What Is A Fragment?

A Brief History of Fragmentation in Philosophy and Literature

Pascal is said to have written in a fragmentary style so as to underscore that total and complete knowledge is God’s, alone. Nietzsche wrote in a fragmentary style to underscore not the transcendence of God’s knowledge, but the perspectivalism of human knowledge—there is no “view from nowhere.” In the romantic period, Hölderlin, Schlegel, and others emulated the ancients by writing fragments as if to highlight the mystery of textual units whose meaning was both networked and standalone—kind of like a block of Whatsapp text.

But the ancients who wrote fragments, Pindar, Sappho, Parmenides, Heraclitus, etc. did not deliberately omit anything. Their fragments are simply the vestiges of survival, the chance and partial remains of that which time couldn’t destroy. In other words, linguistic ruins. Not coincidentally, the modern poets who adapted a fragmentary style mirrored their peers who fetishized broken Greek statues and roofless pillars. Some neo-classicists even sought to build “ruins,” not unlike today’s youth who purchase distressed jeans at a mark-up.

In Kabbalah, all fragments are fragments of God. The soul is a fragment. All objects in the visual field are fragments of some whole. As though the creation of the world were like a text whose letters were scattered to the winds and needed to be reconstructed. The task of the righteous is to collect these fragments and assemble them. We might think of the fragment writer as the collector of soul sparks, or like a volunteer who comes to clean up the streets after an explosion. But even in the best case scenario, a sutured text will have a different feel than one that had never been torn. For the romantics, the goal is not to put the puzzle pieces back together, but to let the brokenness of the puzzle, the uncertainty of what we are even trying to solve, illuminate our conception of the true, the good, and the beautiful. This is what Adorno calls “Negative dialectic.”

Before Adorno, Keats called the artistic way a “negative capability”—a good artist must remain in a state of doubt and suspension, must remain fragmentary.

It has long been the goal of many philosophers to banish the fragment and to find a system— an account of everything—in which everything has its place, from a theory of knowledge to an account of physical motion to the metaphysics of identity to moral philosophy, etc. But existential thinkers like Schelling, Kierkegaard, and Rosenzweig, Heidegger, Levinas, and Arendt understood that systematicity was in tension with freedom. Thus, too much systematic knowledge would smother the lived experience of the individual. The fragment becomes for some existentialist thinkers a way of maintaining individual dignity, a bulwark against intellectual imperialism. Particularists love the fragment, just as they love local culture, and multipolarity, because the fragment can’t be standardized, scaled, subsumed, and anesthetized. The fragments stands alone and apart.

Hegelian thought rejects the dignity of the fragment—a broken view is just a momentary snapshot on the way to a better, more holistic one. The purpose of the fragment is purely instrumental—we have to overcome the fragmentary in favor of a resolution in which the fragment is “sublated” (aufgeheben).

In this brief meditation, we have taken a fragmentary approach to the fragment itself.

The fragment is a relic, a pointer, a monument, a clue, a piece of God, a gesture of humility, an assertion of dignity, a description of modern life, a form of nostalgia, an embarrassment to systematic thought, and a refuge for particularism.

To the extent that you think style should express content, the fragment cannot be ignored. Some might argue it is the only authentic style. Others might say that, properly read, everything—even a well-ordered essay—is a fragment. What has not survived are all the other drafts, real and imaginary. It is against the backdrop of all the possible worlds that are not here that we encounter this one.