The Style of Philosophy

Abstract

Every philosophical belief has its presuppositions; no philosopher can operate without them. Some of mine are these: that the expression of a thought and the thought expressed are distinguishable but inseparable; that one's thought about something and one's feeling about that something are distinguishable but inseparable; that we humans have a nature but that it con sists of psycho-physical dispositions, or capacities, of such vaguely defined sorts and limits that, from a spectator's point of view, I eschew a priori pronouncements about what human beings can or cannot do and await developments, and that, as an agent, I act in the spirit of Sartre's self-creating chooser. In short, and skipping the refinements?failures of philosophical nerve?a person, a human being, a philosopher is what he does. Brillat-Savarin's variation on this theme is well-known?Tell me what you eat: I will tell you what you are?but after a century and a half his aphorism has yet to be exploited by philosophical materialists, or physicalists; nor have the connections between mechanistic theory and the practice of physical fitness been explored to the advantage of both the theory and the practice. The depth of Brillat-Savarin's maxim is revealed if it is broadly interpreted to cover not only foods eaten but the purchasing and the preparation of food and the customs of eating; if, that is, it is read as referring to a certain cluster of universal human activities. Thus his correlative aphorism: Animals feed; man eats: only the man of intellect knows how to eat. His meaning is clear enough: all humans eat, but some humans eat with style. They know how to do it. Others eat, to be sure, but they do not know how. It is the same with other human activities: Tell me what you do and how you do it; I will tell you what you are. And so: Tell me how you do philosophy, how you write, speak, think philosophically; I will tell you what sort of thinker you are. Indeed, I will tell you what sort of person you are. And conversely, for Le style est l'homme m?me?Buffon's famous echo, perhaps, of Pascal: Quand on voit le style naturel, on est tout ?tonn? et ravi, car on s'attendait de voir un auteur, et on trouve un homme (Pens?es, i, 29). Other tries have been made at capturing the essence or, at least, the flavor of literary style?Hume and Schopenhauer compare its simplicity or ornateness to architecture, T. ?. Lawrence urged novelists to study the move ments of a Beethoven sonata, and Professor Von Wright thought of Schubert