The precise, explicitly argued, analytic style of exposition with numbered premises and conclusions promotes the meticulous scrutiny of the ideas under discussion. That is why I sometimes write this way. I know it offends some. There are creatures of darkness and murk who seem allergic to any intellectual hygiene. These types are often found on the other side of the Continental Divide.
"How dare you be clear? How dare you ruthlessly exclude all ambiguity thereby making it impossible for me to yammer on and on with no result?"
Ortega y Gasset somewhere wrote that "Clarity is courtesy." But clarity is not only courtesy; it is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of resolving an issue. If it be thought unjustifiably sanguine to speak of resolving philosophical issues, I have a fall-back position: Clarity is necessary for the very formulation of an issue, provided we want to be clear about what we are discussing.
So we should try to be as clear as possible given the constraints we face. (In blogging, one of the constraints is the need to be pithy.) But it doesn't follow that one should avoid, or legislate out of existence, topics or problems that are hard to bring into focus. It would be folly to avoid God, the soul, Mr. Bradley's Absolute, the meaning of life and all the Big Questions just because it is hard to be clear about them. To give up metaphysics for logic on the ground of the former's messiness, makes no sense to me: the good of logic is instrumental, not intrinsic. (See Fred Sommers Abandons Whitehead and Metaphysics for Logic.) We study logic to help us resolve substantive questions. If all you ever do in philosophy is worry about such topics as the logical form of 'Everyone who owns a donkey beats it,' then I say you have not been doing philosophy at all, but something preliminary to it.
We are not here to waste our time on logical bagatelles and scholarly punctilios. We are here to work out our intellectual and spiritual salvation with diligence.
Clarity, then, is a value. But it ceases to be one if it drives us to such extremes as the logical positivist's Verifiability Principle of cognitive significance, or the extreme of a fellow who once said that "If it cannot be said in the language of Principia Mathematica, then it can't be said." My response to that would be: so much the worse for the language of Principia Mathematica.
I have always been an admirer of your philosophical writing style–both in your published works and on your blog. Have you ever blogged about which writers and books have most influenced your philosophical writing style?
Yes, I have some posts on or near this topic. What follows is one from 21 September 2009, slightly revised.
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From the mail bag:
I've recently discovered your weblog and have enjoyed combing through its archives these past several days. Your writing is remarkably lucid and straightforward — quite a rarity both in philosophy and on the web these days. I was wondering if perhaps you had any advice to share for a young person, such as myself, on the subject of writing well.
To write well, read well. Read good books, which are often, but not always, old books. If you carefully read, say, William James' Varieties of Religious Experience, you will learn something of the expository potential of the English language from a master of thought and expression. If time is short, study one of his popular essays such as "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life." Here is a characteristic paragraph:
But this world of ours is made on an entirely different pattern, and the casuistic question here is most tragically practical. The actually possible in this world is vastly narrower than all that is demanded; and there is always a pinch between the ideal and the actual which can only be got through by leaving part of the ideal behind. There is hardly a good which we can imagine except as competing for the possession of the same bit of space and time with some other imagined good. Every end of desire that presents itself appears exclusive of some other end of desire. Shall a man drink and smoke, or keep his nerves in condition? — he cannot do both. Shall he follow his fancy for Amelia, or for Henrietta? — both cannot be the choice of his heart. Shall he have the dear old Republican party, or a spirit of unsophistication in public affairs? — he cannot have both, etc. So that the ethical philosopher's demand for the right scale of subordination in ideals is the fruit of an altogether practical need. Some part of the ideal must be butchered, and he needs to know which part. It is a tragic situation, and no mere speculative conundrum, with which he has to deal. (The Will to Believe, Dover 1956, pp. 202-203, emphases in original)
One who can appreciate that this is good writing is well on the way to becoming a good writer. The idea is not so much to imitate as to absorb and store away large swaths of such excellent writing. It is bound to have its effect. Immersion in specimens of good writing is perhaps the only way to learn what good style is. It cannot be reduced to rules and maxims. And even if it could, there would remain the problem of the application of the rules. The application of rules requires good judgment, and one can easily appreciate that there cannot be rules of good judgment. This for the reason that the application of said rules would presuppose the very thing — good judgment — that cannot be reduced to rules. Requiring as it does good judgment, good writing cannot be taught, which is why teaching composition is even worse in point of frustration than teaching philosophy. Trying to get a student to appreciate why a certain formulation is awkward is like trying to get a nerd to understand why pocket-protectors are sartorially substandard.
But what makes James' writing good? It has a property I call muscular elegance. The elegance has to do in good measure with the cadence, which rests in part on punctuation and sentence structure. Note the use of the semi-colon and the dash. These punctuation marks are falling into disuse, but I say we should dig in our heels and resist this decadence especially since it is perpetrated by many of the very same politically correct ignoramuses who are mangling the language in other ways I won't bother to list. There is no necessity that linguistic degeneration continue. We make the culture what it is, and we get the culture or unculture we deserve.
As for the muscularity of James' muscular elegance, it comes though in his vivid examples and his use of words like 'pinch' and 'butchered.' His is a magisterial weaving of the abstract and the concrete, the universal and the particular. Bare of flab, this is writing with pith and punch. And James is no slouch on content, either.
C. S. Lewis somewhere says something to the effect that reading one's prose out loud is a way to improve it. I would add to this Nietzsche's observation that
Good prose is written only face to face with poetry. For it is an uninterrupted, well-mannered war with poetry . . . (Gay Science, Book II, Section 92, tr. Kaufmann)
A well-mannered war, a loving polemic. There is a poetic quality to the James passage quoted above, but the lovely goddess of poetry is given to understand that truth trumps beauty and that she is but a handmaiden to the ultimate dominatrix, Philosophia. Or to coin a Latin phrase, ars ancilla philosophiae.
Finally, a corollary to the point that one must read good books to become a good writer: watch your consumption of media dreck. Avoid bad writing, and when you cannot, imbibe it critically.
When I was eight years old or so and first took note of the phrase 'Merry Xmas,' my piety was offended by what I took to be the removal of 'Christ' from 'Christmas' only to be replaced by the universally recognized symbol for an unknown quantity, 'X.' But it wasn't long before I realized that the 'X' was merely a font-challenged typesetter's attempt at rendering the Greek Chi, an ancient abbreviation for 'Christ.' There is therefore nothing at all offensive in the expression 'Xmas.' Year after year, however, certain ignorant Christians who are old enough to know better make the mistake that I made when I was eight and corrected when I was ten.
It just now occurs to me that 'Xmas' may be susceptible of a quasi-Tillichian reading. Paul Tillich is famous for his benighted definition of 'God' as 'whatever is one's ultimate concern.' Well, take the 'X' in 'Xmas' as a variable the values of which are whatever one wants to celebrate at this time of year. So for some, 'Xmas' will amount to Solsticemas, for burglars Swagmas, for materialists Lootmas, for gluttons Foodmas, for inebriates Hoochmas, and for ACLU extremists Antichristianitymas.
A reader suggests some further constructions:
For those who love the capitol of the Czech Republic: Pragmas. For Dutch Reformed theologians of Frisian extraction who think Christmas is silly: Hoekemas. For Dutch Reformed philosophy professors of Frisian extraction who like preserves on their toast: Jellemas. For fans of older British sci-fi flicks: Quatermas. For those who buy every special seasonal periodical they can get their hands on: Magmas. One could probably multiply such examples ad nauseum, so I won't.
How could an ACLU bonehead object to 'Xmas' so construed? No doubt he would find a way.
A while back I quipped that "Aporeticians qua aporeticians do not celebrate Christmas. They celebrate Enigmas." My man Hodges shot back: "But they do celebrate 'X-mas'! (Or maybe they 'cerebrate' it?)"
"Here is Rhodes, jump here" (through the hoops of political correctness). A graduate of Oriel College, Oxford University, sent me this statement concerning the Rhodes Must Fall petition. A memorial to Cecil Rhodes, that is. Can you say Der Untergang des Abendlandes?
"Here is Rhodes, jump here." From Aesop's Fables #209, "The Boastful Athlete." A man who had been off in foreign lands returns home. He brags of his exploits. He claims that in Rhodes he made a long jump the likes of which had never been seen before. A skeptical bystander calls him on his boast: Here's your Rhodes, jump here!
The moral? Put your money where your mouth is. Don't talk about it, do it!
Perhaps an erudite classicist such as Mike Gilleland could say more on this topic. He would have to do at least the following: dig up all the ancient sources in Greek and Latin; trace the saying in Erasmus and Goethe; comment on Hegel's variation on the saying in the Vorrede zur Philosophie des Rechts, explaining why he has saltus for salta; find and comment on Marx's comment on Hegel's employment of the saying.
Finally, if Alan Rhoda were to rename his cleverly titled, but now defunct, weblog Alanyzer — and I'm not saying he should — he might consider Hic Rhoda, Hic Salta. He is a very tall man; I'm 6' 1'' and had to look up to see his face when I met him in Las Vegas some years back. To jump over him would be quite a feat.
UPDATE 12/19: Dave Lull, argonaut nonpareil of cyberspace and friend and facilitator of bloggers, informs me that Dr. Gilleland has taken note of my call for an erudite classicist. This bibliomaniac, antediluvian, and curmudgeon does not, however, consider himself "truly erudite." If his self-deprecatory consideration is just, then he had me fooled.
Only politically correct topics may be discussed. So Eric Holder called for a 'conversation' on race as if we had never talked about this before. But I don't recall him calling for a 'conversation' on immigration.
The other constraint is that 'conversation' must consist in an acquiescence by the conservative in the leftist's nonsense. No dialog allowed.
So whatever you say about Donald Trump, we ought to give him this much: he began a real conversation (no sneer quotes) about immigration. And the RINOs are going to be dragged into it.
You don't like Trump's crudity, bombast, and exaggeration? Me neither. He is undoubtedly lacking in the gravitas department. But on immigration he is basically on the Right track. For proposals more temperate and nuanced we may turn to thinkers such as Daniel Pipes. See here.
Let the conversation (no sneer quotes) begin. Let's see how serious you leftists are about real conversation.
A measured statement from the Christian evangelical camp by Mark Tooley. Excerpt:
At the very least, Christian immigration advocates should urge U.S. immigration policies that strongly prohibit persons who reject American democratic principles. Over one hundred years ago immigration policies screened against anarchist sympathies, which murderously raged in Europe. Later U.S. policies screened against Bolshevism. Of course, the U.S. screened against Nazi and Fascist sympathizers. So too it should protect against adherents of Islamist theocratic political supremacy.
This should strike one as supremely self-evident unless one is a hate-America leftist as are too many people in high places. I don't need to name names.
(That's a curious expression, isn't it? If I write or say a name, I haven't named it. I have named the bearer of the name. For example, if I write 'Obama,' I haven't named that name; to name that name I would have to write something like, " 'Obama'. ")
Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1979), p. 227 in a letter to Maryat Lee dated 28 June 1957:
I doubtless hate pious language worse than you because I believe the realities it hides.
To the unbeliever, pious language is just so much cant and hypocrisy and offensive for these reasons. At funerals for worldly persons one sometimes hears pious claptrap about the dearly departed going off to be with the Lord. This may prove sickening to the unbeliever. Here is someone who spent his whole life on the make. And now you portray him as eager to meet his Maker? Or a nominal Catholic who never prayed the rosary in his life is set in an open casket with a rosary interlaced between his fingers. Disgusting!
The conventional lukewarm believer, for whom there is a tendency to conflate formulas and usages with the underlying realities, will not be offended. He does not take religion all that seriously in any case. It is a matter of habit and acculturation and respectability together with a vague sense that it might be a good idea to attend services as a sort of insurance lest any of the stuff about heaven and hell turn out to be true.
And then there is the person of genuine faith, for whom faith is not a convenience or a crutch or cheap consolation or an insurance policy or a mere matter of habit or acculturation or respectability. Such a person aims to penetrate through the formulas and usages to the transcendent realities and is offended by conventional piety for the right reason.
Everybody profiles. Liberals are no exception. Liberals reveal their prejudices by where they live, shop, send their kids to school, and with whom they associate.
The word 'prejudice' needs analysis. It could refer to blind prejudice: unreasoning, reflexive (as opposed to reflective) aversion to what is other just because it is other, or an unreasoning pro-attitude toward the familiar just because it is familiar. We should all condemn blind prejudice. It is execrable to hate a person just because he is of a different color, for example. No doubt, but how many people do that? How many people who are averse to blacks are averse because of their skin color as opposed to their behavior patterns? Racial prejudice is not, in the main, prejudice based on skin color, but on behavior.
'Prejudice' could also mean 'prejudgment.' Although blind prejudice is bad, prejudgment is generally good. We cannot begin our cognitive lives anew at every instant. We rely upon the 'sedimentation' of past experience. Changing the metaphor, we can think of prejudgments as distillations from experience. The first time I 'serve' my cats whisky they are curious. After that, they cannot be tempted to come near a shot glass of Jim Beam. They distill from their unpleasant olfactory experiences a well-grounded prejudice against the products of the distillery.
My prejudgments about rattlesnakes are in place and have been for a long time. I don't need to learn about them afresh at each new encounter with one. I do not treat each new one encountered as a 'unique individual,' whatever that might mean. Prejudgments are not blind, but experience-based, and they are mostly true. The adult mind is not a tabula rasa. What experience has written, she retains, and that's all to the good.
So there is good prejudice and there is bad prejudice. The teenager thinks his father prejudiced in the bad sense when he warns the son not to go into certain parts of town after dark. Later the son learns that the old man was not such a bigot after all: the father's prejudice was not blind but had a fundamentum in re. The old man was justified in his prejudgment.
But if you stay away from certain parts of town are you not 'discriminating' against them? Well of course, but not all discrimination is bad. Everybody discriminates. Liberals are especially discriminating. The typical Scottsdale liberal would not be caught dead supping in some of the Apache Junction dives I have been found in. Liberals discriminate in all sorts of ways. That's why Scottsdale is Scottsdale and not Apache Junction.
Is the refusal to recognize same-sex 'marriage' as marriage discriminatory? Of course! But not all discrimination is bad. Indeed, some is morally obligatory. We discriminate against felons when we disallow their possession of firearms. Will you argue against that on the ground that it is discriminatory? If not, then you cannot cogently argue against the refusal to recognize same-sex 'marriage' on the ground that it is discriminatory. You need a better argument. And what would that be?
'Profiling,' like 'prejudice' and 'discrimination,' has come to acquire a wholly negative connotation. Unjustly. What's wrong with profiling? We all do it, and we are justified in doing it. Consider criminal profiling.
It is obvious that only certain kinds of people commit certain kinds of crimes. Suppose a rape has occurred at the corner of Fifth and Vermouth. Two males are moving away from the crime scene. One, the slower moving of the two, is a Jewish gentleman, 80 years of age, with a chess set under one arm and a copy of Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed under the other. The other fellow, a vigorous twenty-year-old, is running from the scene.
Who is more likely to have committed the rape? If you can't answer this question, then you lack common sense. But just to spell it out for you liberals: octogenarians are not known for their sexual prowess: the geezer is lucky if he can get it up for a two-minute romp with a very cooperative partner. Add chess playing and an interest in Maimonides and you have one harmless dude.
Or let's say you are walking down a street in Mesa, Arizona. On one side of the street you spy some fresh-faced Mormon youths, dressed in their 1950s attire, looking like little Romneys, exiting a Bible studies class. On the other side of the street, Hells (no apostrophe!) Angels are coming out of their club house. Which side of the street would you feel safer on? On which side will your concealed semi-auto .45 be more likely to see some use?
The problem is not so much that liberals are stupid, as that they have allowed themselves to be stupefied by that cognitive aberration known as political correctness.
Their brains are addled by the equality fetish: everybody is equal, they think, in every way. So the vigorous 20-year-old is not more likely than the old man to have committed the rape. The Mormon and the Hells Angel are equally law-abiding. And the twenty-something Egyptian Muslim is no more likely to be a terrorist than the Mormon matron from Salt Lake City.
Clearly, what we need are more profiling, more prejudgment, and more discrimination (in the good sense). And fewer liberals.
A note on the above image. Suppose all you know about the two individuals is what you see. The point is that the likelihood of the old white lady's being a terrorist is much, much less than the likelihood of the man's being a terrorist. This is what justifies profiling and why it is insane to subject both individuals to the same level of scrutiny. For that would be to assume something obviously false, namely, that both individuals are equally likely to be terrorists.
Again we face the question why liberals are so preternaturally stupid. And again, the answer is that they have enstupidated themselves with their political correctness and their fetishization of equality.
To soften, to render effeminate. "Emolliated by four centuries of Roman domination, the Belgic colonies had forgotten their pristine valor." (Pinkerton) Entry from Webster's, 1913.
To understand the Left you must understand that central to their worldview is the hermeneutics of suspicion which is essentially a diluted amalgam of themes from Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.
Thus nothing has the plain meaning that it has; every meaning must be deconstructed so as to lay bare its 'real meaning.'
Suppose I say, sincerely, "The most qualified person should get the job." To a leftist that means: "People of color are given extra unfair benefits because of their race."
Or suppose I describe a black malefactor as a thug. What I have actually said, according to the hermeneutics of suspicion, is that the malefactor is a nigger. But 'thug' does not mean 'nigger.' 'Thug' means thug. There are thugs of all races.
Leftists often call for 'conversations' about this or that. Thus Eric Holder famously called for a 'conversation' about race. But how can one have a conversation — no sneer quotes — about anything with people who refuse to take what one sincerely says at face value?
The Republicans have been accused of 'politicizing' the debt crisis. But how can you politicize what is inherently political? The debt in question is the debt of the federal government. Since a government is a political entity, questions concerning federal debts are political questions. As inherently political, such questions cannot be politicized.
If to reify is illicitly to treat as a thing that which is not a thing, then to politicize is illicitly to treat as political what is not political. Since governmental debt questions are 'already' political, they cannot be politicized.
Some commentators are now claiming that the Paris attacks are being 'politicized.' But again, how can something that is inherently political be 'politicized'? An attack by a terrorist entity upon a Western democracy is clearly a political event.
Someone might respond to me as follows. "I see your point, but when people say that an event is being politicized, what they mean is that it is being exploited for partisan advantage. Thus those opposed to Muslim immigration will 'use' the Paris attacks to support their case against such immigration."
I agree that this is what most people mean by 'politicization.' But then what is wrong with it? Nothing as far as I can see.
We must learn the lessons from these terrible events. One lesson of Paris, or rather a confirmation of a lesson that already should have been learned, is that radical Islam (militant Islam, Islamism, pick your term) is a grave threat to civilization. French civilization, and European civilization generally, borders on the decadent; but it is still to be preferred to the fanaticism, tribalism, and backwardness of the Islamic world. That is what we call an understatement.
So I say we need more 'politicization' in the second sense of the term. We need more 'exploitation' of such horrific crimes.
And there is a bridge from Paris to Mizzou.
In a characteristically piss-poor OpEd piece in the NYT entitled Exploiting Paris, Frank Bruni whines, "Using Paris to delegitimize them is puerile." He is referring to the 'safe space' girly-girls and crybullies.
This shows how willfully stupid he and his colleagues are. (Not all of them, of course: Douthat and Brooks are worth reading.) They fail to grasp the connection between the assault on free speech by the Islamists and that by the crybullies and pampered fascists of our elite universities. And they will never own up to the obvious fact that the Left serves to enable radical Islam.
Both are incredibly destructive forces that attack the foundations of genuine civilization. Observe also that the Left is not only destructive, but insanely self-destructive: they think they will use the Islamists for their ends; but they will be the first of the infidels to be slaughtered.
Leftists are consummate linguistic hijackers. I've been making this point since the inception of this weblog back in aught-four. I won't repeat my examples. It just now occurred to me that a useful tactic in the culture war might be the reverse hijacking of liberal-leftist lingo.
I have done this three times in the last few days without conscious subsumption under the italicized rubric.
Thus 'Black Lives Matter' gets twisted into 'Black Lies Matter' to highlight the fact that the distortions, falsehoods, and outright lies of many blacks and their liberal-left enablers get people killed, mostly blacks, and undermine the rule of law.
'Safe space' and 'trigger warning' are easily mocked as I did a few hours ago.
All's fair in love and war, and this is a war, muchachos. Make no mistake about it. The behavior of leftists shows that they see it as a war, as witness their relentless smearing of Dr. Ben Carson. They practice without scruple the politics of personal destruction. They did it to Sarah Palin in an especially vile manner, and to Herman Cain. If they see politics as a war, we can't see it as a gentlemanly debate. Mockery and derision are potent weapons as Saul Alinsky recognized and they must be employed to attack the enemies of the republic and to energize those who, for whatever reason, are impermeable to calm and learned disquisitions.
But you must also have rigorous arguments and calm disquisitions at the ready for those who are capable of processing them.
'Moralizing' is what liberals call moral discourse, just as 'judgmentalism' is what they call the making of moral judgments. 'Hypocrite' is what they call those who preach high standards.
Am I being fair? Fair enough. You are free to nuance the point to your satisfaction so long as you don't miss the truth behind my jabs.
Remove the question mark from the above caption and you have the title for a New York Timeseditorial for 16 October. Here are the first three paragraphs with my comments interspersed:
Lawmakers in Washington and around the country are in an uproar over what they derisively call “sanctuary cities.” These are jurisdictions that limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, or try in other ways to protect unauthorized immigrants from unjust deportation.
"Derisively call"? Here is a well-known leftist tactic. Words and phrases that have long been in use, have clear meanings, are descriptive rather than emotive, and are therefore innocuous, are given such labels as 'derisive,' 'insulting,' demeaning,' 'racist,' and so on. 'Anchor baby,' 'illegal alien,' and 'Obamacare' are three examples that come immediately to mind. As for 'anchor baby,' Alan Colmes recently opined on The O'Reilly Factor that it is demeaning because it likens the babies of illegal border crossers to weights that place a burden on American society. I kid you not. That's what our boy said. But the term implies no such thing. Anchor babies are so-called because, if you will permit me to change the metaphor, they provide a foothold in the U.S. for their illegal alien parents. This is because, on current law, anyone born within the boundaries of the U. S. is automatically a citizen of the U. S. Now whether this is or ought to be an entailment of Section 1 of Amendment XIV of the U.S. Constitution is an important question, but not one for the present occasion.
Notice in the second sentence of the first paragraph the phrase "unjust deportation." If you will excuse the expression in this context, it takes cojones to call unjust the lawful deportation of illegal aliens. Cojones or chutzpah, one.
The Senate is voting Tuesday on a bill from David Vitter of Louisiana to punish these cities by denying them federal law-enforcement funds. The House passed its version [hyperlink suppressed] in July. North Carolina’s Legislature has passed a bill forbidding sanctuary policies. Lawmakers in Michigan and Texas are seeking similar laws.
This a distortion of Vitter's proposal. The truth: "Vitter’s legislation would withhold certain federal funding from sanctuary states or cities that fail to comply with Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued detainer requests for illegal aliens." (Emphasis added)
These laws are a false fix for a concocted problem. They are based on the lie, now infecting the Republican presidential campaign, that all unauthorized immigrants are dangerous criminals who must be subdued by extraordinary means.
It takes unmitigated gall to claim that your opponents are lying, when you are lying. I'd like to know who among Republicans has claimed that ALL illegal aliens are dangerous criminals. So who is slandering whom here?
At this point I stopped reading. Three paragraphs, four howlers: first a trade-mark leftist act of linguistic obfuscation, then an outright lie, then a distortion of the truth, then another outright lie.
But of course few if any contemporary liberals will agree with what I have just written. This leads us beyond this particular issue to a strange, ominous, and yet fascinating development in American life which of course has been long in the making: we can't agree on much of anything any more. We are, unbelievably, arguing over what really are beneath discussion, over issues that ought to be non-issues. And every year it gets worse. Suing gun manufacturers? Aussie-style gun confiscation? No photo ID at polling places? Sanctuary cities? Social Security benefits for illegal aliens?
Now you can perhaps understand why I often refer to contemporary liberals as morally and intellectually obtuse. There is really nothing reasonably to debate on these and many other, not all, current hot topics. Those who think otherwise and are willing to use the power of the State to enforce their crazy and deleterious ideas are making a very strong argument, nolens volens, for Second Amendment rights.
