Language education pursuing "beautiful writing" is truly shallow

(translated from my Chinese blog)

This is my new project, “Nietzschean Philology”. In each installment, I’ll read a passage from Nietzsche’s original writings. By practicing text analysis, we can enhance our ability to understand the world.

The reading of "We Philologists" continues. In sections 35~38, Nietzsche 展开 ed a discussion on style and text, and his prophecy that modern civilization, with its urbanization, textualization, and bureaucratization, ultimately leads to the loss of vitality in human society, still resonates powerfully today.

35. It is the same with the simplicity of antiquity as it is with the simplicity of style: it is the highest thing which we recognise and must imitate; but it is also the last. Let it be remembered that the classic prose of the Greeks is also a late result.

36. What a mockery of the study of the "humanities" lies in the fact that they were also called "belles lettres" (bellas litteras)!

37. Wolf's [Friedrich August Wolf (1759-1824), the well-known classical scholar, now chiefly remembered by his "Prolegomena ad Homerum."--TR.] reasons why the Egyptians, Hebrews, Persians, and other Oriental nations were not to be set on the same plane with the Greeks and Romans: "The former have either not raised themselves, or have raised themselves only to a slight extent, above that type of culture which should be called a mere civilisation and bourgeois acquirement, as opposed to the higher and true culture of the mind." He then explains that this culture is spiritual and literary: "In a well-organised nation this may be begun earlier than order and peacefulness in the outward life of the people (enlightenment)." He then contrasts the inhabitants of easternmost Asia ("like such individuals, who are not wanting in clean, decent, and comfortable dwellings, clothing, and surroundings; but who never feel the necessity for a higher enlightenment") with the Greeks ("in the case of the Greeks, even among the most educated inhabitants of Attica, the contrary often happens to an astonishing degree; and the people neglect as insignificant factors that which we, thanks to our love of order, are in the habit of looking upon as the foundations of mental culture itself").

38. Our terminology already shows how prone we are to judge the ancients wrongly: the exaggerated sense of literature, for example, or, as Wolf, when speaking of the "inner history of ancient erudition," calls it, "the history of learned enlightenment."

"We Philologists", Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by J. M. Kennedy 

Style! While preparing this article, what felt most ironic to me was: ChatGPT kept telling me that Nietzsche was critical of modern people's preference for "systems, bureaucracy, education, public order," making them lose their personal style, yet it delivered the content to me using the "AI writing style", the most styleless way of expression that everyone knows and finds annoying today—segmented by paragraphs and points, making it seem very structured and organized. Thanks to LLMs, I can no longer stand reading such AI-generated articles.

Regarding these two paragraphs about style, I initially grouped them together with the following two paragraphs discussing Wolf and "literacy" when dividing the chapters. However, in reality, the topic of "style" itself deserves extensive discussion, because we are undeniably living in an era that is both flooded with style and yet utterly devoid of it: look at the repulsive "江湖体"* restaurant signs on the streets, the identical user interfaces of various apps, the visually exhausting product images on Taobao, and then open a social app to see the same uniform outfits, makeup, and beauty filters on all the pretty people. Every day, someone invents a new "style"—dopamine style, Maillard reaction style, noblewoman style, tennis style... And every day, people also invent new phrases (I’m waiting for the day when style and phrase become synonyms) to express their meager thoughts and emotions: "ceiling," "absolutely amazing," "yysd," "give a 夯," "someone died next to it and I didn't notice..."** When semantics have inflated to this extent, I really want to know, if one day someone really dies next to you (most likely someone very close to you), what words will you have left to express your inner feelings? (I also really want to ask the Chinese language teachers of today, if the content your students post on Weibo, Bilibili, and Xiaohongshu*** in the future is basically a hodgepodge of these internet memes, will you feel that your Chinese education has utterly failed?)

Nietzsche's most famous statement about "style," from The Gay Science:

One thing is needed. — To 'give style' to one's character! — A great and rare art!

But what is meant by "to give style to one's character"?

When discussing style, Nietzsche was clearly not talking about aesthetics or taste. On the contrary, he thought it was highly ironic to understand style as "beauty," such as "bella litteras." (Sections 35~36 are against "bella," 37~38 are against "litteras.") First, style can be entirely simple, but this is still not about clothing or the everyday sense of rusticity; it is about an overall understanding of the world, and for the entire national culture, it is a late-maturing phenomenon. Combining with the issue of compulsory education discussed in the previous article, style must be something that emerges only after a person's educational stage is nearly complete, something that can only be achieved when one has grasped the principles of political economy and sociology, has a certain degree of reflection on life, and ultimately has a holistic impression of the macro human social history. This holistic impression will permeate all aspects of a person's life, making others feel that there is something distinctive about them, allowing a person to break free from various "personality types" like MBTI. No longer "belonging to a certain personality type," but "achieving one's own style." Looking at today's language education, which only knows how to pursue "beautiful writing" or a life scenario of aesthetic pursuit, it is truly shallow: imitating the writing style of the ancients superficially without a holistic perspective and deep understanding, unable and unwilling to innovate the entire way of life, only focusing on meticulous craftsmanship in words—isn't it just ugly pretending?

Just as life as a whole is often hard to summarize in words, an individual's style cannot be reduced to a few concepts or terms (this is also one of the modern obsession, the desire to grasp something conceptually and think that this means fully understanding it). So Nietzsche never explicitly stated, nor could he have, exactly what "individual style" is. We can only know what it is not, and can only use exclusion. In certain obscure but meaningful ancient beliefs, the definition of a god is just this: not this, not that. No matter what you say god is, god is not that. "Individual style is god-like," it is beyond words.

Therefore, literary studies attempting to grasp the appearance of the ancients from texts is destined to fail from the very beginning. This is also the irony Nietzsche read into the term "beautiful writing": texts are inherently styleless. Wolf's understanding of antiquity embodies this error: the mistaken belief that civilization, and the ancient Greece and Rome representing it, must be urbanized, literate, and text-based, must emphasize the inner spiritual world while neglecting the external material world (hence the emphasis on formal education and the abolition of substantive education), and must be "enlightened." But what is enlightenment? First and foremost, it is literacy, the ability to read and write. Sometimes I think that those indigenous tribes, which our urban dwellers regard as barbaric, possess a natural sense of smell that we "civilized" people can never master in our lifetime, able to track animals in the wilderness, and in a sense, are far stronger survival methods than us. Even today, anthropologists rely heavily on these indigenous guides to explore the most "barbaric" regions of the earth in depth—it is we who need them more, not they who need us.

So Nietzsche emphasizes the way of existence of oral, face-to-face contact, namely speaking, giving a speech, arguing, rather than literal, indirect, bureaucratic reading and writing texts. Because in the process of face-to-face conversation, too many things are happening, too much living content is conveyed beyond language and words, the posture, tone, speed, rhythm of speech, gestures, micro-expressions of the interlocutors—how are these to be translated into text? The advantage of text only becomes prominent within the bureaucratic clerical system, but that precisely means depersonalization. For example, to lower the understanding threshold for any member of the academia, a set of academic writing norms has been specially formulated, precisely to prevent the author from injecting too much personal color into the text. This styleless textual expression has finally reached its peak in our time: large language models can finally fuse all available text into one pot, crafting the most styleless, most versatile, most boring, and most formalistic text.

We are too familiar with the clerical system today. Some employees of certain companies would rather conduct all communication through computer chat windows to "keep a record in the system" than have face-to-face conversations in private as human beings. To give another example, many companies recruit talent based on the systems they use (especially programming languages), in other words, they are looking for people according to the needs of the machines. It's not that people need machines, but that machines need people. People have become appendages of machines.

I sometimes feel this way, worrying that my own writing has become too mechanical, too bureaucratic, too formalized, too devoid of humanity. People can go on admiring analyses that are meticulously dissected, texts filled with high concepts and a pretentious air of profundity, but I always believe that the most vivid and powerful writing always happens in face-to-face conversations, not on paper. This point, especially for the Chinese people who have been text-based and bureaucratic for three thousand years, for this peculiar nation that prioritizes text over language, cannot be emphasized enough.

* 江湖体 is a specific group of fonts that defies traditional caligraphical principles and have a strong visual effect.

** All these are latest online phrases that exaggerates the expressed feelings, similar to "peak" or "chef's kiss" or "slaps" or "GOAT".

*** Weibo, Bilibili, and Xiaohongshu are the three most popular social apps among Chinese youngsters.