ON STYLISTIC DOGMATISM AND THE LIMITATION OF POSSIBLE KNOWLEDGE

Fernando Murillo
University of British Columbia

In recent days, an image entitled the 10 commandments of logic has been circulating on academic
groups of social media, stating the rules of academic writing and expression.
Such rules without differentiating fields nor traditions set down the doctrine of logic as the standard
by which all academic communication should abide.
Norms that impose on all academic work the constrains of the logical attitude. e.g. the spelling out of
questions and outcomes a priori, the validation of arguments solely on their connection to warrants
and examples of identity, and the overall mathematical approach of if A then B or X is so if and only
if, function ideologically hiding their Anglo, and very much modern, pragmatic specificity and
inclination. Such a logical approach seems quite appropriate for certain particular situations and
contexts, but when applied to humanities and, specifically to certain modes of philosophical work, it
becomes problematic.
The discourse behind these norms does not only represent a constraint in terms of communication.
They also affect thinking, preclude an authentic (and potentially transforming) engagement with lived
experience, and muffle the possibilities of speculative, creative and even playful thinking.
Hegel had already recognized the appearance of such demands expressed as custom in his time, and
decided to address them at the very beginning of his Phenomenology of Spirit. In the context of
philosophical work, he asserts, the normative demands for the presentation of such work seem not
only superfluous but, in view of the nature of the subject-matter, even inappropriate and misleading.
Would the core of psychoanalytic knowledge we have today had been possible to construct if Freud
or Lacan had been forced to renounce to their assertive experience and, instead, comply with the
norms of logical argumentation? Quite possibly not.
Denouncing an attitude of style-policing, Hegel warns that when this compulsion for convention gets
fixated on the antithesis of truth and falsity, the more it tends to expect a given philosophical system
to be either accepted or contradicted; and hence it finds only acceptance or rejection.
By fixating attention on form, they miss out almost entirely on the content and the possibility of learning
from it.
As Austin already reminded us in his series of lectures How to do things with words, from the
perspective of language, not all utterances can be defined in terms of being true or false. Some are
intended to have a performative effect. That is to say, they produce and bring into existence that which
they name. Is that not the way science has advanced historically, way before the emergence of
method?
The witch-hunt for so called logical fallacies or the acceptance/rejection of propositions implies, for
Hegel, a failure to understand philosophy as a progressive unfolding of truth. As he illustrates, The
bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say that the former is refuted by
the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation
of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of it insteadYet their fluid nature makes them
moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary
as the other.
This style-police attitude reveals a confusion of rhetorical logical concatenation with truth. But not only
that. A predominant and selective attention to issues of form over content may reveal also a
symptomatic resistance to that content, or simply sheer ignorance.
Demanding compliance with argumentative norms passes readily enough as a concern with what is
essential, Hegel pointed out, yet when this activity is allowed to pass for actual cognition, then it
should be reckoned as no more than a device for evading the real issue, a way of creating an
impression of hard work and serious commitment to the problem, while actually sparing oneself both.
In such context, perhaps it is time to reconsider the potentialities found in speculative, associative
thinking. In times of an all-pervasive mindset of standardization and utilitarianism, it is in exploratory,
creative and playful thinking that we may find ways to re-interpret ourselves and the world.
It is in inwardness, and its recursive and elusive language of desire, that we may re-encounter life in
its concrete richness and engage in a Real experience of being-in-the-world (in the Lacanian sense of
the Real). It is in this free-associative language that we might find ways that have the potential for our
much needed subjective re-construction and, at the end of the day, provide edification rather than
insight, as Hegel suggested.