Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Philosophy

Literary styles in philosophy

Collingwood and the Journals

During my doctorate, exposure to peer-reviewed journal articles nearly put me off the whole idea of philosophy. Having been philosophically raised on the exciting narrative that began with Descartes shining a ray of clear light through the accumulated fog of Scholastic decadence, I was disheartened to discover a whole industry churning out reams of (largely unread) philosophical literature so dull and lifeless it would shame the most pedantic monk of the darkest age. I was nearly ready to go back to working in alarm system maintenance—just to keep the thrill alive.

What kept me in was, first, the thought that what this literature saw itself doing was not what I took philosophy to be, and so there was no need for me to do what they called philosophy, and, secondly, discovering just in time a coherent articulation of what I think philosophy is.

What they think they are doing is scientific research, for which peer review has become the stamp of authenticity. Peer review came about with a Cold War project designed to maximise the financial return on public investment in scientific research, by imposing a quality-control mechanism. Since the result in the natural and social sciences has been failure and a waste of money, you might wonder why the humanities would want to follow the same path. But the move makes sense if the point is to ape the look and feel of what the earthly powers have declared “scientific”. This also makes sense of what has inevitably resulted: a dark fulguration of jargon and formalisation, of “papers” with “abstracts” presenting the “results” of “research”.

The escape I discovered from this was in R.G. Collingwood’s Essay on Philosophical Method. I didn’t follow every twist and turn of his argument, but I received, like a draft of fresh air in a crowded room, his claim that a philosophical work is an instance neither of scientific nor of historical writing but rather a branch of literature, specifically “a poem of the intellect”—”the point at which prose comes nearest to being poetry”. He writes:

otherwise than the scientist, and far more than the historian, the philosopher must go to school with the poets in order to learn the use of language, and must use it in their way: as a means of exploring one’s own mind, and bringing to light what is obscure and doubtful in it. This, as the poets know, implies skill in metaphor and simile, readiness to find new meanings in old words, ability in case of need to invent new words and phrases which shall be understood as soon as they are heard, and briefly a disposition to improvise and create, to treat language as something not fixed and rigid but infinitely flexible and full of life.

I was happy to go to school with the poets—much happier than I was to receive “scientific” training by consulting the latest “research findings” in the journals. A key difference between Collingwood’s conception of philosophy and the conception implicit in the journals is that, on Collingwood’s view, style and substance are not distinct in philosophy—no more than they are in poetry. A philosophical text records the experience of grappling with a thought, just as a poem records the experience of grappling with a feeling. You could extract the “content” from either philosophy or poetry by writing down a list of the feelings or thoughts being expressed, but in either case you would, in doing so, lose the poetry or the philosophy, which is the crystallisation of a particular experience, not a catalogue of its contents.

Because most people think of philosophy in the journals’ way rather than Collingwood’s way, critics have had much less to say on philosophical style than they have had on poetic style. Only literature professors in dire need of new research projects bother to write about matters of style in scientific publications. There is, however, scope to apply what critics have said about poetry to philosophy.

Pure, Ornate, Grotesque

Take, for instance, Walter Bagehot’s 1864 essay, “Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art in English Poetry”. Bagehot identifies these three styles as ways of expressing a type or character in a poem.

First, pure:

The definition of pure literature is, that it describes the type in its simplicity, we mean, with the exact amount of accessory circumstance which is necessary to bring it before the mind in finished perfection, and no more than that amount.

Bagehot’s examples here are Wordsworth and Milton, for example Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed Upon Westminster Bridge”, which express a single view of London on a clear early morning, and the accompanying feeling of “a calm so deep”, without any unnecessary ornament.

Next, ornate:

The extreme opposite to this pure art is what may be called ornate art. This species of art aims also at giving a delineation of the typical idea in its perfection and its fulness, but it aims at so doing in a manner most different. It wishes to surround the type with the greatest number of circumstances which it will bear. It works not by choice and selection, but by accumulation and aggregation. The idea is not, as in the pure style, presented with the least clothing which it will endure, but with the richest and most involved clothing that it will admit.

An example of this is Tennyson; I can’t do better to explain the point than to quote one of Bagehot’s examples—the description of the tropical island in Enoch Arden:

The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns
And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven,
The slender coco's drooping crown of plumes,
The lightning flash of insect and of bird,
The lustre of the long convolvuluses
That coil'd around the stately stems, and ran
Ev'n to the limit of the land, the glows
And glories of the broad belt of the world, […]

The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl,
The league-long roller thundering on the reef,
The moving whisper of huge trees that branch'd
And blossom'd in the zenith, or the sweep
Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave,

We get the feel of the island, no doubt, but you see what Bagehot means in saying that the idea is presented with “the richest and most involved clothing it will admit”.

Finally there is my favourite, the grotesque style:

Ornate art and pure art have this in common, that they paint the types of literature in as good perfection as they can. […] But grotesque art does just the contrary. It takes the type, so to say, in difficulties. It gives a representation of it in its minimum development, amid the circumstances least favourable to it, just while it is struggling with obstacles, just where it is encumbered with incongruities. It deals, to use the language of science, not with normal types but with abnormal specimens; to use the language of old philosophy, not with what Nature is striving to be, but with what by some lapse she has happened to become.

The example of this is Robert Browning—my favourite of these poets by far, and, it would appear, Bagehot’s least favourite. Bagehot quotes various examples, but here is the description of the rat infestation in The Pied Piper of Hamelin:

Rats!
They fought the dogs, and killed the cats,
    And bit the babies in the cradles,
    And ate the cheeses out of the vats,

      And licked the soup from the cook's own tables,
    Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
    Made nests inside men's Sunday hats,
    And even spoiled the women's chats,
        By drowning their speaking
        With shrieking and squeaking
    In fifty different sharps and flats.

To paint a morning view of Westminster Bridge or a lush tropical island is what we expect of poetry, but only Browning can transport you to the heart of a rat-infested town. In every sense, language seems to strain against its designed purpose: there aren’t fifty different sharps and flats, but how better could you describe the hideous tone cluster of a chorus of rats?

These categories, it seems to me, can be applied to philosophy as well. Descartes is a master of the pure style, presenting his thoughts so unadorned that his early readers had to write to him asking for elaboration (often only to be told to read the text again with a clearer mind). Locke, Kant, and Hegel might all be taken as examples of the ornate style. All three are capable of writing memorable epigrams, but these are always encrusted in a thick layer of categorisations, qualifications, and distinctions. Each thought is presented in every permutation and alongside every other thought that might be related to it—to use Bagehot’s terms, in the richest and most involved clothing that it will admit. As for the grotesque style, we find this in Zhuangzi and Nietzsche—perhaps also in the later Wittgenstein. Here, thought is driven to where it is least comfortable, into the most awkward corners and towards the most abnormal specimens. In the grotesque philosophy, thoughts are presented, as Bagehot says, in difficulties.

Philosophical Grotesquery

Browning is my favourite of the poets (I mean Robert, though Elizabeth isn’t far behind), and so, predictably, the grotesque is also my favourite philosophical style. But in the end it’s misleading to call this merely a style—we have to remember Collingwood’s point that style and substance are unified in philosophy.

In poetry the subject can sometimes be, to some extent, distinguished from the style. A wonderful demonstration of this is given by G.K. Chesterton, who rewrites the ending of Browning’s “Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha” in “a conventional and classical style”. Browning’s lines, describing the organist lost in a musical reverie and surprised by the entry of the sacristan, are:

Hallo, you sacristan, show us a light there!
    Down it dips, gone like a rocket.
What, you want, do you, to come unawares,
Sweeping the church up for first morning-prayers,
And find a poor devil has ended his cares
At the foot of your rotten-runged rat-riddled stairs?
    Do I carry the moon in my pocket?

Chesterton’s “conventional and classical version” is:

What must I deem then that thou dreamest to find
Disjected bones adrift upon the stair
Thou sweepest clean, or that thou deemest that I
Pouch in my wallet the vice regal sun?

All the grotesqueness is gone, but the subject is still roughly the same. But in philosophy, this would not work. To express grotesque philosophy in a pure or ornate style would be to express an entirely different philosophy.

Bagehot’s taxonomy is in fact based on a particular philosophy. This is why he ranks the pure style above the ornate and the ornate above the grotesque—because he understands the world as a hierarchical scale of values. The pure style is appropriate for the “highest” subjects, which deserve to be presented in all their ideal purity. The ornate style is for “lower” subjects, which must be ornamented to avoid boring the reader. The grotesque style renders types in circumstances which, Bagehot hints, perhaps ought not to be presented at all. It gives us not “what Nature is striving to be” but only “what by some lapse she has happened to become”.

Bagehot worked in a very Platonising atmosphere, I think; he writes at one point of “the ideal at which inferior specimens aim, the class-characteristic in which they all share, but which none shows forth fully”. This, I think, is why he sees Browning’s monsters and rats as types in unfavourable circumstances, rather than, say, as ideal types of rats and monsters. It makes me think of the passage in the Parmenides, in which Socrates becomes uncomfortable at the question of whether there are Forms (ἰδέαι) of fire and water and is scandalised by the question of whether there are Forms for mud and dirt. A sharp contrast can be found with Chapter 22 of the Zhuangzi, where Zhuangzi is asked where the “Way” (dao 道) is to be found, answers that it is to be found everywhere, and, when pressed to give “lower” instances, happily declares it to be found in 屎溺 (look them up). A clearer line could hardly be drawn between pure philosophy and grotesque philosophy.

What the example shows is that the grotesque style in philosophy is not a function of the philosopher’s attraction to unworthy types and lapses in Nature—at least not usually. More often it expresses a non-hierarchical philosophy in which there are no unworthy types or lapses in Nature, in which Nature itself is not striving to be anything in particular. The grotesque is not really a style of philosophy; it is a philosophy: to express thoughts in the grotesque manner is to have thoughts of a particular kind—to see the world in a non-hierarchical and non-judgemental way. It is to present thoughts “in difficulties” because the world is “in difficulties”—at least, it is so built as to defy the intellect’s attempts to order and discriminate.

Really I think the same is true of Browning. Attempting to capture his philosophy, Chesterton wrote: “There is nothing that the man loved more, nothing that deserves more emphatically to be called a speciality of Browning, than the utterance of large and noble truths by the lips of mean and grotesque human beings”. This wasn’t just a strange fetish of Browning. It is not that he could have put the same truths into the mouths of large and noble human beings and conveyed the same message. The message is the medium—Mr. Sludge the Medium and all the other frauds, liars, ratbags, and lickspittles through whom God speaks his scattered truth. The truth does not appear only where we would find it most appropriate—only in the types we find high and the speakers we find noble. It comes from everywhere at once. The dao 道 is everywhere, however low you look. So, anyway, says the grotesque philosophy.