Hyper Critical Styles

For those of you who don't know AN Whitehead, he was a friend of Russell and a philosopher from the early 20th Century. Russell warned him not to write in such a dense, esoteric style, but Whitehead clearly did not take the advice. Nietzsche is a German philosopher from the mid 18th C and his notion of "decadence" focused on how the herd-mentality became preoccupied with secondary qualities and not truth. It must be added that decadence is the substitute of petty or pointless things for realism (or that which gives rise to proper value). HC is hyper-critical writing that "darkens" ideas that are already unknown and then belabors the discussion ad nauseum. CCS is critical commonsense, an evolved form of Reidian realism that emphasizes social philosophy and, as modern (and not necessarily Reidian), accepts unsystematic ways of expressing philosophy.

Whitehead and Decadence in HC

The only reason someone would write like Whitehead is because they believe truth requires excessive complexity. The disregard for the common man must be implicit in this style and it must be so thorough that the writer is willing to lose also most academics. Contrast this with N who though complex and dense (in terms of definitions and references) appeals to a broad audience through aphorism. That truth can be invented through belaboring words and phrases, most of which are made up, seems to be the end-product. Decadence is a word used by N to describe society's preoccupation with unimportant secondary qualities instead of truth. Trifling over grammar in a text and not focusing on the text's truth is pettiness and decadent to N. Cultural trends that lend no value to experience are also decadent. It is the unnecessary addition of not just feeling, but an overwhelming conviction of what others guilt you into feeling and specifically in relation to these secondary qualities.

An otherwise intelligent thinker who is working hard at thoughtful writing who indulges in HC must have, as their prime deficit, a lack of self-awareness. This is seen in Whitehead when he writes, "Philosophy destroys its usefulness when it indulges in brilliant feats of explaining away." (p.17 P&R). This is a great description of HC and academic decadence and, interestingly enough, exactly what Whitehead did and refused to change that lost him to most thinkers. He references systematizing throughout this writing and yet it is clear that he was uninterested and unwilling to systematize his own writing, arguing with Russell that he prioritized only original work. This in and of itself is not a bad thing and perhaps is even an avenue to un-systematized writing that I now value, but it seems clear that Whitehead had very little awareness of this as a substantial style and his choices seemed borne (as are mine) more so from laziness.

In addition, for our purposes, we might add: A most obvious sign of the danger in HC is seen when every word must have a follow-up explanation. While it is great to be clear, the value in a CCS statement is that it is just understood as-is. It is harder to be a writer like Russell who takes complex ideas and makes them accessible (than it is to indulge in feats of silliness or HC). Read any random page in P&R and think to yourself: Could this be said with as much wisdom but with much less decoration? And then read this that Russell wrote: "It cannot be that everything is relative, because then there would be nothing for it to be relative to." No elaboration needed. Reid of course already wrote this over and over in another way and another context in the 1760s.

see Process and Reality, A.N. Whitehead, approx 1929 from manuscripts used at the Gifford Lectures. My version, the Corrected Edition is from 1978, Griffin and Sherburne.