Greenberg as a writer

It’s ironic that Greenberg fell out of fashion so quickly for his supposedly depoliticized formalism, given that his background was so heavily Marxist. I for one think he’s fantastic, filled with insights.

A reader wrote this morning:

“Deleuze was correct in one thing; the best writers are usually the best thinkers and Greenberg is by far, the best writer of the 20th Century in my opinion.”

I also tend to agree, with Nietzsche who said it before Deleuze, that writing and thinking go hand in hand, and I’m skeptical of the idea that it’s possible to hide superficial or half-baked ideas with pretty rhetoric; you have to have a poor ear for rhetoric and style to be convinced in such cases that the style is good. As I’ve complained before, analytic philosophy tends to suffer from the false notion that good writing simply means clear writing, as though unclarity were the main problem with bad writing. A whole essay could be written on why this is wrong, and at some point I’ll get around to doing that.

As for the reader’s comment, I’m not sure I’d go so far as to say that Clement Greenberg is the best writer of the 20th century (there’s a lot of competition for the honor), but he does have a powerful voice. As stated yesterday, he really capitalized on the limitations of his medium –the short review article– to form a highly compressed style that has the feel of deliberate allusion about it.

Brentano’s wonderful essay on the four phases of the history of philosophy talks about how in some ways the history of philosophy is like science (in the sense of Kuhnian “normal science”) in that rigorous methods might be thought to lead to incremental progress, whereas in other ways the history of philosophy is more like the history of art, with rising and declining phases of ripeness and decadence.

In order to measure phases of ripeness and decadence, you can’t use the sorts of “scientific” criteria that could be formalized and plugged into a machine. You need discerning individual judgment, and that judgment can only be judged by educated and matured personalities. When Greenberg fires off phrases such as “the impressionists’ inadvertant silting up of pictorial depth,” he doesn’t have enough space in his reviews to “prove” it or to “unpack” what he means. But you already see that he knows what he’s talking about, and that you couldn’t have put it better yourself, and that that’s why Greenberg deserves your respect. I have the same sense when reading good literary critics.

So, why are philosophers usually such poor philosophy critics? Because we’re in too big a hurry to look for who’s right and wrong. And I don’t much see the point of that, since I don’t see that philosophy is becoming more and more right over time. That’s not an argument for relativism– in fact, it’s an argument for a fairly demanding elitism when assessing the relative weights of important philosophers. But it does mean that philosophy is not a matter of making fewer mistakes than in the past. In fact, making even more mistakes might be the way to go. The best way to avoid mistakes is to be an opportunistic sandbagger who never risks a vivid statement, and no one reads those sorts of authors for long.

Incidentally, there’s a funny story behind how I first encountered Greenberg’s phrase “the impressionists’ inadvertant silting up of pictorial depth.” (And incidentally, that’s his explanation for why Cézanne had to find some immanent manner of suggesting physical depth on the canvas surface without returning to traditional perspective.) Namely, I once had a student who plagiarized that phrase from Greenberg’s essay. It was such an amazing line, and of course I knew that this 18-year-old non-native English speaker hadn’t come up with it, and through searching I discovered that Greenberg was the author.