Reading for Beauty

On Philosophy as a Style

In academic circles, much is made of a so-called divide between “Analytic” and “Continental” Philosophy. But that distinction is a red herring.

There are 2 kinds of philosophers:

Those who write beautifully & literarily (though not always clearly) and everyone else.

It’s Beauty vs. Information.

If you teach philosophical texts for stylistic beauty your list will look different than if you teach for conceptual novelty.

Most of the thinkers who write beautifully also hold that the experience of philosophizing should be a beautiful one.

We don’t know if Aristotle was a beautiful writer, because we only have his lecture notes. But chances are he wasn’t so enticing. He didn’t need to be, as he just wanted precision. And that’s fine. There is a beauty to his clarity of understanding, even if not to his language.

Plato, on the other hand, is utterly gorgeous.

Cicero, Boethius, and Augustine are wonderful prose writers, as is Abelard. The aesthetic experience of reading them is as important as what they say.

Lots of writers are rhetorically inventive and worth the grind: Maimonides, Aquinas, and Descartes. But they aren’t beautiful writers; their words don’t fly.

Kant is mostly a terrible writer. Hegel is uneven, but the disorientation is part of the message. Since History hasn’t come to an end until we finish reading the book, of course our experience of the book, on first read, will be off kilter.

Emerson is a beautiful read, but Stanley Cavell is less so. Rorty is pretty dry stylistically, though a great thinker. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard are obviously beautiful writers, regardless of content.

Husserl and the phenomenologists tend to be dense to the point of unreadability, except for Heidegger, whose later writings are aesthetic events. Heidegger’s poems, however, are terrible.

Walter Benjamin is one of the best stylists of the 20th century, but perhaps sublime to the point of being more of a parable than an argument.

Arendt and Strauss wrote in their non-native languages and were masterful stylists.

Whatever you think of Agamben, many of his essays are works of beauty.

People will have their own lists of who writes beautifully and what beauty means. For example, I don’t enjoy Barthes or Schopenhauer or Derrida for beauty, but some do. Not all rhetoric is beautiful.

Rhetoric, like beauty, pertains to form. Machiavelli writes rhetorically, but not beautifully. Beauty is a rhetorical strategy. But the main goal of rhetoric is persuasion. Beauty’s aim is to stupefy and enliven.

I don’t just read for beauty. But beauty is what keeps me coming back. For as Plato knew, beauty speaks to the soul, and the goal of thought is to help the soul fly again.

Some think beauty is just the honey to help the medicine go down (instrumentalists). This is the standard reading of Lucretius, who wrote a materialist treatise in the form of a poem. Is the poem any good or is it just a conceit by which to get us to read the philosophy?

Some think beauty is some kind of distraction or replacement for a bad argument. Looks deceive, etc. Pure thought should resemble a series of 1s and 0s.

But not all arrangements are made equal. One goal of philosophy is to get us to know more. Another admirable goal is to get us to know more by experiencing more, by having a sublime experience of the mind being opened.

True/False is one axis along which we can judge works of thought.

But Beautiful/Meh is another.

It’s a testament to thinkers like Kant and Husserl, like Duns Scotus, Carnap, and Popper, that they manage to engage and move without being beautiful. Perhaps we should trust them more for their lack of ornament.

You can have good UX with a variety of thinkers, whether or not they are written beautifully. It all depends on expectations. For some, beauty diminishes the UX, because what they want is knowledge, unadorned, not sentiment. We should evaluate texts on the basis of the UX they seek to deliver, not on the basis of the UX we want them to offer. If it turns out that Hegel is difficult for us, but is difficult by his own design, that’s a different story from a thinker who is simply an unskilled communicator.