Maverick Philosopher

Latin or Anglo-Saxon?

Well-written advice on writing well from Brand Blanshard.

A Per Impossibile Counterfactual

It is equally true that if science could get rid of consciousness, it would thereby get rid of itself.

Is it Better to Write in Latin or in Anglo-Saxon?

Brand Blanshard, On Philosophical Style (Indiana University Press, 1967; orig. pub. 1954), pp. 46-48. I have broken Blanshard’s one paragraph into three.

The question has often been canvassed whether it is better to write, in the main, in Latin or Anglo-Saxon. There is no doubt that one’s writing will have a different mood or atmosphere as the one element or the other predominates. A critic has suggested that if you never want to fail in dignity, you should always use the generic word rather than the specific; do not say, "If any man strike thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other"; say, "If any injury is done to thy person, do not indulge in retaliation." There is a clear difference in the tone of these two; but you will note that in converting from the specific to the general, the author has automatically translated into Latin.

Both components in the language are important; we could not do without either. But just because philosophy runs to generality, and has therefore a natural bent for the Latin, the reader is the more surprised and pleased when he finds it written in the homelier idiom. Of course many writers have never thought of asking whether their writing is predominantly Roman or Saxon. It might pay them to do so.

Raleigh thought that "imperfect acquaintance with the Latin element in English is the cause of much diffuse writing and mixed metaphor. If you talk nonsense in Saxon you are found out at once; you have a competent judge in every hearer. But put it into Latin and the nonsense masquerades as profundity of abstract thought." Unfortunately, the mask may deceive even oneself.

Blanshard on Santayana's Prose Style

Brand Blanshard, On Philosophical Style (Indiana University Press, 1967), pp. 49-50. Originally appeared in 1954. Emphasis added.
   
The most distinguished recent example of imaginative prose in  philosophy is certainly George Santayana. Santayana was no man's copy, either in thought or in style. He consistently refused to
adopt the prosaic medium in which most of his colleagues were writing. To read him is to be conducted in urbane and almost courtly fashion about the spacious house he occupies, moving noiselessly always on a richly figured carpet of prose. Is it a satisfying experience as one looks back on it? Yes, undoubtedly, if one has been able to surrender to it uncritically. But that, as it happens, is something the philosophical reader is not very likely to do. Philosophy is, in the main, an attempt to establish     something by argument, and the reader who reads for philosophy will be impatient to know just what thesis is being urged, and what precisely is the evidence for it. To such a reader Santayana seems  to have a divided mind, and his doubleness of intent clogs the intellectual movement. He is, of course, genuinely intent on reaching a philosophic conclusion, but it is as if, on his journey there, he were so much interested also in the flowers that line the wayside that he is perpetually pausing to add one to his buttonhole. The style is not, as philosophic style should be, so transparent a medium that one looks straight through it at the object, forgetting that it is there; it is too much like a window of stained glass which, because of its very richness, diverts attention to itself.

There is no reason why a person should not be a devotee of both truth and beauty; but unless in his writing he is prepared to make one the completely unobtrusive servant of the other, they are sure to get in each other's way. Hence ornament for its own beautiful irrelevant sake must be placed under interdict. Someone has put the matter more compactly: "Style is the feather in the arrow, not the feather in the hat."

It seems to me that far too much Continental philosophy is plagued by the same "divided mind" and "doubleness of intent."

Bryan Magee's Tribute to Brand Blanshard

Brian Magee spent a year at Yale University where he attended a seminar given by Brand Blanshard on empiricist epistemology. In Confessions of a Philosopher, p. 124, Magee remembers Blanshard:

He was reminiscent of Bertrand Russell in his commitment to rational analysis and argument in forms that did not subordinate them to considerations of language. [. . .]

At first his teaching method struck me as a trifle chilly, but then I realized that it was the first philosophy teaching I had encountered that was not sectarian and excommunicative. The interpretations put on everything by Oxford philosophers had been analogous to the interpretations put on current affairs by active members of the Communist Party: partisan, belligerent, propagandist, intolerant, nakedly self-oriented and one-sided. Blanshard was quite different from this. Although he was himself in opposition to the tradition he was discussing he presented it with an admirable fairness in its relationship to other traditions. [. . .]

At Oxford the assumption has always been that the empiricist tradition was philosophy. There had been one occasion when I had raised a question about the existentialist tradition as represented by philosophers like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger, only to have it explained to me that these were "not philosophers." Among other things Blanshard's seminar was for me an object-lesson in academic fairness . . . .

What Blanshard Might Have Said to Derrida

A correspondent reminds me that today is Brand Blanshard's birthday.  Born on 27 August 1892, he died on 19 November 1987.  Here is a line from Blanshard's On Philosophical Style, Indiana University Press, 1967, pp. 52-53:

Persistently obscure writers will usually be found to be defective human beings.

The entire essay is available online here.