The Berlin legal philosopher and journalist Christoph Möllers has just received the Tractatus Prize for philosophical essay writing, endowed with 25,000 euros, for his book “Degrees of Freedom”. In an interview for the magazine “Köpfe und Ideen” (Heads and Ideas) of the Berlin Wissenschaftskolleg, he replied to the question of how close, in his opinion, aphoristic-essayistic writing and oral speech actually stand with the words:
“On the one hand it’s true, on the other hand the aphorism is a conversation-stopper. The other person is pounded a bit in the mouth and the expectation is not that she will comment on it – she would only be a spoilsport if she pointed or commented. Aphorisms are something very thetic, sometimes imperative. Imagine a great master: La Rochefoucauld says a sentence that he has probably been working on for a long time, and then the other person would begin to understand it as the beginning of a conversation. That would be a misunderstanding. “