Cultivating Philosophical Style

As a student in an analytic philosophy department in the ’70s and ’80s, I scarcely heard a word about the importance of style. I might occasionally hear that W.V. Quine’s essays were eloquently composed but that grace in his writing was shrugged off as window dressing.

There were professors who complained that a sentence was unclear or the footnotes were done improperly, but that was the extent of their style critiques. They shared the guild conviction that beyond achieving a certain level of clarity, the “how” was of no moment, only the “what.” But the how and the what, the form and the content, are intertwined.

The grand master stylist Nietzsche wrote, “Style ought to prove that one believes in an idea, not only that one thinks it but feels it.” Yes, feels it. Metaphorically speaking  (and when it comes to the inner life, metaphors are all we have), every idea is attached to a feeling and the style of our writing unveils our reasons of the heart, our personal appropriation of the ideas we are tapping out on our word processors.

In his immortal Concept of Anxiety, Søren Kierkegaard, writing under the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis, insists that for every subject matter there is a proper mood:

That science, just as much as poetry and art, presupposes a mood in the creator as well as in the observer, and that an error in modulation is just as disturbing as an error in the development of thought, have been entirely forgotten in our times, when inwardness has been completely forgotten, and also the category of appropriation…

The error in modulation alluded to here is clearly an error in mood. On Kierkegaard’s reckoning, an individual who writes about ethics in the frame of mind of someone trying to solve a mathematical equation misunderstands ethics. For Kierkegaard, the mood appropriate to ethical  reflection is an earnest resolve to lead a righteous life. Like Kant, Kierkegaard believed that a knowledge of right and wrong is universally distributed. He was sometimes guilty of underestimating moral complexity; however, he rightly insisted that in adopting an objective attitude to ethics one mistakenly places oneself outside an ongoing question at the core of one’s being.

For those who believe life is an argument and are inclined to curl their lips at the importance of mood, consider how much less powerful Plato’s Euthyphro would be without the irony.

But style in philosophy is more than just a matter of mood. In 1982, Stephen Toulmin published the prescient, “How Medicine Saved the Life of Ethics.” From that time forward, philosophers have assumed the role of experts on the ethics of just about everything—business, engineering, the environment—and presented themselves to the public as consultants on right and wrong.

Nevertheless, if members of the philosophy guild aspire to become public intellectuals,  style must become part of the philosophical curriculum.  We need teachers who will help students develop an ear for what is ponderous and what quickens the heart. We need maestros to encourage students to take Nietzsche at his word: “Style should be suited to the specific person with whom you wish to communicate. (The law of mutual relation.)”

For my part, I begin with the elementary lesson of pruning prose for clichés. After all, clichés are bloodless words, the kind of automatic phrases your email suggests in response to messages. Permit me, then, to call out a few hackneyed terms, beginning with “lens.”

Today it is all too common for a philosophy student to write that he or she will be looking at whatever through the lens of whomever—e.g., in this essay I will be considering Foucault’s Madness and Civilization through a Nietzschean lens. Enough with lenses already! And while we are at it, let’s muffle “echo,” a term echoing through many current philosophical articles, as in, Kierkegaard “echoes” Kant’s understanding of morality.

While the term “embrace” must at one point have possessed a tincture of the lyrical, it too has been bled pale from overuse. The same holds for the not so robust, “robust.”

And yet, the atrophied term that irks me the most is “moves.” Philosophers are always prattling about “moves” as though they were playing a game of chess or preparing a case for court. This tired trope is usually combined with worries to the effect, “If I make such and such a move, so and so will counter with such and such.”

Schopenhauer, who indirectly helped Nietzsche develop an ear and his voice, wrote, “The first rule for good style is to have something to say; in fact, this in itself is almost enough.” Perhaps the “move” metaphor is inspired from the calculating spirit of the grad student who carefully pushes her argumentative pawns: She’s just working the edges of some scholarly problem.

The curmudgeon in me recognizes that someone trying to break into the majors of a tenure track job needs to rack up publications but they shouldn’t get mired in the mentality of thinking of philosophy as a series of moves and counter-moves.

Nietzsche, who once likened the truth to a “mobile army of metaphors,” instructs, “The more abstract a truth which one wishes to teach, the more one must first entice the senses.” Some may read enticing the senses as a form of manipulation, but it is instead an attempt to enrapture the reader’s attention. Philosophy and poetry have a long history of sneering at one another, yet a philosopher who aspires to animate his or her theory would do well to invoke the Muse and dispense with clichés.

Gordon Marino

Gordon Marino is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College. His The Existentialist's Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age will be published by HarperOne in April.