Luke Morris

4/12/04

J.S. Mill:  The Intelligible Philosopher

It often happens that I must face the drudgery of reading a work of philosophy.  In doing so I must battle dry, dreary, dumbfounding prose, seeking for some coherent meaning behind the wall of words.  While my passion for thought drives me on, my love of language holds me back – I can only process so much jargon.  Exceptions exist, though; some philosophers do know how to write.  And, like torches in a dark hall, these thinkers guide me forward, giving me hope that some day I may arrive at understanding.  One such beacon is John Stuart Mill.

Mill knows how to write a sentence.  In passages that the average philosopher would speckle with vague nouns and passive tense verbs, Mill tells us exactly what he thinks, in language that human beings can understand.  This is not to say that he keeps his statements diminutive.  No, he is happy to write compound and complex sentences, of numerous clauses, stretching across a dozen lines, often encompassing an entire argument between two periods.  Then he’ll write a simple sentence.  Or a fragment.  And he’ll follow that with another statement, contradicting the first, in a classic philosopher’s dialectic.  But despite all of that, even with my stunted, practical, vulgar knowledge of language, I know what he means.

“He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation,” Mill writes.  “He who chooses his plan for himself employs all his faculties” (On Liberty 56).  This line illustrates Mill’s penchant for juxtaposition, as he uses rhetorical device to bash the accepted dogmas of his day.  The “ape-like imitation” comment, for instance, fires without subtlety at the prevailing masses of mediocrity who accept the status-quo.  The rhythm of the sentences is also important to their effectiveness:  his small words tap a marching beat, driving us forward, while the sentence variety keeps it lively.  But Mill does not hold his readers by the hand like lost kids in a zoo.  He does not cater to the reading skills of the proletariat he decries, nor does he keep his paragraphs short and easily digestible.  He favors paragraphs that run a full page or more, where he can express the details of a thought, and force the reader to hear him out.

The sound of Mill’s sentences and the structure of his paragraphs make for fun reading, while his diction and syntax make his philosophy comprehensible.  When he says “neither one person, nor any number of persons, is warranted in saying to another human creature of ripe years that he shall not do with his life for his own benefit what he chooses to do with it” (74), the order of the words enables the sentence to flow, without many breaks for punctuation.  And his word choices, simple and fitting, tell us what he really thinks.  “The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement,” Mill exclaims, “being in unceasing antagonism to that disposition to aim at something better than customary” (67).  By his usage here Mill paints us a portrait of an abstract concept – the despotism of custom – that brings to mind a harsh dictatorship of the majority building an enclosure of accepted behavior, the walls of which impede the exceptional individual from creating or achieving something that might benefit mankind.  While we may not agree with these ideas, we must admit that the words make sense.

In Mill there is no pretentious talk of a spiritual world-process of history, of noumena and phenomena, of analytic and synthetic truths, of self-consciousnesses confronting one another, or of the negation of the negation of the abstract.  No, when Mill says something, we know what the hell he’s talking about.  And that is the key to good writing.