on intellectual correctness

I just saw the following sentence in a story about a train accident outside Mumbai:

“India’s rail network, which crisscrosses the country, has been marred by a poor safety record.”

The typical language nitpicker might find fault with this sentence: after all, doesn’t any rail network, by definition, crisscross a country? etc. etc.

But I find it to be an excellently written sentence for a news story. Just saying “India’s rail network has been marred by a poor safety record” would be factually accurate, but completely bland.

Adding “which crisscrosses the country” may technically be redundant, but it adds intensity and special emphasis, and creates a sense (an accurate one, too) of lively sprawl about the Indian rail network, while dramatically contrasting it with a lingering sense of danger from the poor safety record.

Some people continue to think that “good writing” simply means conveying clear and accurate facts without contradiction and with as much economy as possible. That’s not true. Good writing means bringing things to life rather than merely abandoning them to clarity and economy.

And this is why good writing is perhaps the most important instrument of philosophy. To present something clearly and economically is at best only Step One of the philosopher’s job. We can see things clearly and economically while still seeing them purely externally and superficially. In every topic there is much that escapes exact definition, and you need to be able to hint vividly at it, to give additional texture and depth to your subject matter.

One professor I knew of would always smugly demand “good plain English” of student papers. Fair enough. Good plain English is better than muddled, obscure English. But it’s insufficient. The demand for good plain English assumes that fuzziness and lack of precision are the major problem with most people’s work. I would argue, on the contrary, that an excess of clarity and precision is often the problem, since not everything in the world is clear and precise– or at least not at the outset.

Clarity is merely a useful tool or means to an end. The real goal is lucidity. And lucidity demands that we admit the dark spots on the map when they are there.

I really don’t mean to keep picking on analytic philosophers, because as a group they are superior to the continental tradition in a number of ways (I’m afraid I’m preferring Russell’s Leibniz to Deleuze’s version at the moment). But they also have a stranglehold on prestigious institutions in the Anglophone world, and hence I am not sure why they are sometimes touchy about the critiques of an obscure ex-continentalist in Egypt. But while there is a bottomless supply of clear writing in analytic philosophy, almost none of it is lucid. There are virtually no analytic philosophers one would read simply for the pleasure of reading them. You would read them to refresh your memory about a certain line of argument, not because there is an inherent philosophical pleasure to reading them as one would feel when reading the prose of Nietzsche or Bergson. (Personally, I feel a similar end-in-itself pleasure when reading Latour. Note: much continental writing is simply awful, and I have never claimed otherwise.)

Making mistakes is not your biggest danger as a thinker. Your biggest danger is seeing things merely externally and correctly.

We almost need a new term. By analogy with “politically correct,” I would use the phrase “intellectually correct” to describe the sort of thinking that is concerned only with making accurate pronouncements, with no attention to all that is left out in such pronouncements. Such thinking pays no attention to rhetoric, and by “rhetoric” I do not mean “deviously persuasive ornamental speech at the expense of honesty,” but “skilled attention to the background that is subtly present in any explicit utterance.” Aristotle already saw the great importance of rhetoric in this sense, and realized that it was not mere sophistry, but built into the very structure of language and thought. Aristotle, for Pete’s sake.