“affected casualness”

The phrase of the day comes from Tom at Plastic Bodies, in a post you can read HERE concerning the Gary Gutting article of yesterday.

This is my favorite part:
“…there’s a certain affected casualness that permeates a lot of analytic writing…”
That’s brilliantly put, and he’s exactly right.

I still want to defend Gutting to some extent, even though I come from the opposite camp. I’m already on record when it comes to “clear” writing. There are times when univocal propositional assertions are inappropriate, and times when premature clarity is damaging to the rigorous investigation of a topic.

Everyone knows this when it comes to literature. But somehow, the belief persists that philosophy ought to behave more like the natural sciences, and that since everything in the natural sciences involves making unambiguous statements about which properties something does and does not possess, that philosophy should follow suit. But philosophy is not a form of the natural sciences any more than it is a form of geometry (Whitehead demolishes the idea of philosophy as a deductive science in the opening sections of Process and Reality). Some literary skill *is* an important part of philosophy– not as glittering supplemental ornament, but because literary skill is one of the most basic and important cognitive skills there is. Literary skill is the proper tool for determining the apportionment of light and shadow on any given topic. But many analytic philosophers have a tendency to view any form of shadow as a sort of shifty, dishonest evasiveness. There seems to be a view that unless you can say something absolutely clearly, then you must have nothing at all to say. But this is false. Clarity is a goal, not a starting point. Nothing is ever completely clear to humans– that’s just Socrates 101.

But let’s be fair here. Lots of continental philosophy is indeed horribly written, needlessly obscure and filled with jargon seen only at second hand. Gutting had a legitimate point there, even if it was one-sided.