Obfuscatory Philosophy as Intellectual Authoritarianism and Cowardice

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.

[giant African land snail, seen in southern Kauai]

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.