well-argued = well-written

Here’s a point that I’ve made a number of different times in different ways, but it struck me again very powerfully today while doing manuscript revisions.

There is still a widespread belief that on one side there is rigorous logical argument, and on the other there is good writing, which is treated in many quarters as pretty but inessential– as nothing but perfume and ornament.

This is not my experience when revising any piece of writing. You don’t really understand something until you can write it well. What I often find with “good arguments” that are poorly written is that they are not well-argued at all. They generally look well-argued because they are embezzling half of their argument from reigning prejudices of the day. They pound fists on tables at all the key moments or set up wildly false choices.

If you really understand a topic, you won’t need to shoehorn it into prefabricated oppositions or reduce it to the trench war of the moment. You will know how to turn it in your hands and see it from all possible angles, and you will also have a sense for those aspects of your subject matter that are destined to remain somewhat obscure and accessible mostly to allusion. Good writing does not just mean “clear” writing, just as a good translation doesn’t mean one that avoids mistranslating any words.

Everything we know has a foreground but also a background. Rhetoric is the science of the background, and hence to dismiss good writing as rhetoric is to commit the philosophical error of thinking that a thing is reducible to a blandly accurate list of its traits. Somewhere, once (I don’t remember where) I wrote this: “As a general rule, both things and people that fail to transcend their resumés are best avoided.” And I still believe that.

Though I generally agree with Levi’s thesis on the role of jouissance in philosophy I wouldn’t say that my liking for Gibbon needs to be explained in quite that way. There is a cognitive value in Gibbon’s metaphors, just as there is a cognitive value in emotion. The sort of philosophy that always wants to denounce one side of any opposition (reason vs. emotion, science vs. poetry, etc.) always strikes me as the sort of philosophy that in such a rush to defeat other people that it’s willing to grossly distort reality in the process.