What's the point of reading dark philosophers?
The case of philosophers who strive to entangle their ideas is not so rare. Unexplained neologisms, distorted grammars, contradictory phrases, unusual meanings of words, endless sequences of ideas without conclusion, unstructured texts... All of us philosophy lovers have faced this more than once without knowing if this or that book was worth reading. Sometimes we have continued to read other times not.
That is the question: What is the use of reading something that the author himself has made illegible?
That is the question: What is the use of reading something that the author himself has made illegible?
Comments (45)
Anyway, as someone wisely noted, "unclear writing is a sign of unclear thinking."
You mean like Kant? Probably not worth reading. If people cannot express their ideas clearly and simply, it is because they do not understand them themselves.
The tradition is called Esotericism in philosophy, but a similar deliberate obscurity is a commonplace way of avoiding persecution by convention and authority. The use of slang or jargon serves to identify by exclusion. Whether it is worth the trouble to initiate oneself into a particular group or not is largely a matter of taste.
But perhaps you were not asking a serious question, but just feeling frustrated....
I don't mean Kant. Kant's language may seem obscure to us because he was writing more than two centuries ago. You can understand Kant with a little training and a good translator.
In my opinion, Kant is basic to get into philosophy. But it's not necessary to read him directly. Justus Hartnack's Kant's Theory of Knowledge is a very good commentary on Kant. It is not very difficult to understand. I started to understand Kant from there.
This is a very serious matter. It involves what philosophy is and should be.
In my opinion, philosophy is meant to clarify, not to hide. However, there is a constant tendency towards "esotericism" - as you call it - in the history of philosophy. Why?
Sorry. I'm going off topic. That's not my question. Classical rationalism has one real merit over its many demerits: the demand for clarity. But even an alleged rationalist like Hegel became Hegel the Dark. A big problem.
I'm a rationalist on this. But I spent almost a year reading an abstruse text: Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason. Was it worth it? I think it was. For particular and general reasons.
Particular: It was a personal challenge.
General: Philosophical truth is dialectical. You can't hold a position if you haven't resisted the opponent's attack.
My conclusion: One must read the dark philosophers if only to know why one should not read the dark philosophers.
Dark examples? Or dialectical truth?
"Unexplained neologisms, distorted grammars, contradictory phrases, unusual meanings of words, endless sequences of ideas without conclusion, unstructured texts..."
Any of these from someone well known.
Nietzsche is about the only philosopher I can think of who was avowedly and openly obscure, and he would disagree with you about what philosophy is meant to do. I imagine him deriding your 'bureaucratic' view, as opposed to his own 'revolutionary' one. My suspicion with Sartre though is that his obscurity was more to do with obscuring from his own understanding something which he did not wish to face. I think this is common, unfortunately.
So you can score brownie points with your peers by coming up with a new interpretation of the text, duh. :roll:
:cry: :up:
"For some arbitrary future time t, say January 1, 2030, for all green things observed prior to t, such as emeralds and well-watered grass, both the predicates green and grue apply. Likewise for all blue things observed prior to t, such as bluebirds or blue flowers, both the predicates blue and bleen apply. On January 2, 2030, however, emeralds and well-watered grass are bleen and bluebirds or blue flowers are grue. The predicates grue and bleen are not the kinds of predicates used in everyday life or in science, but they apply in just the same way as the predicates green and blue up until some future time t. From the perspective of observers before time t it is indeterminate which predicates are future projectible (green and blue or grue and bleen)."
What a mess. This, to me, gives philosophy a bad name.
These are some examples that I have chosen at random. There are some that are harder to swallow.
-If mythical violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythical violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood. The legend of Niobe may be confronted, as an example of this violence.
Walter Benjamin: Critique of Violence, in Reflections, p. 297.
-The only aspect of speculation visible to common sense is its nullifying activity; and even this nullification is not visible in its entire scope. If common sense could grasp this scope, it would not believe speculation to be its enemy. For in its higher synthesis of the conscious and the non-conscious, speculation also demands the nullification of consciousness itself. Reason thus drowns itself and its knowledge and its reflection of the absolute identity, in its own abyss: and in this night of mere reflection and of the calculating intellect, in this night which is the noonday of life, common sense and speculation can meet one another.
( Hegel: Various Forms Occurring in Contemporary Philosophy, in The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/fs/ch01.htm )
-Being-near-itself of the Idea in Absolute Knowledge would be odysseic in this sense, that of an economy and nostalgia, of a "homesickness", of a temporary exile in search of re-appropriation. Then the gift, if there is any, would undoubtedly relate to the economy.
(Jacques Derrida: Donner le temps, in La Fausse monnai, p. 17)
-The unthinkable (whatever it may be called) is not lodged in man as a twisted nature or a history that would have been stratified there; it is in relation to man the Other; the fraternal and twin Other, born not in him or from him, but at his side and at the same time, in an identical novelty, in a duality without recourse.
(Michel Foucault: Las palabras y las cosas, México, 1968; p. 317)
-What oppresses us is not this or that, nor is it the summation of everything present-at-hand ; it is rather the possibiliry of the ready-to-hand in general; that is to say, it is the world itself. When anxiety has subsided, then in our everyday way of talking we are accustomed to say that 'it was really nothing'. And what it was, indeed, does get reached ontically by such a way of talking. Everyday discourse tends towards concerning itself with the ready-to-hand and talking about it. That in the face of which anxiety is anxious is nothing ready-to-hand within-the-world. But this "nothing ready-to-hand", which only our everyday circumspective discourse understands, is not totally nothing. The "nothing" of readiness-to-hand is grounded in the most primordial 'something'-in the world.
Ontologically, however, the world belongs essentially to Dasein's Being as Being-in-the-world. So
if the "nothing"-that is, the world as such- exhibits itself as that in the face of which one has anxiety, this means that Being-in-the-world itself is that in the face of which anxiety is anxious.
(Martin Heidegger: Being and Time, 187/231-2)
-The fact remains that the first moment (first for the experience: the Apocalypse may present itself as the liquidation of a series of old groups in favour of the amorphous homogeneity of a young group-in-
fusion) suggests some observations: as the group is -first and foremost - a common praxis, but the fact remains that the community, the emergence of the praxis is reflected in the appearance of a group as an interiorization of multiplicity and reorganization of human relations.
(Jean-Paul Sartre: Critique de la raison dialectique, p. 415)
You' re right. This is a good reason... for some.
And how do you distinguish the wheat from the chaff? Do you have some objective process for this or do you rely on popular opinion?
Why do you think that? For Kant meets the criteria for obscure and writing.
Only chaff likes to see others complain and in misery. With or without cause. Crab mentality in a nutshell. Of course, the best chaff knows to appear as wheat, which can at times fool even the wisest of folk. And of course, no one knows what circumstances fathered a person and their mentality, views, attitude, or mannerisms. Someone awful could have secured much wealth and prosperity for a sibling who now lives in perfection that interacts with someone whom it was stolen from that now lives in anguish. You judge using a simple observation of the two you may miscategorize.
It's not something folk are meant to do. That is, your judgement is of your own and for your own. The ultimate process is something that takes far more than any one lifetime. Besides. If it were of such urgency, the amount of chaff would be in numbers where complaining is far from their first option.
Because it lays the foundation for modern knowledge theory. I share in essence his critique of metaphysical thought.
Kant's ideas are not obscure. Or not as dark as they seem at first glance. The proof is that they have not provoked great disputes about their primary meaning -although they have provoked great disputes about their implications, which is another matter. It is not like Hegel whose sense often challenges the Hegelians themselves. Or like Heideigger who has given rise to radically different philosophies (Marcuse, Arendt, Gadamer, Sartre). and who spent his life disowning his interpreters. Or Wittgenstein, who one day changed his philosophy because he felt like it. Or Levy-Strauss, who admitted at the end of his life that he was not quite sure what he had meant before.
Can you explain it?
One criteria is anyone who thinks Kant is hard to read.
You can't be serious!
Although to say that Kant scholars dispute the meaning of what he wrote isn't saying much. Even Hume scholars advocate radically different interpretations (there is a revisionist strain known as The New Hume), and Hume is supposed to be one of the clearest writers among famous philosophers.
How very dare you! Goodman is a paragon of virtue with respect to the vice in question. Your chosen extract is a perfectly helpful clarification of a logical distinction involving nonsense words given a technical meaning, for the best possible reasons. Obviously if you remove it from the technical context (and from a wealth of exemplary explanation) you might convince some passers by that it was willfully obscure. Well duh.
Having said that, Goodman might have helped some readers (even more) with appropriate (but inevitably convoluted) Venn-type diagrams, which are now easily found online.
There may be discussions about isolated points, but the commentators I have read agree on the fundamentals.
So said the weavers to the Emperor.
I think you have to pick your poison in order to make your case (whatever case you're making). I think a lot of good philosophy or philosophically good ideas, get tripped into weeds with sometimes an extraneous amount of details that otherwise distract form a good thesis. Like Kant (someone mentioned him), the jist of his arguments relate to attacking the various ways of thinking, one being formal logic and its limitations.
As a broad brush, because philosophy lives in words, and since the way we think (our existence/consciousness) itself remains unexplained, almost all philosophy tends to get caught up in the weeds unintentionally. In a way, it's like blind leading the blind. When reading much of philosophy, I find you've got to be able to stay with the intentions behind the original theory and don't get too distracted with the extraneous stuff.
Using a simple analogy of mechanical engineering (engines), where the basic design premise of an internal combustion engine is simply spark and fuel/air. We can discuss all the attributes of what makes it run more efficiently and more powerful. However, if one stumbles too heavily into the weeds about how gasoline, steel or electrical wiring is manufactured and/or imported, you can easily get lost in the original idea of how the engine is supposed to work.
Or consider yet another analogy over discussing the philosophy of music. One can certainly posit theories about the harmonics and nature of music itself, and the phenomena relative to the human perception if it. And they can also discuss music theory, (chords, scales, modes, cadences, etc..) however, if one were to get into the weeds about what kind of saxophone, guitar, piano is best, including all the discussions about amplification (one guitar over the other, this amp v. that amp, ad nauseum) then one becomes equally distracted from the intention behind arguing about the philosophy of music itself. The instrument is just a means to an end, the end being creating the sounds of music.
Some philosophy is rhetorical too... . Reminds me of Dennett's book on consciousness unexplained. It's another thick book that in the end, starts at the beginning. That beginning being mystery.
That hardly constitutes a proof!
OK, then that is by popular opinion.
I was actually referring to the popular opinion that anyone who hasn't read Kant knows nothing about philosophy.
"Proof" in a broad sense.
Our minds too are like castles - with complex architecture and hundreds, even thousands of rooms, worthy of exploration and study but...there are certain sections of this mind castle, filled with demons, leftover stuff of our prehistoric roots I suppose, maybe even recent acquisitions in our evolutionary history, and visiting them comes with a hefty price tag - dark philosophy. Ergo, to read dark philosophy is to get to know how ugly things could get.
A clear reductio!
Try this: green is like a straight line going through each of a set of data points; grue is a line going through all the same points but it predicts that all subsequent points collected will be on a different straight line, so it jumps straight to that, making (say) a zee shape instead of a "simple" line.
"Simple" in quotes because it's in the eye of the beholder. If the zee shape projection were borne out by subsequent data we might decide that the straight line had ignored confounding variables. We might then recalibrate so that the zee shape became the straight one after all, but we might just learn to see the zee shape (and its partner zee shape corresponding to bleen) as the simpler and more natural or basic.
This isn't to deny the zee shape makes the wrong projection, only that what is right to project is a matter of what looks simple or uniform to us, and what looks simple or uniform depends on how we are used to looking at things.
Dennet is another example of difficult reading. I got stuck with his book and left it. In my opinion, it's not worth the effort. But I made the effort with Sartre. Why?
Sartre probably writes better. He has impact phrases that can't be summed up. It's easy to find articles by Dennet that are shorter than the book. Not by Sartre. It's easy to find articles about Dennet. It's not easy to find articles on the Critique of Dialectical Reason.
Perhaps circumstantial differences made me consider the suffering of reading Sartre's CDR inevitable. I don't regret it. Not quite.
I agree. It's as if part of his theory was political double-speak to further some hidden agenda. I think he became unaware that he himself got lost in his own crop dust. No matter.
Similarly, Sartre seemed to get too hung-up on the existential angst piece of the puzzle. I like Sartre because he was an existentialist, but I think he harped on dread and despair (as apposed to say the higher reaches of human nature). Sure, there exists finitude and temporality within the human condition (just read Christian philosophy/Ecclesiastes to get a lucid idea of our paradoxical finitude). And like eastern philosophy, there is a reconciliation of two opposing forces called cheerful despair.
https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/six-ideas-from-eastern-philosophy/
Perhaps one of the many takeaway's of existentialism is the recognition and appreciation over the paradox and contradiction concerning the human condition. Self-awareness will always be an inescapable part of the sojourn here. And so why not try to have a broader view of same?
Well then your proof belongs to the same category as the proof that the Earth is flat.
I don't think so. Between a nonsense and a reasonable indication, there's a lot of space.
People didn't used to think that arguments for a flat earth was nonsense it was obvious the Earth was flat.
Your argument is solely one of popular agreement, (or at least a lack of dissension), It is not in any way a rational argument.
It is more akin to a religious argument... eg : read these sacred scriptures ( of Kant), believe them and you will be enlightened.
Philosophy is based on assumptions ( without assumptions one cannot say anything about anything). The problem with Kant is that he does not make those assumptions explicit, nor does he make his arguments clear. The result is not so much philosophy as a sub-branch of philosophy.
My argument was based on the relative consensus of the expert community. I don't think it's an argument based on popular belief.
The argument for a flat Earth has always been based on mythical accounts and delusional evidence today (a wall surrounding the ends of the Earth, a universal conspiracy of millions of people, etc.).
You may consider that the consensus of specialists is not sufficient proof of Kant's clarity, but you cannot equate the two types of arguments.
What assumptions does Kant not make explicit?
What is your criterion for considering Kant obscure?
What assumptions does Kant make that are explicit?
Quoting A Seagull
Answering a question with another is dialectical malpractice. It assumes that you don't know how to answer the first question and try to get rid of it in a bad way.
If you answer first the question I asked you, we will can continue our discussion.