Oppenheimer's Style and Candor III

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The problem of doing justice to the implicit, the imponderable, and the unknown is of course not unique to politics. It is always with us in science, it is with us in the most trivial of personal affairs, and it is one of the great problems of writing and of all forms of art. The means by which it is solved is sometimes called style. It is style which complements affirmation with limitation and with humility; it is style which makes it possible to act effectively, but not absolutely; it is style which, in the domain of foreign policy, enables us to find a harmony between the pursuit of ends essential to us, and the regard for the views, the sensibilities, the aspirations of those to whom the problem may appear in another light; it is style which is the deference that action pays to uncertainty; it is above all style through which power defers to reason.

This sense that the future is richer and more complex than our prediction of it, and that wisdom lies in sensitiveness to what is new and hopeful, is perhaps a sign of some maturity in politics. . . .
J. Robert Oppenheimer, The Open Mind, 1948

In what follows, I have of course no final answers to any of the big questions. But I believe we must not, under any circumstances, cease to be mindful of these questions, even while we know there can be no definite answers. Having ready answers means you don’t understand; understanding here means never letting go of the questions. Unknowing will turn out to be a sign not of weakness, but of wisdom.
Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021, p. 1195.

It is wrong to say good language is important to good thought merely; for it is the essence of it.
C. S. Pierce, The Ethics of Terminology 1902, in C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (Eds.) Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Pierce (vol. 2, pp. 319-322), Harvard UP

In the July 1953 issue of Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, J. Robert Oppenheimer published an essay on, among other things, what might be the requirements for an upcoming Operation Candor to be conducted by the government for the American people. The essay was titled “Atomic Weapons and American Policy.” The operation would address the meaning of the nuclear arms race.

As we’ve seen in first looks at Oppenheimer’s essay, he had a distinctive style. Did he himself see “style” as a matter of any importance?

A matter of the highest importance, it turns out.

Wait. A “scientist” who thinks “style” is a matter of the highest importance? What’s that about? Scientists are all about “substance,” aren’t they?

We tend to talk about “style” as if it were something quite separate from “substance,” with “substance” being what matters. “Style” is taken to be mere decoration, something that has no effect on “substance.” “Substance” is what’s real, given. No freedom is to be found there. Submission or rejection are the only appropriate responses.

This was assumed to be true even when views of “substance” were fundamentally at odds, when the questions were taken to be either/or, not both/and, still less both/and either/or and both/and. Either/or is how the question was being imagined in, for example, the “Cold War” going on between the United States and the Soviet Union.

In this view, issues of style may be taken to contemplate a domain of freedom and action, but the actions taken are finally inconsequential, a mere matter of, well, style.

In the The Open Mind, a book published in 1948, the year after Oppenheimer was made the director of the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton, he had shown that he saw this view of style and what was at stake in matters of style as deeply impoverished.

“Style,” he had written there, was instead how we may try to “do justice” to a problem that “is always with us in science, it is with us in the most trivial of personal affairs, and it is one of the great problems of writing and of all forms of art”—the problem of how to do “justice. . . to the implicit, the imponderable, and the unknown.”

“The implicit, the imponderable, the unknown.” Is that a thing? Clearly not. Is it a “substance”? Not that either. Is it then not “real”?

Oppenheimer clearly thought it was real, and I agree. Who would be so foolish as to deny the real existence, in some sense, of “the implicit, the imponderable, and the unknown,” even if it is implicit, imponderable, and not yet known to us?

Let’s ask the question another way: Can “the implicit, the imponderable, and the unknown” ever be removed entirely from human affairs? We may try to remove it but we must hope we never succeed. That would mean we were forever imprisoned inside what was already explicit, fully pondered, and known.

The implicit, the imponderable, the unknown are what give us a future.

If the implicit, the imponderable, and the unknown will always be with us, then “style,” in Oppenheimer’s sense, will always be—potentially, anyway—something we need. Need desperately, perhaps.

At stake in considerations of style, furthermore, will not be something that is entirely separable from “substance.” At stake will be what “substance” might be made to mean.

“It is style,” Oppenheimer continued,

which complements affirmation with limitation and with humility; it is style which makes it possible to act effectively, but not absolutely; it is style which, in the domain of foreign policy, enables us to find a harmony between the pursuit of ends essential to us, and the regard for the views, the sensibilities, the aspirations of those to whom the problem may appear in another light; it is style which is the deference that action pays to uncertainty; it is above all style through which power defers to reason.

Oppenheimer saw “style,” then, as a name for how we can try (and possibly fail) to address a “problem” that is “always with us,” whether we recognize that it is always with us or not. That “problem,” says Oppenheimer, is with us in matters large and small, in the most “trivial of personal affairs” as well as in “science” and in “writing and all forms of art.” It is with us also, Oppenheimer says, in ‘the domain of foreign policy.”

It is not, however, a “problem” of the kind that can be “solved,” in a contemporary “scientific” or “technical” sense.

It is instead, Oppenheimer says, a problem of how we may be able to do “justice”—in this case justice to “the implicit, the imponderable, and the unknown.”

Style may offer us choices, as “substance” does not, but, Oppenheimer implies, it is not open to us to choose not to have a style. We can choose to ignore questions of style but we cannot choose not to have one. We cannot choose not to have a way of doing, or failing to do, justice to the implicit, the imponderable, the unknown.

If we ignore questions of style, the questions are still there, just hidden from us now, truncated, going their way and doing their work without us.

Is doing “justice” to such problems a matter of “solving” them? That would seem to depend on what we mean by “solve.” Do we mean coming to a final definitive certain right-or-wrong answer, as when we sum a column of integers? Or does it mean something more like what the root of “solve” in Latin suggests? In Latin, solvere might mean “loosen, untie, release, unlock, fulfill,” as well as “dissolve, scatter, dismiss, explain, remove.” It might not be a matter of arriving at a final definitive and certain right-or-wrong answer.

Which, when you think about it, isn’t even on offer when time runs out and your team has more points than the opposing team. Until that moment, the outcome of the game will have to have been uncertain if it is to have been of any interest. Your team may have won that game, but there will be, if the game has been properly played, another game. Which is the ultimate goal, isn’t it? The point without which the game has no point? If winning the game were the ultimate point, we’d end the play there.

How sad that would be.

“Solve” may also mean, to use a word Oppenheimer does, finding a “harmony” between what may have been seen as the elements of a problem.

Let’s remind ourselves what Oppenheimer says is at stake in “style.” At stake is

—whether we might find a way to complement “affirmation” with “limitation and with humility,”

—whether we might find a way “to act effectively, but not absolutely,”

—whether “in the domain of foreign policy” we might “find a harmony between the pursuit of ends essential to us, and . . . regard for the views, the sensibilities, the aspirations of those to whom the problem may appear in another light.”

—whether in our “action,” we will be able to defer to the “uncertainty” inherent in action.

—whether “above all,” Oppenheimer says, “power” will defer to “reason.”

“Style” is then, inescapably, a matter of substance. The two are not the same thing but they are also not entirely separable from each other. They are, we might say, complementary. Distinguishable, but not entirely distinct, and both necessary to a complete account of what’s going on.

All this could bring up some interesting questions as to what we think we are about in this Cold War, couldn’t it? Or perhaps any war.

We may want to return to these questions in upcoming entries.

For now, let’s go on to see what Oppenheimer had to say about “Atomic Weapons and American Policy” and what President Eisenhower might want to be candid about if he ever got going with an Operation Candor.

Next: Oppenheimer on “Atomic Weapons and American Policy” I