From the conjunction "between the ethical and the aesthetic", explains Miguel Catalán in the introduction to the collection of aphorisms about Karl Kraus that the Valencian philosopher (died just three weeks ago) entitled The artist's task (Casimir books), "proceeds importance of the aphorism, that from 1905 will dominate all the writing of Kraus, but that also constitutes the secret form of all his writing ". Catalan, prolific aphorist as well as the author of a monumental work on lies and deception, shared the definition that the Austrian writer made of the genre: "An aphorism", can be read in the anthology Sayings and contradictions (Lowercase) , "must not tell the truth, but overcome it. With just one sentence you have to go beyond it. "
Kraus, who is first and foremost a journalist with an undisputed moral dimension and an extreme demand for the rigor in the use of language (on the perversion of words as the origin of totalitarianism reflected in The third night of Walpurgis ) dedicated most of the pages of La torch , the magazine edited, funded and written entirely by him, to place journalism as the main responsible for the intellectual decline of Europe , the Great War and the rise of national socialism. "We still cannot get an idea of the devastation caused by the press," he writes, alarmed by the abundance of topics and common places that are repeated in the narrative structures of newspaper articles and by the "distortion of reality" that has been done since them to hide it in a premeditated way. Aphorisms such as "the relationship of newspapers with life coincides more or less with that of card casters with metaphysics" reflects the frontal rejection of a cultural industry that provoked, he said, "brain softening."
In the Vienna that saw how the illustrated dreams were diluted in that amalgam of blood and mud from which the trenches were made, it is not strange that some intellectuals considered that only the propaganda could come out of the newspapers. And stupidity. Today, the lament is another. Faced with the inevitable death of newspapers, a future of ignorance and primacy of the visual is predicted. This is sentimental. The cultural consensuses of these days (in cinema, in literature, in philosophy) are already a symptom of a renunciation of intelligence that makes one of those Kraus aphorisms that go beyond the truth: "There are missing trade dependents. All they point to journalism. "
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