Apothegms are concise insights addressing Nature’s mystery, and my favorite genre of aphorisms. Meaningful apothegms avoid cliché, over-simplification, and speak to life-as-lived, in particular the sovereignty of complexity, the unknown, and uncertainty.
Prosaic apothegms and mystical apothegms are the two subtypes. Apothegms are distinguished from maxim and dicta aphorisms by how uncertainty is accepted as the fundamental feature of our lives. Dicta view life as a series of riddles to be solved, maxims are presented as proven imperatives.
But apothegms suggest that reason takes us only so far,……Nature does not exist to quench our desires, nor that should we understand her, nor necessarily be happy. Our hubris and cravingsare far more problematic than our ignorance.
Western culture (Enlightenment science/technology) tends to view the world as amenable to rationality, investigation, interventions, man-as-dominant,……while Eastern culture (Buddhism/Taoism) tends to view the world as flux, uncertainty, a mystery to be accepted, man-as-one-part. So,…….maxim and dicta aphorisms are popular in the former, and mystical and prosaic apothegms reflect the latter.
Be aware that some Western philosophies blend these poles, e.g., Stoicism/Epicureanism/Skepticism/Pyrrhonism/Value Pluralism),..….and are pleasures to study.
There is a key distinction between mystical and prosaic apothegms that pertains to healthcare that I will discuss in the next Article of the Week.
COVID-19 has made conference attending challenging,……so the attached manuscript by my colleague Mitchell Tsai and his associates, if read carefully, is as good as sitting through several lectures (excellent references too, note #7 and #18 from our visionary former VON colleague Paul Plsek). Great endings are important too, note Dr. Tsai’s first two highlighted sentences in the Conclusions.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32371743/
Joe Kaempf, MD
District VIII Member Extraordinaire
Portland, OR
Volume 12, Number 41