Accusations of Obscurity
I a lot folks dismiss ideas because they claim it lacks "clarity". The assumption seems to be that if an idea, or concept, is not easily comprehended it is therefore dishonest. There are some issues with this line of thinking.
1. Many philosophies that are deemed obscure or unreadable are written in an unfamiliar place and time. To truly understand Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates, you would have to live in ancient Greece (unless you're a scholar).
2. It could simply be a translation issue. Works written in German such as Kant and Hegel are much more difficult to understand in English than German.
3. You never really tried (intellectual laziness). It's much easier to dismiss something by claiming you don't understand it. You don't actually accomplish anything, but hey, at least you don't have to debate.
4. Lack of Knowledge. Some philosophical ideas and arguments are fairly complex, and were never meant for the layman. For example you probably need attend a few classes to understand early twentieth century philosophical thought with the new developments of logic by Frege and Russel.
What do you think?
1. Many philosophies that are deemed obscure or unreadable are written in an unfamiliar place and time. To truly understand Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates, you would have to live in ancient Greece (unless you're a scholar).
2. It could simply be a translation issue. Works written in German such as Kant and Hegel are much more difficult to understand in English than German.
3. You never really tried (intellectual laziness). It's much easier to dismiss something by claiming you don't understand it. You don't actually accomplish anything, but hey, at least you don't have to debate.
4. Lack of Knowledge. Some philosophical ideas and arguments are fairly complex, and were never meant for the layman. For example you probably need attend a few classes to understand early twentieth century philosophical thought with the new developments of logic by Frege and Russel.
What do you think?
Comments (103)
Not necessarily dishonest, just easily misunderstood or unhelpfully veiled.
While some of your points about context, language and effort may be true and play a role on occasion, there is still the matter of writing which is lucid versus writing which is convoluted.
Getting the right reading of a given philosopher can be hard enough - take Nietzsche - easy to read, hard to understand. Even harder if the writer is verbose, uses neologisms and writes unclearly with interminable sentences which have an abundance of sub clauses.
The real question is what counts as obscure writing? For me Heidegger. For others Wittgenstein. People have different brains and respond differently to a writer's thoughts and style.
The other issue is one of the interested dilettante. If you are not an academic or a philosophy hard case you may simply not wish to pursue the more recondite writers because life is too short. This is not laziness, it is prioritizing.
That's included because the general idea is that your debating opponent is deceiving you.
Quoting Tom Storm
True, but I have the feeling that there are more variables.
Yes, you listed these so I added this one. :smile:
Fair enough.
However, there can also be false allegations of oversimplification. It's frustrating. Thise who look down on you, for example, will automatically perceive anything you say inadequate.
I am a deep skeptic about most philosophy, especially western. You are much, much, much too kind to and understanding of most philosophers. Science has difficult ideas. It needs to describe complicated things that haven't been seen before. There are lots of unfamiliar moving parts. There need to be new words to describe the things that are discovered. Learning and understanding some aspects of science requires education and experience. Even so, talented writers can make the general ideas and many of the details clear to intelligent non-scientists. I've read original work by great scientists - Darwin, Einstein, Schrodinger, Heisenberg. These guys could write in very clear and understandable ways. Usually, when I would read a paper, the first couple of pages would be really interesting and clear. Then, it would rapidly get over my head. That's how I knew that their writing was clear but my understanding wasn't.
Philosophers don't have that excuse. The things they are talking about are not hidden away in the microscopic and subatomic worlds or billions of years ago soon after the big bang. Everything they write about is right out in the open for everyone to see. Every time I've come up against an idea wrapped up in dense verbiage and unnecessary jargon, when I've finally fought my way through I've found ideas that I have no trouble explaining in relatively normal language. Sometime those ideas are wonderful, but they are often not worth the trouble.
There are philosophers who can express complex ideas in clear understandable language. The world is complex, but it's not that complex. If you can't say it in words I can understand, you don't understand it.
Oh c'mon. :grin: I could just as well be playing devils advocate. :smirk:
It's person dependent. Some people have an innate capacity to understand certain ideas better than others, perhaps the topic at hand resonates with a specific individual.
Having said that, on the "negative side", I do think that some of classical figures are very obscure. I very much think Kant was extremely profound, but the dense verbiage used and the fact that he (often) did not refer to ordinary objects to elucidate a conceptual difficulty, makes it harder.
Then there are cases in which I have to strongly suspect that, despite finding a few ideas of some interest, the verbiage is intentionally dense for appearance of profundity.
I think the prime example here is Hegel. Even secondary literature on Hegel is just overwhelmingly complex and dese. And once I unpack the ideas, to the extent that I can, I don't see much that excuses his vocabulary.
On the "positive side", there are plenty of philosophers who wrote clearly and said interesting things. Plato, Descartes, Hume, Reid, Schopenhauer, James the popular side of Russell and so on.
Even when they are clear, which some of them are very clear, the ideas are complicated, because speaking about say, mental phenomena is extremely complex and multifaceted and nuanced. So that may be an important reason as why philosophers are "hard". The topic is very hard in a special sense.
Yes, it is true that lack of effort can be correctly pointed out. But if in good faith I try to read Hegel or Deleuze and get little for my efforts, then the accusation isn't pertinent: it's not worth more time.
Finally, even if Descartes and Schopenhauer are quite clear, if they don't resonate with you, then they don't resonate with you. No problem, there's plenty of other stuff that will catch your attention in philosophy.
Your post reminded me of a short audio (5 minutes long) I heard a while ago:
(From 1:57 onwards)
In the case of poststructuralism, I think Chomsky explains rather well why one can't compare Kant to someone like Derrida, even though Kant's work may be obscure in some parts.
[quote= Luce Irigaray]Is [math] E = M c^2 [/math] a sexed equation? Perhaps it is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us. What seems to me to indicate the possibly sexed nature o f the equation is not directly its uses by nuclear weapons, rather it is having privileged what goes the fastest...[/quote]
If someone read this and told me that there is something profound or important in what Irigaray says, I'd say they are speaking utter nonsense.
It would seem like there's a tendency by some people and some philosophers to believe that if someone is famous or critically acclaimed, then everything they say must not be nonsense, and must be important or profound. But to argue thus is simply to appeal to authority.
Contrast with this the case of Kant: some of his ideas are quite hard to understand, but when you ask kantians or philosophers who are more or less knowledgeable about his works to explain them, they usually can give a more or less satisfactory explanation of them in simpler terms. The same cannot be said about many postmodernists.
So, it's better to follow Popper's advice:
I really enjoyed the Chomsky audio. I've been thinking I should put some effort into his work. I guess if Chomsky and Popper agree with us, we must be right.
I never said that if Chomsky and Popper said it, that means it's right.
What matters is the content of what someone says, not who says it.
I know that.
Quoting Amalac
I agree. I was being amusing.
That's my specialty actually.
If you want specific recommendations on different topics, I'll be glad to give you some recommendations.
Yes, please. How about some follow up on what he was discussing in the audio to start.
But then I pumped the brakes and confessed that maybe there are just some things I don't get, and don't want to invest the time and energy to get. I try to remain open to the possiblitlity that some things are beyond me.
What pisses me off are professorial questions about something I meant in something I wrote. I'll sit down and point my finger to a sentance in my writing that directly and specifically answers the question asked. Then scratch my head as to how a person with an advanced degree could have missed it.
I've always been a champion of the record created by a writing. That way, no one can ever claim they were not told. But alas, it is not always possible to communicate with written words. Maybe that is why we love the parable, the story told around a fire. There is not enough of that these days.
It depends on how deep you want to go with this.
If you want a good intro to his talking about innate ideas and the like, I'd recommend you see Michel Gondry's documentary about his ideas, called Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy?
It has some nice illustrations about how our innate faculties react to very small changes in the environment.
It's available for free here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cv66xFD7s7g
His comment is simply that the way we recognize houses is innate in us. Another alien creature could have the concept HOUSE which differed in what properties are essential to it, such as a HOUSE being though if in terms of seeing an interior first, then the front side.
We do the opposite when we think of houses.
As for the Post-Modernist comment, he has in mind people like Derrida, Lacan and the like, which he thinks are gibberish.
He only demands that people explain these ideas the way a physicist or a biologist could explain some aspects of what they work on in simple terms. Here's an article he wrote about postmodernism:
http://bactra.org/chomsky-on-postmodernism.html
Thanks. I'll take a look.
This is silly. Of course one can simplify Kant for todayâs laymen. The man wrote 200 years ago. His ideas have been assimilated into the mainstream by now. Even the business community teaches ideas influenced by him. Try going back 200 years and simplifying him for the average person of the late 1700âs. He would have appeared as incoherent as Derrida does to many today.
I donât find the writing style of Heidegger or any number of other contemporary philosophers to be unnecessarily opaque. The problem is that they were ahead of their time, and the developed a vocabulary that only makes sense if one has already arrived at that future world. If youâre going g to compare philosophy and science , then recognize how often it happens that a new philosophical work is dismissed and ignored for decades by academics who blame the authorâs style rather than their own limitations.
Then suddenly the philosopher is rediscovered by a new generation of scientists who are ready to absorb what the philosopher was saying. This is happening now with Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger. A new generation of thinkers in cognitive science have embraced their views on perception and affectivity(donât look for Chomsky in this group. He is considered hopelessly out of date ) . You wonât find them bemoaning the inadequacy of the writing style of these philosophers. Why? Because they actually understand them.
No heâs not. Possibly you give up too easily and end up blaming the writer for your own conceptual struggles? Actually , we can blame Anglo-American culture for not preparing us to make our way through Continental philosophy. I had to do it on my own and it was an enormous struggle for me. I was suspicious of it ,and thought it inferior to empirical writing. Took me quite a while to change my mind.
"The Sound and the Fury" didn't do anything for me, but I loved "As I Lay Dying." It's funny, my brother, who doesn't like to read, somehow got ahold of "As I Lay Dying" and really liked it. My philosophy of fiction reading, and I think it's probably a bad one, is, if it doesn't pull me in in the first few chapters, to heck with it. For non-fiction I might try harder if it's something I really want to know about.
If you want to read some Faulkner, he has a collection of short I guess you would call them mystery stories collected as "Knight's Gambit." Very accessible, but they still have that taste of the dangerous wildness found in the countryside outside of town, which is probably the thing I like best about his writing.
Unh hunh. Is too.
What makes an idea âsimpleâ? The fact that you understand it? Isnât that circular? If someone tries
their best to simply their philosophy and you still donât understand it then the onus is on them? Where is the recognition of the possibility that the concepts behind the language are the problem, that they are beyond oneâs comprehension?
Tell you what. You give me a list of who you consider to be leading suspects for unreadable philosophy , and I will summarize, simplify, and link their work to social scientists who have embraced them. Since your beef isnât with empirical writing but only philosophy , you will presumably have no problem correctly interpreting the empirical ideas of these scientists. My expectation is that you will have trouble doing precisely that. Becuase the problem isnât so much with the style of writing of philosophers, itâs with the content. Itâs essentially the same content in the hands of the scientists who embrace them, just expressed in amore conventionalized language. This may give the illusion of readability, but thatâs deceptive.
:fire:
That is what a person of self-discipline will do. And that is what I tell myself I should do. And, it is what I have been told by others to do. And I resolve to do it. Faulker taught me.
I've also heard he has other good stuff. I just wish that when I was doing my research for a good book, I would have been told to read his other work. But yeah, I slog through, thinking all along "Well, it has to get better! I mean, people said how great this is. They can't be wrong!" Some movies are that way too.
Hopefully I've learned my lesson.
That explains why Popper never understood Kuhn.
Yes. If you do your best to explain and the person does not understand, then the onus tends to be on the person who doesn't get it. I agree with you.
There are, however, personal factors: what you find interesting another person will not or may find it trivial or boring or pointless. That's the way it is with people.
But at the very least, I agree with him that if you can't explain the basic idea or general thought behind something, I'm going to be suspect of your (not you specifically, but anybody) understanding of the topic.
This likely does not apply to mathematics.
Quoting Joshs
It doesn't follow from the fact that someone's work wasn't understood in his time, that future discoveries will show that it was actually important.
Quoting Joshs
A hard task, but not an impossible one, unlike with people like Derrida and Lacan (excluding his psychology, about which I haven't read enough to make a judgement). I bet their âideasâ(if you can even call them that) will not have any importance in the next 200 years.
Quoting Joshs
Once again, it doesn't follow that if a work is dismissed as nonsense or as unimportant, that means that it is in fact not nonsense and/or important.
Quoting Joshs
I don't know Merleau-Ponty, and I only know
a bit about Heidegger's work , so I can't comment on them (they are not who I had in mind when speaking of poststructuralism anyway). But perhaps you could give me a brief explanation of how Heidegger's work helped or is contributing to scientific progress.
As for Husserl, I actually find his work quite interesting, and he wasn't at all who I had in mind when I refered to post-structuralists, I would classify him rather as an analytic philosopher. I don't take âpostmodernâ or âpost-structuralistâ to mean merely âcontemporaryâ.
I had in mind rather the kind of authors who say the nonsense featured in Sokal and Bricmont's âFashionable Nonsenseâ.
If you can find a paragraph quoted in that book that Sokal and Bricmont failed to understand (like Irigaray's quote in my previous post) explain it to me in simple terms and show how it's important, perhaps I can take your views more seriously.
Take descriptions of advanced shapes, such as a metatrons cube or a tesseract.
You wouldn't clearly write a description of a tesseract. It wouldn't pass off saying it was a cube inside a cube - go on - have a go.
I understand what a tesseract is, and it compels a deep sort of conversation.
I think the problem is deeper discussions are treated as 'sweet talking' when truly they're just intriguing to the wise of men.
I conclude by saying people should have more freedom where writing it concerned, they must be concise and then intellectual, but not necessarily direct.
What Popper specifically did not understand was the idea behind the paradigm, that worldviews, scientific and otherwise, function as integrated gestalts, and when a gestalt shift takes place, no amount of plain speaking will produce comprehension if the person has not achieved this shift in worldview.
Popper denied that change in theoretical ideas takes place this way because he remained wedded to a correspondence view of truth.
To be fair , if your only exposure to âpostmodern philosophyâ is Sokalâs book, you really need to read primary sources , or at least notable interpreters of such sources. I should mention that I donât find Irigaray to be a significant philosopher , and I share with Derrida a distaste for Lacanâs sloppy style. The âpostmodernâ writers I particularly admire are Derrida , Foucault, Deleuze, Heidegger ( yes, I consider him to be postmodern) , and Wittgenstein.
Quoting Amalac
I read Derridaâs ideas as being in close proximity to Heideggerâs but venturing just a little beyond him. So as long as Heidegger remains relevant , so will Derrida.
Quoting Amalac
Matthew Ratcliffe is one of the leading writers on cognition and emotion. Here are two articles showing why he considers Heideggerâs work on affect and mood so relevant to current theorizing in psychology. Ratcliffe is not alone here. Jan Slaby, Evan Thompson , Dam Zahavi, Thomas Fuchs and many others in psychology are turning to his work.
https://www.academia.edu/458309/Why_Mood_Matters
https://www.academia.edu/458222/Heideggers_Attunement_and_the_Neuropsychology_of_Emotion
Why would I go to the trouble of doing that? There are so many other good books out there - philosophy, non-fiction, poetry, fiction - why would I spend my time reading books I didn't enjoy or get anything out of?
Quoting Joshs
I see part of the confusion here is purely verbal: I don't consider Foucault or Wittgenstein to be obscurantist at all, unlike Derrida. I don't consider them âpostmodernâ.
Quoting Joshs
I never said it was my only exposure, that's something you inferred on your own.
Quoting Joshs
Ok, I'll read them if I have the chance.
Thereâs that word âclearâ again. Iâm still not sure what itâs supposed to mean, other that that you understand someoneâs prose. With regard to Popper, what you call âclearâ I call lacking in depth, which leads me to the conclusion that clarity is in the mind of the beholder.
You don't think there's a qualitative difference in writing quality between Husserl and Russell?
I'm not speaking about depth of ideas, that's person dependent, but I'd be surprised if you said that Husserl wrote better than Russell or Heidegger than Plato. Nothing against either Husserl or Heidegger, in fact I enjoy them, but not because of style.
Thatâs a toughie. I canât stand Russell, and am allergic to most analytic approaches to philosophy in general. To me they come across as terribly thin, utterly unable
to dig more than a millimeter or two beneath the surface of a thought. The few exceptions I found were Putnam and Rorty, and I suppose thatâs because they were distancing themselves from the analytic style. It took me decades to penetrate Husserl, and thatâs because he leapt so far ahead of his contemporaries that every sentence he wrote was like a thesis unto itself.
That's fine in that you don't find what Russell says interesting or deep. I was only speaking about prose style.
On the other hand, to your credit, you tend to express yourself quite clearly, not in the convoluted way Husserl did. You can say that that's because he was ahead of his time. Maybe.
But then there are people, like Zahavi, who do explain Husserl very clearly.
Quoting Joshs How many of his books have you read?
The main problem I see with obscure language is fake depth. It is a phenomenon linked to projection: the reader faced with an obscure and ambiguous text tends to project his own intuitions onto the text and this results in a play of mirrors, an echo effect where the reader can easily mistake hollowness with depth.
That's actually Einstein. :roll:
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.â
I couldn't find that quote...
Same here. I wanted to quote an intellectual giant on the issue but I don't even know where to begin. So, I'll try to convey my thoughts in my own words.
[quote=TheMadFool]When a photograph isn't clear, there are two possibilities:
1. Something's wrong with your eyes. Correctable with the help of an ophthalmologist
2. The photograph itself is fuzzy/blurry. Impossible to correct. [/quote]
I'll take your word for it.
If philosophy is not about conceptual clarification, then it is nothing.
Hence if supposed discussion muddies things further, requesting further explication is good practice.
So it would be wrong, as you say, to reject outright a discussion that is unclear. But it would be worse to accept it. Demanding clarification is then the best response.
If clarification is not forthcoming, or if the reply is equally obscure, then it is reasonable to move on; indeed, in not pursuing an obscure line of discussion, one is not rejecting anything, since nothing has been presented.
I think the beholder part is largely true. It's also a product of experience. If you are an academic who has been trained to read more, shall we call it 'technical' writing, then your reading experience is different. Abstruseness/complexity are relative terms.
To call prose 'clear' you would probably need to set a range of key indicators that describe what clear looks like - something similar to what George Orwell did in his essay "Politics and The English Language" (the principles transcend cultural chauvinism). I do hold an old fashioned belief that a writer should strive for clarity and there are likely to be a range of steps they can take to build this into their writing and articulation of ideas.
:100:
Not everyone agrees with that.
:100:
Quoting Tom Storm
I'm no academic, and I'm lacking in a lot of philosophical terms of art. This forces me to write things out "long hand" if you will. But the idea might still be there.
How? Because you say so?
No. It is your belief that philosophy is about clarifying concepts, not mine.
So you want philosophy that makes no difference.
I am not saying that either. All I said not everyone agrees that philosophy is about clarifying concepts. How philosophy should be done is a different matter.
My desires about philosophy isn't relevant.
What I am advocating is called argument. When someone says something, if it doesn't make sense you can ask for clarification. Been that way since at least Socrates.
It's What We Do.
Supposing otherwise undermines the process in which we are engaged.
So yeah, my way is the right way. But it's not just me who says it is the right way.
So what it comes down to is, if you think philosophy is not about conceptual clarification, then it is up to you to present an account of philosophy that does involve conceptual clarification.
That is, it is over to you to clarify your concept of philosophy.
Good luck.
So drop the "truely"; it does nothing, anyway. Or if you prefer, drop "understand" and try realising that there is no one way to read any text.
Quoting Wheatley
Then get a better translator. The request for clarification remains cogent.
Quoting Wheatley
It's also easy to dismiss failure to write clearly as a failure on the part of the reader.
Quoting Wheatley
Then the clarification is the additional knowledge needed to follow the argument. Hence the need for SEP.
Again, your point is clear; requesting clarification can be used as a rhetorical tool. But the alternative strikes me as far worse; allowing nonsense to propagate.
I like to leave philosophy open and creative. Having predispositions on the proper way to do philosophy, such as demanding clarity all the time, is very constraining.
That's poetry.
Wrong forum.
It has already been done! I like the Britannica article on philosophy Link. Analytic philosophy (which you seem to be advocating) is merely a modern construct.
I'm against this proposition. Suppose the author of a text intended you to understand it a particular way. I like to read something the way it was intended to be read.
Different languages have a different feel to it. Even if you get a good translation, you can still misunderstand the author.
That's true. :lol:
Have you successfully stopped nonsense from propagating? If so, my hat is off to you.
I'll say this: Your way of describing philosophy can be very useful for communication on the Philosophy Forum, but there's no god-like figure that can decree that this way is the correct way of doing philosophy.
If what you prepare to say or what you theorise, is concise, you can be intellectual, almost automatically. You cannot reduce conciseness to simplicity in communication. The more clear it is the better, but by no means is clarity straightforward, you may not be able to word correctly something that can be made clear through metaphor, and then poets claim to misunderstand and you are deemed obscure.
Forgive me for bringing up the Winged Propeller shape which is an active shape like a tesseract.
It has two symmetrical propellers at the back of a 'klein bottle' connected front chassis on which a sentient (capable of roaming and judging passively) intelligence is created in its global center, through the harmonious swirling power generated by the torque of propellers and the front layer that simulates aerodynamicity.
Seems like jibberish - then you are not looking at conciseness, you are a non intellectual on shape or lesser than me, or you're thinking perversely.
First judge if my description of the Winged Propeller shape is concise, perhaps engage with debate. It seems there are no debates on this forum, just competitive discussion.
It's not poetry if you include critical reasoning.
So you can do this without conceptual clarification?
How will you be able to tell?
Quoting Wheatley
The same language has a different feel to it. These are not just issues of translation from French or German.
Quoting Wheatley
Why... because you say so? Why can't @PoeticUniverse write critical poetry?
What do you mean "do this without conceptual clarification"? That's just a general outline of philosophy, there are many kinds of philosophy, not all of them involve conceptual analysis.
Are you looking for a definition?
Quoting Banno
Yeah, but it's even more unfamiliar when it comes from a foreign language.
Quoting Banno
Non-poetic creative philosophy. Happy?
Many people think in black-and-white terms. They are not interested in understanding things, but in taking sides. So even when they read a (would-be) philosophical text, they do so with an intention of taking sides. If it turns out that they can't do so easily (because they agree with some things in the text, while disagree with others, and some they don't understand), they take this as a cue to oppose the text/the author.
Nonsense isn't like weeds, so that once you pull or dig it out, it would be gone for a least a while.
Nonsense is something far more systemic, complex, eluding direct action.
But in academic setting, test scores and criticism from professors are meant weed out the kinds of people who spout nonsense. (Perhaps not.)
Quoting baker
Yes, especially on the internet where anyone can spout nonsense and get away with it.
Quoting baker
How do you deal with such people?
One problem with your description is that I don't have a strong ability to visualize complex objects. Clarity could be provided by an illustration.
Come on, Banno. Do you really claim that this is the way philosophy works here on the forum, or in philosophy in general, for that matter. Or for you, for that matter.
If it is spawned at all it generates whirling power into it's global center and that contained power then judges automatically and roams, wherever the flow takes it.
I donât think prose style can be separated from the content of oneâs ideas. I canât imagine Husserl
writing his phenomenology in any other way , without it changing the very substance of the work. Zahavi writes âclearlyâ about Husserl. He is also a lightweight in comparison to Husserl who I think misses vital features of Husserlâs work.
I write in a certain way on this site in an attempt to co-ordinate with where I think others are at in their thinking. I write very differently when I am elaborating my own philosophical ideas without such constraints and compromises.
With regard to Russell vs Husserl, I also think the notion of clarity is connected with how one views the nature of facts and truth. Russell is old
school , holding onto what Wittgenstein called a picture theory of truth. Being clear for Russel thus meant presenting pictures to others as cleanly as possible. I but Husserl , like Wittgenstein , was âpost-pictureâ in his thinking. Truth becomes a constantly evolving self-referential process rather than directed toward pictorial representation. This is why Husserl considered himself
to be an eternal beginner, always on the road to full clarity but approaching it by endlessly starting over.
Reading through all the responses on this thread, it strikes me there are people who don't think a philosophical idea can be profound or important unless it is obscure or difficult. Maybe to them the effort required to figure something out is related to its value.
In France, you gotta have ten percent incomprehensible, otherwise people wonât think itâs deepâthey wonât think youâre a profound thinker.â
Quoting T Clark
Well , profundity and importance tend to be synonymous with a certain notion of difficulty , dont they? When the light bulb goes on and thereâs a âeurekaâ moment, in that moment it all seems so easy, so effortless. But how often do such moments occur without long, hard preparation and struggle, reading the same sentences or formulas over and over without clarity? Most of the exciting concepts in science I learned ( Darwinism, Newtonian and relativistic physics) unfolded this way.
As far as obscurity is concerned, the word implies something hidden, veiled, unclear. For centuries , the obscure was the enemy of philosophy. It was the murky and deceptive veil of appearances that it was philosophyâs job to clear away. Philosophyâs handmaiden, the sciences , reinforced the idea that obscurity was the enemy of truth. But then scepticism began creeping in with Hume , and Kantâs attempt to salvage the old
verities forced him to let obscurity in via the unattainable thing-in-itself. This was still an obscurity beholden to and dominated by apodictic truth. The door to obscurity was opened wider with Hegelâs dialectic of becoming. Kantâs categorical and moral certainties could no longer justify themselves. But the path to scientific truth via falisification was opened up.
Obscurity only made its way into the heart of truth with the post-Hegelian relativisms of Rorty, Kuhn and Feyerabend, Wittgenstein,Nietzsche, the phenomenologists , the Pragmatists, the social constructionists and the postmodernists. If one is still
wedded to Kantian or Hegelian notions of truth, then reading the above works may lead to a different experience of obscurity. That is, they may
simply appear incoherent, inconsistent and deliberately obfuscating . One may never get to what they are trying to reveal and see only an inadequate style.
You know much, much, much more about Husserl than me. I ask for a clear exposition of ideas, that can be done. It's another thing if you get technical and develop a description which is sophisticated, that's fine, it's a part of professional philosophy.
Russell was sympathetic to certain aspects of Wittgenstein's early work. But he is much broader and covers many more topics than Wittgenstein. Doesn't mean he's better for it, but that's a fact.
I can see why phenomenology is a work of constant renewal and why Husserl was constantly refining his ideas. That makes it interesting too. But I don't think the expressions he uses easies understanding. We'll have to disagree on that part.
I will say this about Husserlâs concepts. Many of his terms fly in the face of conventional understandings. For instance , his use of soul, spirit , ego, intention. As is the tendency among Continental philosophers, he dipped into older uses of such words , going back as far as the Greeks. We in the Anglo world prefer to work with the most contemporary and most narrowly technical uses of words in our philosophies. This often leads to trouble. The translation of Freudâs Interpretation of Dreams for American audiences wiped out all of the vital literary-philosophical context of terms like Ich and Esse and substituted narrowly psychological meanings( Ego and Id). It really distorted the overal character of the work
So you do have to learn essentially a new vocabulary with Husserl and Heidegger, but once you have done so, you may come to realize that it is actually a much richer use of concepts than the flat and narrow technicalization of them that we see in analytic writing.
Unlike the latter , it connects and integrates new concepts with an unbroken heritage of literature , philosophy and theology going back thousands of years .
Absolutely, positively, completely, indubitably no.
Quoting Joshs
As I noted previously, science is different from philosophy, with the exception, I guess, of logic.
Quoting Joshs
I guess I see this as just the opposite. The idea of thing-in-itself is the ultimate simplification. It's the world with all the paint and glitter of language and reason stripped off. What could be less obscure. It's right there if you look. Just turn off the words that obscure it.
Quoting Joshs
I can't speak to most of these, but it is absolutely not true of the pragmatists. How could an understanding of reality nailed down to concrete human behavior and understanding be obscure.
And that's fine.
Quoting Joshs
I can speak about Heidegger, I was quite into him several years ago. As far as I can see, he uses an interesting type of language to understand everyday life, which often evokes a kind of mystical experience, which I find valuable.
It's quite deep in this sense. But I find more senses of depth in other writers, such as Schopenhauer or James and even Russell in parts of his analysis of common sense conception in relation to physics and physiology.
Heck I find Whitehead more deep than Heidegger (in the latter sense of depth), and Whitehead is as hard as they come in some parts. Peirce too.
But Whitehead could has been much clearer, while still retaining complexity in thought.
Give me an example in your life of stumbling upon a fresh scientific idea that was profoundly important to you , and tell me why there was âAbsolutely, positively, completely, indubitablyâ no difficulty or labor leading up to youâre being prepared to recognize it.
Quoting T Clark
I think you mean that, FOR YOU, science and philosophy differ this way. Which may explain why you donât wax enthusiastic about philosophy. For me, there is absolutely no difference between the âeurekaâ moments I have experienced while discovering scientific concepts, and those experienced reading important philosophy( or , for that matter , some literature). Why should
there be? What is it about philosophy that could
possibly prevent such an experience?
As my favorite psychologist, George Kelly said, âthe brilliant scientist and the brilliant writer are pretty likely to end up saying the same thing.â
Quoting T Clark
Because it makes meaning relative to situational use , and therefore is an inherent âobscurityâ in that there is nothing any longer of truth to ânail downâ outside of pragmatic use. The problem with nailing things down is that , as a pragmatist, you canât separate the meaning of what it is that is being nailed down from the contingent purpose for nailing it. As the purpose changes, so does what is nailed. James wasnât prepared to go quite this far in his pragmatism, but Rorty and Wittgenstein were.
Conceptual clarification is what philosophy consists in, yes. And further, if you have an honest think about it, you will agree. And this even despite your penchant for threads that are merely making lists.
Consider:
,,,and so on. Your own threads. What are these if not quests for clarity?
And it obviously, obviously does. Not every difficult work is dishonest, obviously. Ideas can be very difficult, and so can expressing them clearly. But the rampant abuse of difficult language, in contemporary writing especially, has caused a suspicion of all difficult writing.
That Irigary quote... The fact that it can exist at all, and the author not laughed out of academia, but rather be taught and celebrated, speaks to a deep corruption and dishonesty in academic humanities.. Which ruins the discipline for everyone, and deserves all the hate it gets.
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It depends on how it's formulated.
"You're not making any sense!"
vs.
"I don't understand what you mean here. Could you explain it a bit more? What is the relation between your A and B?"
But I suppose no self-respecting philosopher would ever utter the latter, at least not meaning it genuinely.
Hence this should be the preferred method of philosophizing:
You throw rocks at them, or shoot Hellfire missiles at them, whichever is more handy for you. Barring that, you leave their presence.
You've got to hide your love of wisdom away.
This seems like typical Banno snarky insulting bullshit, which is much more common than any search for clarity. So, in the interests of clarity, am I right about that?
Kant actually says in the Preface to the First Edition of the CPR that he eschews from using examples because it would make the text longer than it needed to be, and distract from understanding the whole:
Elsewhere, Kant also says that it is the deserving right of other minds to elucidate his transcendental philosophy in this secondary aesthetic way. He also remarks that examples can be more easily criticized and thus turned against the theory, so it is best to avoid accidentally exposing your theory to criticism that can make it appear to be false.
Yes. I remember reading that part.
I find it ironic that he thought that giving examples would make his thought more difficult to criticize. As if his thought isn't already criticized (and interpreted) in thousands of ways by all kinds of people, not only philosophers.
But I think Schopenhauer proved him wrong in this respect, he gives plenty of lucid examples and writes beautifully. Granted, they differ in several respects.
There's is some merit in that he was trying to articulate some difficult ideas, but others before him who said very similar ideas, weren't much clearer.
Nice.
You, TClark, create two sorts of threads. Lists and conceptual analysis.
Only one of these is philosophy. The other is stamp collecting.
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