The Significance of Style

I've previously linked to David Stove's infamous little stinkbomb, 'What is Wrong With Our Thoughts?'.  After opening with a series of illustrative examples and wisecracks, Stove considers and rejects a number of facile answers to the titular question.  I want to isolate a couple of points he touches on in passing, but is, characteristically, too quick to dismiss:

'Defects of empirical knowledge have less to do with the ways we go wrong in philosophy than defects of character do: such things as the simple inability to shut up; determination to be thought deep; hunger for power; fear, especially the fear of an indifferent universe. These are among the obvious emotional sources of bad philosophy. . . . Still it is, of course, an understanding of bad thoughts that we are after, rather than of bad hearts: of public intellectual effects, rather than of private emotional causes. . . . 

'That philosophers' errors are usually most intimately connected with their abuses of language, I not only do not deny but am most anxious to affirm. Far more often than not, their intellectual crimes and their literary ones are inextricably interwoven. . . . The exposure of philosophers' errors, consequently, is likewise often literary as much as it is intellectual. Hume, in his justly famous paragraph about 'is' and 'ought,' brought a fundamental logical truth to light, by complaining of a certain common literary sleight-of-hand. . . . It cannot be an accident, any more than it is an accident that our mental and our bodily powers are extinguished together at death, that thought and language arrive together, in Hegel, at the highest degree of corruption of which either is capable.'  (ibid.)

I've concatenated these two paragraphs because although Stove seems clearly to think of them as quite separate, it seems obvious to me that they're deeply related: after all, Hegel's dry, boorish and obscure style probably accurately reflects a dry, boorish and obscure character -- just as Schopenhauer's fiery, direct, and cranky style probably accurately reflects a fiery, direct and cranky character.  As the latter says in The Art of Literature:  'Style is the physiognomy of the mind, and a safer index to character than the face.'

The common term between language and character, then, is style, and what's wrong with our thoughts is what's wrong with our style.  This doesn't answer the question, but shifts it to a more tractable domain: we know less about good thinking than about good style, and if the two turn out to be the proverbial obverse and reverse of eachother then we're already halfway to a solution.  The early prototype of Stove's nosology of thought can be found in Fowler's The King's English, which contains not merely diagnoses but remedies for a host of minor illnesses.  If Fowler's moralizing tone seems antiquated to us now, that's to our detriment -- his vehemence about proper use stems from the conviction that stylistic defects are intellectual defects are moral defects.

Which is a good occasion for a little digression.  Elsewhere in the essay, Stove writes (only a little untruthfully): 'Nothing which was ever expressed originally in the English language resembles, except in the most distant way, the thought of Plotinus, or Hegel, or Foucault. I take this to be enormously to the credit of our language.'  Which is incredibly funny if you're familiar with the evolution of English, because it's only since the 18th century that English has even been a serviceable medium for expressing abstract thought in any degree of sophistication.  (If you doubt this, R.F. Jones' The Triumph of the English Language is a book that can prove it to you.)  You might even say that until the 19th century there was something of a wilful hostility toward abstraction in the tradition of English vernacular. 

Earlier along that path, here and there we see a figure like Chaucer or Shakespeare who manages to heroically improve the language by working with the grain of it; but you can equally well see sad spectacles like Francis Bacon or Richard Hooker struggling mightily against English to little avail.  For serious intellectual work, Bacon, like almost everyone else up until the late 17th century, used Latin.  Even into the 20th century, one can find an American with antique sensibilities like C.S. Peirce faintly complaining that ancient Greek is a far superior language for thinking in.

Of course, Stove also might be less of a chauvinist if he spoke German -- I'm a novice at it, but it does have obvious virtues that English lacks, such as much greater freedom to form compound words.  This is a famously mixed blessing, as people have been known to fall into a stupor before reaching the end of a convoluted sentence in technical or bureaucratic German; but I have it on good authority that once you've tasted the Germanic power of compounding you can't help but feel a little hampered thinking in English.  Like most forms of power, this is magnetic to the corruptible: having a less restricted vocabulary means you can much more easily form thoughts that don't make any damned sense, and many do abuse it thus.  It might actually be the saving grace of the English that their language is less expressive. 

I don't know much about the evolution of German, but given that Germanic peoples historically tend to lag behind the rest of Europe by a couple of centuries in most intellectual trends, it's not too surprising if by the 19th century Hegel is still having some problems thinking coherently in an abstract style.  Impossible though it may be to believe when you try to read the Logic, Hegel was quite capable of crafting a sound sentence in German the moment he descended to concrete matters.  He was, as he went along, making up a style to suit his end -- which was, very roughly, to do for Protestantism what Thomas Aquinas had done for Catholicism six centuries prior, but without the advantages of Latin.  Small wonder the product is a bit of a monster.

To get back to the main point, the ways in which English thinking can go wrong are different from those in which German or French or Roman or Greek thinking can go wrong, and so also for individual cases within a common linguistic tradition.  These differences are not merely cosmetic, and study of them should sharpen our appreciation of the merits and demerits of the different styles of thinking they enact -- and, perhaps, reveal some invariant features of good thinking.  But this kind of study isn't merely logical, as Stove points out; it's also aesthetic and ethical, and necessarily historical -- it's a comparative study of styles.  Because thinking is not something that happens merely in the head: our every act is evidence of it. 

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Addendum:

Since dashing this post off, I came across a dissenting opinion, expressed in the context of what makes for bad code:

'The disease is ignorance of the language's features, not poor programming style. Once the features are fully understood, the correct styles are obvious. An auxiliary theme of this book, one that applies to any programming language, is that in programming, style is not something to pursue directly. Style is necessary only where understanding is missing.'  (Doug Hoyte, Let Over Lambda)

I'd say this is a distinction without a difference: bad style and ignorance go together like love and marriage, and the upshot is the same in any case -- strive to understand what the language affords and your expression will improve automatically, but the expression itself is a learning experience and good style is the aesthetic confirmation that you've understood.