Aloha from Kauai! Here's another snail for your enjoyment.
Since I'm still on vacation, here’s a repost with edits from 2011 and from my 2019 book A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures.
I've been told that Kant and Hegel were poor writers whose impenetrable prose style is incidental to their philosophy. I've also been told that their views are so profound as to defy expression in terms comprehensible even to smart, patient, well-educated people who are not specialists in the philosophy of the period. I've heard similar things about Laozi, Heidegger, Plotinus, and Derrida. (I won't name any living philosophers.) I don’t buy it.
Philosophy is not wordless profound insight. Philosophy is prose. Philosophy happens not in numinous moments of personal genius, but in the creation of mundane sentences. It happens on the page, in the pen, through the keyboard, in dialogue with students and peers, and to some extent but only secondarily in private inner speech. If what exists on the page is not clear, the philosophy is not clear. Philosophers, like all specialists, profit from a certain amount of jargon, but philosophy need not become a maze of jargon. If private jargon doesn’t regularly touch down in comprehensible public meanings, one has produced not philosophy, but only hazy words of indeterminate content. There are always gaps, confusions, indeterminacies, hidden assumptions, and failures of clarity, even in the plainest philosophical writers, like Mozi, Descartes, Hume, and David Lewis. Thus, these philosophers present ample interpretative challenges. But the gaps, confusions, indeterminacies, and hidden assumptions lie only one step behind the visible prose, available to anyone who looks conscientiously for them, not sliding away into a nebulous murk.
For a philosopher who can convince readers to take him seriously (given the exemplars, let’s say “him”), obfuscation yields three illegitimate benefits. First, he intimidates the reader, and through intimidation, dons a mantle of undeserved intellectual authority. Second, he disempowers potential critics by having a view of such indeterminate form that any criticism can be attributed to misinterpretation. Third, he exerts a fascination on the kind of reader who enjoys the puzzle-solving aspect of interpretation, thus drawing from that reader more attention than the quality of his ideas may merit (though this third benefit may be offset by alienating readers with a low tolerance for lack of clarity).
Philosophers of this type exhibit a kind of intellectual authoritarianism, with themselves as the assumed authority whose words we must spend time puzzling out. And simultaneously they lack intellectual courage: the courage to make plain claims that could be proven wrong, supported by plain arguments that could be proven fallacious. These three features synergize: If a critic thinks she has finally located a sound criticism, she can be accused of failing to solve the fascinating interpretative puzzle of the philosopher’s superior genius.
Few philosophers, I suspect, deliberately aim to be obfuscatory. But I am inclined to believe that some are attuned to its advantages as an effect of their prose style and for that reason don’t bother to write comprehensibly. Maybe they find their prose style shaped by audience responses: When they write clearly, they are dismissed or refuted; when they produce a fog of words that hint of profound meaning underneath, they earn praise. Maybe they are themselves to some extent victims — victims of a subculture, or a circle of friends, or an intended audience, that regards incomprehensibility as a sign of brilliance and so demands it in their heroes.
7 comments:
"If private jargon doesn’t regularly touch down in comprehensible public meanings, one has produced not philosophy, but only hazy words of indeterminate content."
Do you think this has to be true? Curious what you think - I know many of the philosophers you cited as examples will define, stipulate, or arrive through reasoning at some kind of determinate shape for a concept. It's not ordinary common sense, yes, and many philosophers would be troubled by this, but do you think that it means that it doesn't have to have a determinate shape to it at all if it is an idea beyond the common understanding, especially when philosophers often want to challenge what is ordinary or want to make attempts to show how we really ought to revise the ordinary way we understand the world and our ideas in favor of something new they have discovered?
One other thing - it's interesting that this ironically might also be a criticism of Wittgenstein who, although purported to be sticking close only to ordinary language and everyday understanding, and who told us never to leave common sense out of the Philosophy classroom, nevertheless argued solely through forms of elucidation and clarification of concepts, and so we can imagine a similar reaction, where if you were unable to see things the way he did, you were guilty of a kind of misunderstanding, and thus the aura of the sage looms since you might live in fear that you have failed to see something the master sees. So do you think really what the problem here is is a method of Philosophy that is solely in terms of clarification, perhaps? Such a philosopher seeks only to clarify, only to elucidate - isn't there a similar risk of Authoritarianism? Some philosophers seem to express views of Philosophy where arguments are ultimately besides the point - we can only hope to offer clarifications or elucidations until we can see what is true. Is this whole business a sham then, perhaps? Or is this not right?
Schwitzgebel frames intellectual courage as the willingness to make plain, falsifiable claims. But there's another kind of intellectual courage he doesn't practice here: admitting "I have tried and failed to understand X" as a fact about his own limits, rather than converting that failure into a diagnosis of X's author as a coward or a fraud. The move from "I don't understand this" to "this is obfuscatory, and here's the psychological/sociological account of why the author benefits from my not understanding it" skips a step.
The honest, more vulnerable move would be closer to: "I don't understand Hegel, and I can't rule out that this is my limitation rather than his." He instead built a framework where that possibility barely enters.
I don't know that courage had much to do with it, but maybe other virtues do. As In: I have read Hegel's physics, which are ignorant, erroneous fantasies. Since his philosophical claims, where I can make them out, are pretentious manifestos without arguments or incomprehensible as written, I conclude the same about them. I have read Heidegger's political writings. They are ignorant, unfounded and sometimes unintelligible. Where I can fathom them at all, his philosophical writings seem have the same character, So where I cannot fathom them, I make the same inference.
I came for the free book (which looks AWESOME, btw), only to be sucked in by this flagrant provocation. A lot of what you say is true, but I cut my teeth as a continentalist, and I gotta tell you the people you're complaining about are recognized within the field as well. Neither Hegel nor even Heidegger is more difficult than Kant, who you could accuse of inventing obscurantist philosophy. Personally, I find him worse. I actually knew what Heidegger or Hegel would 'likely say' about topics I had yet to read them on--Kant often surprised me.
When I fled continentalists to hang with anglo-american pragmatic types, I gotta tell you, the same division between those with passion and understanding and those with skills and status not only exists, but does so perniciously. A good part of what english speaking philosophers 'think obvious' is almost certainly what has their shoelaces tied together. My experience is that the tactical obfuscation is more sublimated, sometimes more naive, but every bit as pervasive.
Heidegger basically took the opposite lesson from Wittgenstein, attempted to language his way into the problem. Now, even given the potential for institutional abuse, you of all people know the problems of meaning/awareness (be they merely social or genuinely ontological) is too sticky to rule out much anything aside from naked human conceit. Esotericism is a cost of doing business in science anymore.
If there's an argument you ever wanted to lay on a (one-time) Heideggerean, lay it on me! Not really a Dreyfus fan, but I actually think the central plank of Heidegger's thought, presence, will be naturalized.
In other words, I totally agree with your diagnosis of philosophy, but I think its more universal than you might realize. Think of the Wittgensteinians! Or Brandom and all the Pittsburghers. Jargon every bit as twisty as Heidegger's, yet phrased in accessible language. And easily, infinitely more difficult to reason with than Heideggereans! The bias that tracks your training will be invisible to you, but I see it.
I can go on and on about it if you wish. As a nonacademic, I am intimately acquainted with the 'shut up and sit down' argument.
Good to hear from you, Scott! It’s been awhile.
I agree that our biases will make such things less visible for some classes of thinkers, and my analytic training influences me. I was trying to avoid mentioning living philosophers, but I’ll allow that I broadly agree with your assessment of Brandom and McDowell.
Could this be an example of a 'class of thinkers', "dualists-becoming-trialists"...
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