Nobody has resorted to a systematic analysis of aphorisms using formal logic. Moreover, no one tried to assess their quality, expressing the latter in a certain rigorous method.

The authors tried to cross this Rubicon with possible objectivity, proposing the first in the history of aphoristics, an original systematization and classification of aphoristic statements

For this purpose, they proposed a six-level scale of the quality of aphorisms, which ranked all works of this literary genre: from “semantic innovations” to “handicrafts that imitate a creative result”.

The authors also tried to answer such difficult questions: what guidelines will help the writer of maxims to significantly increase his intellectual potential? What methods of analyzing a text will induce it to enrich literary technique? The practicing aphorist is offered a variety of means of activating his reflection on his own creativity and self-assessment criteria.

The article considers the dependence of aphorisms on the profession, gender, psychological type and social status of their authors. The existing relationship of these factors, which are not always obvious at first glance, has been revealed.

The psychological characteristics of the personality, of course, leave their mark on all options for creative activity, especially literary, one of which is aphoristics

The authors, throwing aside false modesty, devoted the supplement to their book to their own aphorisms obtained by the "burime" method: one author composes a "blank" of the aphorism, the other edits it or turns the resulting "masterpiece" upside down. The authors consider themselves to be the pioneers of such joint creativity.

If those who are interested in the reasons for the emergence of aphorisms (why do they appear?), Their connection with the personality of the creator, open this extraordinary book, they will find a lot of unexpected things for themselves.