aphorisms versus epigrams

Aphorisms and epigrams are both witty and/or pithy sayings, but they differ in their application to the world. An epigram, for which Lichtenberg’s professor Kästner was noted, is a witty saying having to do with a particular situation, while an aphorism is a witty maxim that contains a broad pearl of wisdom.

Here are a couple of examples that let you see the difference between the two concepts.

An epigram by the British poet John Dryden (Epitaph intended for his wife, from The Poems of John Dryden):

Here lies my wife:here let her lie!
Now she's at rest, and so am I. 

An aphorism by the French composer Hector Berlioz:

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

a polymath in the news?

The Canadian actor Alan Thicke died a few days ago. This article called him a TV polymath. While he was certainly a fine actor, a polymath? Probably not.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, pt. 2

Let’s talk about Lichtenberg's family background. It was very interesting.

He was the seventeenth (and last) child in his family, but only the fifth to survive. At age eight, he had an accident that caused a spinal deformity. The injury never healed, and left him a hunchback for life. The injury affected his psyche but not his academics. He attended the University of Göttingen, where he became a student of the comparably clever mathematician/epigrammatist Abraham Gotthelf Kästner.

Lichtenberg was an excellent student and became a Göttingen lifer. He was named a professor there in 1769, teaching physics, particularly experimental physics, math, astronomy, and natural philosophy, and stayed there until his death in 1799. In fact, he never left Göttingen except for several extended trips to England, where he got acquainted with English culture (he was a serious Anglophile), perfected his English, and met numerous English scientists.

As a physicist, Lichtenberg was celebrated for his teaching and for his convictions that physics must be demonstrated, not just thought or lectured about. He was the first German professor of experimental physics. His lectures and demonstrations were very popular; more than a quarter of the whole school would sometimes crowd into the lecture hall for his physics experiments, where he would shower his classes with exhortations to investigate and test things for themselves with comments like “Almost everything in physics must be investigated anew.” Despite his successes in the classroom, he always remained self-conscious about his deformity; he would sidle into his classroom facing the students to try to hide his hunchback and he would do his best to write on the blackboard behind him without turning around.

Georg Cristoph Lichtenberg - the witty physicist

Georg Cristoph Lichtenberg was, according to his biographer, Olexa Bilaniuk, “the leading German expert in a number of fields, including geodesy, geophysics, meteorology, astronomy, chemistry, statistics, and geometry, in addition to his foremost field and prime interest – experimental physics.”

Wow! That sounds pretty polymathic to me. Lichtenberg definitely meets the criteria for polymath status.

But, despite his scientific accomplishments, Lichtenberg is most well known today as an aphorist; his witty maxims can be found in almost any collection of aphorisms and sayings. Here's one:

"The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery."

Tomorrow we'll delve into Lichtenberg's background and intellectual accomplishments.

why biography

I’m back.

I’ve now done a couple short biographies of some real polymaths, but I thought that it might useful to discuss why biographies are so interesting. I like them, and obviously many people do as well because, for millennia, people have found inspiration from hearing poets, story tellers and writers sing, talk, and write about the lives of the great men (and, sometimes, women) of the past.

For example, the British writer Thomas Carlyle, father of the now discredited Great Man theory, wrote in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History that “we cannot look, however imperfectly, upon a great man without gaining something by him.”

Historian and writer Carl Van Doren believed that all humans feel the need to study, know, and commune with the truly great or important men. Biographer H.W. Dickinson wrote that the “study of biography is valuable, as it broadens the mind, quickens the imagination, fires the ambition and strengthens character.” Modern writer Nigel Hamilton has suggested that learning about the past greats can give the listener or reader “insights into human nature.” And  poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote in A Psalm of Life, “Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime.”

I completely agree. I hope that learning about real polymaths who have such fascinating abilities and accomplishments inspires you to follow their example and learn. While not everyone can lay claim to true polymath status, anyone with just a little extra time on his or her hands to pick up a book and learn can at least take a few steps down Polymath Road.

Whether you launch an autodidactical quest in the library, return to school for more formal education, or decide to sit down for some intellectual internet surfing (always remembering that not everything you read on the internet can be trusted), you should follow the motto of good old Faber College of Animal House fame – Knowledge is good.

Isidore of Seville, pt. 5

On Saturday, we were talking about Priscilla Throop’s translation of the Etymologies. One thing that she did was give the actual etymology for each of Isidore’s words when it differed from Isidore’s versions, which ranged from correct to half-right to completely wrong.

For example, Isidore wrote correctly (IX.4.8) that the name for the Roman senate (and thus modern Senate) came from the Latin word for old man because the senators were old men. But he misfired on hortus. He wrote that a garden (hortus) is called that because something always springs up (oriri) there, but Throop noted that the Latin word hortus actually comes from the Indo-European root *gher, meaning “to enclose.” Thus, a garden is an enclosure. So we must remember that Isidore remained a man of his times, and transmitted quite a fair amount of incorrect information.

The Etymologies were very influential. A better encyclopedia did not appear for centuries. For his work on the Etymologies, Isidore has gone down in history as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, medieval encyclopedists. By creating this encyclopedia, Isidore could be said to have been proficient in or at least made significant accomplishments in at least two widely disparate fields or three less disparate fields. For this feat, Isidore of Seville deserves recognition as a polymath.