On Philosophical Style Quotes

“Style is the ultimate morality of mind." ... [It has] a double aim of complete fidelity to fact and to one's complex sense of fact. ... We are shooting at a star when we aim at style in this sense; we are trying to do justice at once to an infinity without and a near infinity within.”
― Brand Blanshard, On Philosophical Style

“Rhythm is one of the subtlest of all instruments in the delicate work of conveying thought. But there is one general rule that is at once so simple and so near the heart of the whole matter, that I must at least mention it. This rule is to make the emphasez of sense and rhythm coincide. Plain men know by a sort of instinct where to hit hard ; they never say, " There is in my mind a desire which would be gratified if you were to transfer the hammer into my possession " ; they say, " Give me the hammer." This is true style. Someone has said, " All peasants have style," and philosophers cannot afford to get wholly out of touch with the fine economy of natural talk.”
― Brand Blanshard, On Philosophical Style

“Most men's minds are so constituted that they have to think by means of examples ; if you do not supply these, they will supply them for themselves, and if you leave it wholly to them, they will do it badly. On the other hand, if you start from familiar things, they are very quick to make the necessary generalizations. In a sense they are making such generalizations constantly; whenever they recognize the thing before them as a chair or a lamp-post, they are leaping from the particular to the general by a process of implicit classification.”
― Brand Blanshard, On Philosophical Style

“What the philosopher must manage to embody in words is not the whole of him, nor the impulsive and imaginative part of him, but his intellectual part, his ideas and their connections. And his prime object must be to convey these to his readers at the cost of a minimum of effort on their part. He must get them to follow a process of distinguishing, abstracting, and inferringin short, of thinking. That implies thinking on their part as well as his ; and thinkmg is hard work. Now the way to save work for the reader is simply to write clearly. How easy it is to say that ! " Simply to write clearly "- as if that were not one of the hardest things in the world ! It is hard even to say what clearness means, let alone exemplify it in speech and writing.”
― Brand Blanshard, On Philosophical Style

“I must confess that often, when I have tried to read the most popularly effective of German philosophical writers, Nietzsche, I have felt like throwing the book across the room. He is a boiling pot of enthusiasms and animosities, which he pours out volubly, skilfully, and eloquently. If he were content to label these outpourings " Prejudices," as Mr. Mencken so truly and candidly labels his own, one could accept them in the spirit in which they were offered ; there is no more interesting reading than the aired prejudices of a brilliant writer. But he obviously takes them for something more and something better ; he gakes them as philosophy instead of what they largely are, pseudo-Isaian prophesying, incoherent and unreasoned Sibylline oracles.”
― Brand Blanshard, On Philosophical Style

“Phllosophizing proper is a purely intellectual enterprise. Its business is to analyse fundamental concepts, such as self, matter, mind, good, truth ; to examine fundamental assumptions, such as that all events have causes ; and to fit the conclusions together into a coherent view of nature and man's place in it. Now this is an austerely intellectual business. To be sure, philosophy must take account of values, and in the appropriate fields it has much to say of beauty and deformity, of good and evil, and of the issues of religious belief. But it is pledged to discuss these issues with scientific detachment and dispassionateness.”
― Brand Blanshard, On Philosophical Style