What do you call a short text? Nietszche, the famous philosopher, wrote very short "blog posts" in lack of a better words in his books. Is there a word for such short text? A lot of these "blog posts" were 1-2 paragraphs long at the very most. You can read "Thou Spoke Zarathustra" if you want an example.
1 Answer
Especially in his middle period, Nieztsche wrote in a style that we call aphoristic:1
Nietzsche is commonly said to be an aphoristic writer, perhaps the master of the aphorism.
https://scholarship.richmond.edu/philosophy-faculty-publications/108/
Reluctant to construct a philosophical “system,” and sensitive to the importance of style in philosophic writing, Nietzsche composed these works [of his middle period] as a series of several hundred short passages and aphorisms—concise condensations of his assorted insights—whose typical length ranges from a line or two to a page or two.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche-life-works/#MiddPeriWrit1878
Thus Spake Zarathustra is typically considered "later-period" Nietzsche, but it's still aphoristic.
This mode of writing [found in Zarathustra] is often classified as “aphoristic”, and Nietzsche is rightly granted an honored place within the distinguished lineage of that form in German philosophy, which goes back at least to Georg Lichtenberg’s Waste Books. Lichtenberg wrote his fragments for himself rather than the public, but the strategies he developed nevertheless made a serious impact. His aphorisms revealed how the form could be extended from its essentially pedagogical origins (providing compressed, memorable form for some principle or observation) into a sustained, exploratory mode of reasoning with oneself.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/
And this designation was even embraced by Nietzsche explicitly. He writes in *The Genealogy of Morals:
An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not be ‘deciphered’ when it has simply been read; rather, one has then to begin its exegesis, for which is required an art of exegesis…one thing is necessary above all if one is to practice reading as an art in this way, something that has been unlearned most thoroughly nowadays—and therefore it will be some time before my writings are readable.
1:
aphorism
1 : a concise statement of a principle
2 : a terse formulation of a truth or sentiment : adage
// the high-minded aphorism, "Let us value the quality of life, not the quantity"3 : an ingeniously terse style of expression : aphoristic language
// These are dazzling chapters, packed with perfectly chosen anecdotes and pithy with aphorism.— John Keegan