Inheritance and Originality

Abstract

Abstract These words, it seems to me, give us a particular picture of the essence of philosophical writing—of what it is for such writing to be well shaped and disciplined, for its parts to form a genuine whole, for its sections and sentences to have neither too little nor too much vitality. But do they—in developing that metaphor of vegetable life perhaps a little too exuberantly, and amalgamating it perhaps a little too forcibly with another, more metallic or mechanical, one— observe the canons of propriety they deploy in criticism of another’s words? They certainly do not take the picture to which they officially cleave as open to question—as if the matter of philosophical form has been forgotten, or is capable at any moment of being passed over, even when the text we are reading all but explicitly aims to provide an occasion for us to question the obviousness or self-evidence of our picture of that matter. But since, to those in the grip of the picture, such texts are rather more likely to occasion exasperation, how might such all but inevitable circuits of mutual misunderstanding be disrupted? How might a text such as The Claim of Reason be understood as attempting to initiate such disruption? Since any such purposes can be effective only if those who encounter this text choose to stay with its orderings of words, we must first ask how it aims to justify or reward such a choice—how its opening encounter with its readers is designed to attract rather than repel them.

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