I hereby announce a contest: What is the longest sentence ever written by a philosopher?
The kind of sentence that, as you are reading it through — trying to hold the context and decipher the meaning — flows majestically onwards, or meanders along deceptively, with occasional side streams (and parenthetical remarks), until your cerebrum is full, your powers of concentration are taxed, your resolve is flagging, and you find yourself praying ‘Please God let there be a period soon.’
(Pretty pathetic, hmm? A mere 62 words.)
My contribution to the contest will be four quotations, which I will post once per week over the next few weeks.
Here is my first candidate, weighing in at 161 words, from Chapter 2 of John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism:
“We may give what explanation we please of this unwillingness; we may attribute it to pride, a name which is given indiscriminately to some of the most and to some of the least estimable feelings of which mankind are capable; we may refer it to the love of liberty and personal independence, as appeal to which was with the Stoics one of the most effective means for the inculcation of it; to the love of power or to the love of excitement, both of which do really enter into and contribute to it; but its most appropriate appellation is a sense of dignity, which all human beings possess in one form or other, and in some, though by no means in exact, proportion to their higher faculties, and which is so essential a part of the happiness of those in whom it is strong that nothing which conflicts with it could be otherwise than momentarily an object of desire to them.”
Feel welcome to post your candidates in the comments below.
Delicious! How long did it take you to find these?
I’ve marked them over the years, whenever I’ve noticed my brain feeling tortured by a never-ending series of words.
I used to keep track of these from my students. I called one category “Heroic Sentences” and the other “Epic Paragraphs.” I don’t remember the sentence record, but the paragraph was 1-1/2 pages.
Firstly; not only is the sentencing of this sentence as a sentence that may affect your sense of perceived sensible logic through which you later perceive, by sensibly re-reading this sentence and because of this sentence, as a different sentence which leads, very sensibly, to an impossible sentence to sense correctly forcing your brain to not only urge for a period to end this horrible long sentence soon but also, inevitably, to force an incorrect sentence which does not make any sense to ones perceived logic which is where the second and more important point namely: that the proposed sentencing of a sentence is a process caused by the sentence sentenced by the sense of logic the writer sensed for which he had needed a plural sense of other sentenced sentences caused by thought about other sentences which is why it is impossible to sentence or sense the sentencing of someone else’s sentencing of their sentences comes in to sketch a more broader yet specific explanation to the first point: “Not only is the sentencing of this se…” joking. 179 Words
Seems sensible, Bastiaan.
I don’t think the example listed above is the longest sentence in Utilitarianism. How about the following whopper?
“But inasmuch as the cultivation in ourselves of a sensitive feeling on the subject of veracity, is one of the most useful, and the enfeeblement of that feeling one of the most hurtful, things to which our conduct can be instrumental; and inasmuch as any, even unintentional, deviation from truth, does that much towards weakening the trustworthiness of human assertion, which is not only the principal support of all present social well-being, but the insufficiency of which does more than any one thing that can be named to keep back civilization, virtue, everything on which human happiness on the largest scale depends; we feel that the violation, for a present advantage, of a rule of such transcendant expediency, is not expedient, and that he who, for the sake of a convenience to himself or to some other individual, does what depends on him to deprive mankind of the good, and inflict upon them the evil, involved in the greater or less reliance which they can place in each other’s word, acts the part of one of their worst enemies.”
I count 179 words (at least, counting “well-being” as one word). I linked to it in context from an official source as my website link. This bumps Kant to fifth place, and below Mill, where he belongs.
Good find, Ken. Thanks. I’ll update the ongoing contest results soon.
I like how Mill, Kant, and Bentham each begin their long sentences with a conjunction.
As someone fascinated with philosophers’ never-ending sentences, I’m deeply intrested in this type of contest. As far as Mill is concerned, I think at least one longer sentence (containing 175 words) than the above one can be found in Chapter 1 of ‘The Subjection of Women’:
“If the authority of men over women, when first established, had been the result of a conscientious comparison between different modes of constituting the government of society; if, after trying various other modes of social organisation—the government of women over men, equality between the two, and such mixed and divided modes of government as might be invented—it had been decided, on the testimony of experience, that the mode in which women are wholly under the rule of men, having no share at all in public concerns, and each in private being under the legal obligation of obedience to the man with whom she has associated her destiny, was the arrangement most conducive to the happiness and well-being of both; its general adoption might then be fairly thought to be some evidence that, at the time when it was adopted, it was the best: though even then the considerations which recommended it may, like so many other primeval social facts of the greatest importance, have subsequently, in the course of ages, ceased to exist.”
Good find, Kazuma. Thanks!