Theory, Culture & Society recently published a collection of Georg Simmel’s aphorisms, translated by Wendelin Reich and Richard Swedberg. You know, those are pithy notes or fragments that contain, in highly condensed form, insight into the human condition or some such thing. Seems Simmel had that art down. Consider this one:
The natural sciences deal with possible necessities; religion with necessary possibilities.
Or the following aphorism, which, as the translators point out in their introduction, is only half as long as de La Rochefoucauld’s shortest aphorism:
Thinking hurts.
Indeed it does. Fortunately, we have brilliant writers like George to help us.
