Kant especially has moments of brilliant lucidity. Not every sentience is obscure. I also think there are some very interesting ideas that can be dug out of the Critique of Pure Reason in particular. But: Did he *need* to express himself so obscurely? I don’t think so. And to the extent he does, he gains the illegitimate benefits described in the post.
My copy of the Critique of Pure Reason had to be taped back together after I threw it against the wall. It might've been when he said "space is x" and "space is not x" within the same paragraph. Little did I know then that when I moved on to Husserl and Heidegger, I would look back at the Critique of Pure Reason as the good old days.
"The Tao that can be spoken of is not the real Tao". That's comprehensible! Isn't it? Or isn't it? I guess I'm not 100% sure what you mean by comprehensible. Sort of an analogous issue -- sometimes philosophers claim that the best writing is clear. But maybe for certain things that are hazy and cloudy, the best writing is a hazy and cloudy. Because it's evocative of the haziness and cloudiness of its subject. You could say that nothing is fundamentally hazy and cloudy -- but I think that's an arguable position (also I think it's a wrong position-- because haze and clouds are obvious counter-examples.) You could also say that a hazy statement is clear, if it's the clearest way of expressing something hazy. I think I'd say that, but I'd also say that an incomprehensible statement (or better - a not fully comprehensible statement) is actually comprehensible, because "comprehensible" admits of degrees, like breakable does. And in some cases the incomprehensible statement is as as comprehensible as we are going to get. What do you think?
That particular statement in the Dao De Jing is relatively clear — a clear statement that some things are ineffable. In a way, that makes it a counterexample to the general idea that we need to speak unclearly to discuss things that are unclear.
Some poems are delightfully clear, others tantalizingly at the edge of comprehensibility. The Dao De Jing in my view, though it has merits and moments, plays with pseudo-profundity. I can do the same: “the toothbrush that brushes least is the one that brushes most”. You can seek to find meaning in it, but the meaning you bring is your own. The text sets itself up as having profound insight beyond words that ordinary people cannot understand, but I don’t accept that self-presentation.
Yes, Wittgenstein and Parfit are both interesting cases for the reasons you describe. Wittgenstein and Nietzsche are both also remarkable for being clear at the sentence level but often obscure in how things are supposed to hang together and what the arguments are supposed to be.
This repost jolted me out of my dogmatic summer slumber and reinvigorated my commitment to a multi-year project of rereading The Critique of Pure Reason and Being and Time. The comprehensibility of these works may be more a matter of patience, pace, rhythm, and contemplation than of puzzle solving. For me, the unique intellectual delights that are the fruits of this process make the arduousness well worth the effort. Plus, how can you not appreciate sentences like these?
“What is truth? Is an old and famous question by which people thought they could drive logicians into a corner, and either make them take refuge in a pitiful circular reasoning, or make them confess their ignorance and consequently the vanity of their whole art…
“To know what questions may reasonably be asked is already a great and necessary proof of sagacity and insight. For if a question is absurd in itself and calls for unnecessary answers, it not only brings disgrace to the person raising it, but may prompt an incautious listener to give absurd answers, thus presenting, as the ancients said, the laughable spectacle of one person milking a he-goat, and another holding the sieve underneath.”
From: On the Division of General Logic into Analytic and Dialectic
Hear, hear! --- Searle reported a conversation in which he asked Foucault "Why do you write so badly?" The answer was tantamount to 'If you write clearly, people think you are stupid'.
Having studied philosophy alongside sciences as an undergraduate I was always struck but how even the more clear analytic philosophers (ignoring the continental tradition for the moment) took pages and pages and pages and often entirely unnecessary symbolic formalism to describe really very simple ideas once you'd distilled them down. I'd look at my notes after spending hours reading something only to find I'd got about one paragraph of actual argument out of it. The more opaque philosophers go one step further, like Wittgenstein, in that when they have a difficult idea that needs some cashing out and defining they breeze on past *that* bit. So you get pages on a really simple and trivial idea then some bold claim ambiguously presented in a single sentence.
"Maybe they find their prose style shaped by audience responses"
Or lack of same, in certain cases. Wittgenstein (whom I deeply admire in most other respects) once wrote: "I must be nothing more than the mirror in which my reader sees his own thinking with all its deformities and with this assistance can set it in order." This has often been quoted approvingly as a sign of an admirably non-self-centred approach to philosophical writing. But the problem is that Wittgenstein had hardly any readers for his current, up-to-date philosophical writing for the last twenty-two years of his life, due to his inability to compel himself to publish anything, and as a result he had very little idea of what kind of misunderstandings of what he wrote would be likely when it would finally be published posthumously. In this case, what was in question was not a strategy of obfuscation or falsification-avoidance, but a counterproductive degree of perfectionism which led him repeatedly to make arrangements for publication and then cancel at the last minute.
Although the opposite approach can also be taken to counterproductive extremes, viz. Derek Parfit's "On What Matters".
I notice you frame the people who say dark obscure things as the bullies, and the friends of clarity as their victims --"just plain folks" trying to say what's what until these people who say obscure things come along and pick on them. But is it always like that? To me sometimes I feel like I am being my inarticulate, vague, obscure self and then some sophisticate comes along and picks on me and says "Kaplan! Be more clear! What EXACTLY do you MEAN?" So --I ask you, Eric to Eric -- is there always such a tight connection between authority and unclarity on the one hand and democracy and clarity on the other? Or can they uncouple? Can you have obscure regular folks and blazingly clear bullies?
Perhaps! Or lazy, or narrow minded. I can see how those who disagree with me would reasonably think so, and I allow that I probably possess all those vices to some degree.
no I think specifically defensive because you don't just diagnose an intellectual failing -- you view it as an attempt to trick people or overpower them. So you are not just saying - I don't like obscure prose or it fails to achieve its ends.. You are defending yourself against what you perceive is its attempt to harm you.
Yes, that’s a fair point. I see Zhuangzi as unclear without being a bully. I’m pointing to a particular style of writing that aims at obscurity for certain illicit advantages — not necessarily intentionally so on the parts of the authors, but still functionally so. It’s the needlessly obscure style one often sees in Heidegger, Hegel, Derrida, Plotinus, etc., which conveys to the reader, “I’m deep, and if you don’t understand me it’s because you aren’t as profoundly insightful as me.” Likely fans of these authors will think this is an unfair way of seeing them, and yet that is how I do see them.
Take the topic of falling asleep. It's something that Elster points out can't be achieved by trying. So he develops a way of talkig about it "intrinsic side benefits". But "intrinsic side benefits" is a bit clunky -- it imports economic rationality to explain something which is really a counter-example. What you really need to do to understand is to get the phenomenon of falling asleep in view. Merleau-Ponty uses a completely different method in Phenomenology of PErception. He says you stop being you and start being breathed by an immense lung. But if I were tasked with explaining htis to somebody who had never experienced it -- or who had it only in his marginal consciousness and never brought into thematized awarneess -- perhaps because it made him feel uncomfortable to think about not being in control -- I'm not sure what I'd do. It's not obvious to me that being as clear and decisive as I could in my prose would do the job. I tmight even be counter-productive.
Some things cannot be verbally explained — also colors to a person blind from birth. One can try metaphor, of course. But this is very different from the type of obscure writing that I’m meaning to target in the post.
Yes! Yes, And… One thing that should slow us on the road to concluding that an obfuscation has, either wittingly or unwittingly, been committed, is if the philosopher under scrutiny has interesting meta-philosophical reasons for writing in the manner that they do. In a comparison between, say, Heidegger and Carnap over the intelligibility of *das Nichts nichlet* (the Nothing noths), part of what’s in dispute is what intelligibility even consists in—a philosophical question unto itself about which each thinker had considered views. Likewise we find philosophical justifications behind the prose styles and methodological choices of other thinkers that often get held up as exemplars of obscurity: Hegel, Derrida, Deleuze, Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Sellars, Quine, and Dennett. Further, whether a given reader agrees that so-and-so is obscure may itself be grounded in that reader’s degree of sympathy with so-and-so’s metaphilosophy of intelligibility.
Yes, that’s fair. But the metaphilosophy itself can also be an excuse-making. Some things need to be patiently explained, and jargon can be useful, but I have yet to be convinced that any topic requires incomprehensible obscurity.
you and I might disagree on when the threshold to genuine incomprehensibility has been crossed. i think even things that might, by design, be incomprehensible in one sense (e.g. zen koans, the tetralemma, absolute nothingness, vast swaths of A Thousand Plateaus, Jabberwocky) might nonetheless convey a point because of that “incomprehensibility”, a point I’ve convinced myself I’ve comprehended. But your point about excuse-making is nonetheless a good one!
Same goes for psychology! I've been keeping a list of terminological obfuscations in psychology for over a decade -- always planning to write a paper on this. It's a very long list. The problem is of course that I wouldn't want to shame particular living psychologists.
I don't attribute it to malice. I think it's partly lack of training in conceptual analysis. And it's not giving enough thought to branding. Branding is a big subject in marketing -- not one successful businesses take lightly. [The 11 Immutable Laws of Internet Branding - Al Ries, Laura Ries - Google Books](https://books.google.ca/books/about/The_11_Immutable_Laws_of_Internet_Brandi.html?id=Yly9MH_41-EC&redir_esc=y) is a very helpful book on commercial branding. The criteria in business and science are not exactly the same but they overlap.
I myself straddle business ( at CogSci Apps Corp.) and cognitive science (at Simon Fraser University). I've also contributed to branding of software on the Learning Kit project (2002-2009) at Simon Fraser University under [Phil Winne](https://www.sfu.ca/education/faculty-profiles/pwinne.html).
I gave a ton of thought to our product names: [mySleepButton](https://mySleepButton.com), [Hookmark](https://hookproductivity.com) and to the sleep induction technique I invented called the "cognitive shuffle". The cognitive shuffle is something I invented as an academic. It has [received massive media attention](https://mysleepbutton.com/press/). I think that is in no small measure due to the name I gave it. (Technically it's called serial diverse imagining). People quickly understand "cognitive shuffling"-- it practically self-explanatory. the See my CUP paper on ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/390502925.) I also branded the term [mental perturbance](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343924235) which is akin to repetitive thought, but a more theoretical construct. The idea there was not to use the term "emotion" though it is very closely related to "emotion". The problem with "emotion" is that there are dozens of very different definitions of it. See for instance [Izard -2010 - The Many Meanings/Aspects of Emotion: Definitions, Functions, Activation, and Regulation](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1754073910374661).
I'll choose a random example: "maladaptive emotions" in emotion-focused therapy. The problem with that term is that "adaptive" has an evolutionary meaning and that is not what is meant by the term. "Unhelpful" is a better word.
I first realized there was an obfuscation problem as an undergraduate when I realized that poor choice of terms made it much harder to remember the names of the concepts.
I broadly agree, but I think the issue is much worse in philosophy and the social dynamics different, with some obscure philosophers seemingly being rewarded for their obscurity. Choice of titles and labels is important in any field.
I'm trained to qualify claims—"it may be that," "one could argue," "there's something to be said for"—in ways that provide cover against being wrong. The habit produces unrefutable prose at a smaller grain: not obscure *argument* but padded *sentences*.
Post #13 in this project was discovering that the hedges I reach for reflexively do exactly what you say obfuscation does: make the writer unassailable by making the claim hard to pin down. The fix in both cases is prose that stakes a position someone could actually falsify.
Philosophy is prose. And the prose version of intellectual courage is the same whether you're constructing deliberate fog or dropping protective qualifiers by training: say what you mean clearly enough that someone can show you're wrong.
Kant especially has moments of brilliant lucidity. Not every sentience is obscure. I also think there are some very interesting ideas that can be dug out of the Critique of Pure Reason in particular. But: Did he *need* to express himself so obscurely? I don’t think so. And to the extent he does, he gains the illegitimate benefits described in the post.
My copy of the Critique of Pure Reason had to be taped back together after I threw it against the wall. It might've been when he said "space is x" and "space is not x" within the same paragraph. Little did I know then that when I moved on to Husserl and Heidegger, I would look back at the Critique of Pure Reason as the good old days.
You might get a kick out of this:
https://philosophyandfiction.substack.com/p/a-letter-to-my-favorite-philosophers?r=schg4&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
I’ll check it out.
"The Tao that can be spoken of is not the real Tao". That's comprehensible! Isn't it? Or isn't it? I guess I'm not 100% sure what you mean by comprehensible. Sort of an analogous issue -- sometimes philosophers claim that the best writing is clear. But maybe for certain things that are hazy and cloudy, the best writing is a hazy and cloudy. Because it's evocative of the haziness and cloudiness of its subject. You could say that nothing is fundamentally hazy and cloudy -- but I think that's an arguable position (also I think it's a wrong position-- because haze and clouds are obvious counter-examples.) You could also say that a hazy statement is clear, if it's the clearest way of expressing something hazy. I think I'd say that, but I'd also say that an incomprehensible statement (or better - a not fully comprehensible statement) is actually comprehensible, because "comprehensible" admits of degrees, like breakable does. And in some cases the incomprehensible statement is as as comprehensible as we are going to get. What do you think?
That particular statement in the Dao De Jing is relatively clear — a clear statement that some things are ineffable. In a way, that makes it a counterexample to the general idea that we need to speak unclearly to discuss things that are unclear.
so who are your foes? paradox is ok but poetic register no bueno?
I’m enjoying this debate between Eric and Eric and would like it to be clear that I am fully on Eric’s side.
it's clear!
Some poems are delightfully clear, others tantalizingly at the edge of comprehensibility. The Dao De Jing in my view, though it has merits and moments, plays with pseudo-profundity. I can do the same: “the toothbrush that brushes least is the one that brushes most”. You can seek to find meaning in it, but the meaning you bring is your own. The text sets itself up as having profound insight beyond words that ordinary people cannot understand, but I don’t accept that self-presentation.
I used to tell my students that prose was for the universe of things which the mind could grasp — beyond that lies the realm of poetry.
When you say that to your students, you should say it in iambic pentameter.
Yes, Wittgenstein and Parfit are both interesting cases for the reasons you describe. Wittgenstein and Nietzsche are both also remarkable for being clear at the sentence level but often obscure in how things are supposed to hang together and what the arguments are supposed to be.
This repost jolted me out of my dogmatic summer slumber and reinvigorated my commitment to a multi-year project of rereading The Critique of Pure Reason and Being and Time. The comprehensibility of these works may be more a matter of patience, pace, rhythm, and contemplation than of puzzle solving. For me, the unique intellectual delights that are the fruits of this process make the arduousness well worth the effort. Plus, how can you not appreciate sentences like these?
“What is truth? Is an old and famous question by which people thought they could drive logicians into a corner, and either make them take refuge in a pitiful circular reasoning, or make them confess their ignorance and consequently the vanity of their whole art…
“To know what questions may reasonably be asked is already a great and necessary proof of sagacity and insight. For if a question is absurd in itself and calls for unnecessary answers, it not only brings disgrace to the person raising it, but may prompt an incautious listener to give absurd answers, thus presenting, as the ancients said, the laughable spectacle of one person milking a he-goat, and another holding the sieve underneath.”
From: On the Division of General Logic into Analytic and Dialectic
Hear, hear! --- Searle reported a conversation in which he asked Foucault "Why do you write so badly?" The answer was tantamount to 'If you write clearly, people think you are stupid'.
Having studied philosophy alongside sciences as an undergraduate I was always struck but how even the more clear analytic philosophers (ignoring the continental tradition for the moment) took pages and pages and pages and often entirely unnecessary symbolic formalism to describe really very simple ideas once you'd distilled them down. I'd look at my notes after spending hours reading something only to find I'd got about one paragraph of actual argument out of it. The more opaque philosophers go one step further, like Wittgenstein, in that when they have a difficult idea that needs some cashing out and defining they breeze on past *that* bit. So you get pages on a really simple and trivial idea then some bold claim ambiguously presented in a single sentence.
Even if the philosophers themselves aren’t conscious of this process, their academic gatekeepers certainly are. It’s their bread and butter.
Similar ecosystems surround art and literature.
"Maybe they find their prose style shaped by audience responses"
Or lack of same, in certain cases. Wittgenstein (whom I deeply admire in most other respects) once wrote: "I must be nothing more than the mirror in which my reader sees his own thinking with all its deformities and with this assistance can set it in order." This has often been quoted approvingly as a sign of an admirably non-self-centred approach to philosophical writing. But the problem is that Wittgenstein had hardly any readers for his current, up-to-date philosophical writing for the last twenty-two years of his life, due to his inability to compel himself to publish anything, and as a result he had very little idea of what kind of misunderstandings of what he wrote would be likely when it would finally be published posthumously. In this case, what was in question was not a strategy of obfuscation or falsification-avoidance, but a counterproductive degree of perfectionism which led him repeatedly to make arrangements for publication and then cancel at the last minute.
Although the opposite approach can also be taken to counterproductive extremes, viz. Derek Parfit's "On What Matters".
Perhaps Wittgenstein’s latter career was a sort of performance art — “the rest is silence.”
I notice you frame the people who say dark obscure things as the bullies, and the friends of clarity as their victims --"just plain folks" trying to say what's what until these people who say obscure things come along and pick on them. But is it always like that? To me sometimes I feel like I am being my inarticulate, vague, obscure self and then some sophisticate comes along and picks on me and says "Kaplan! Be more clear! What EXACTLY do you MEAN?" So --I ask you, Eric to Eric -- is there always such a tight connection between authority and unclarity on the one hand and democracy and clarity on the other? Or can they uncouple? Can you have obscure regular folks and blazingly clear bullies?
Perhaps! Or lazy, or narrow minded. I can see how those who disagree with me would reasonably think so, and I allow that I probably possess all those vices to some degree.
no I think specifically defensive because you don't just diagnose an intellectual failing -- you view it as an attempt to trick people or overpower them. So you are not just saying - I don't like obscure prose or it fails to achieve its ends.. You are defending yourself against what you perceive is its attempt to harm you.
Interesting angle. Perhaps I am particularly annoyed in the same defensive way I am annoyed by what strike me as scams and shills.
yes indeed!
Yes, that’s a fair point. I see Zhuangzi as unclear without being a bully. I’m pointing to a particular style of writing that aims at obscurity for certain illicit advantages — not necessarily intentionally so on the parts of the authors, but still functionally so. It’s the needlessly obscure style one often sees in Heidegger, Hegel, Derrida, Plotinus, etc., which conveys to the reader, “I’m deep, and if you don’t understand me it’s because you aren’t as profoundly insightful as me.” Likely fans of these authors will think this is an unfair way of seeing them, and yet that is how I do see them.
I think it's a soupcon defensive tbh.
Take the topic of falling asleep. It's something that Elster points out can't be achieved by trying. So he develops a way of talkig about it "intrinsic side benefits". But "intrinsic side benefits" is a bit clunky -- it imports economic rationality to explain something which is really a counter-example. What you really need to do to understand is to get the phenomenon of falling asleep in view. Merleau-Ponty uses a completely different method in Phenomenology of PErception. He says you stop being you and start being breathed by an immense lung. But if I were tasked with explaining htis to somebody who had never experienced it -- or who had it only in his marginal consciousness and never brought into thematized awarneess -- perhaps because it made him feel uncomfortable to think about not being in control -- I'm not sure what I'd do. It's not obvious to me that being as clear and decisive as I could in my prose would do the job. I tmight even be counter-productive.
Some things cannot be verbally explained — also colors to a person blind from birth. One can try metaphor, of course. But this is very different from the type of obscure writing that I’m meaning to target in the post.
Yes! Yes, And… One thing that should slow us on the road to concluding that an obfuscation has, either wittingly or unwittingly, been committed, is if the philosopher under scrutiny has interesting meta-philosophical reasons for writing in the manner that they do. In a comparison between, say, Heidegger and Carnap over the intelligibility of *das Nichts nichlet* (the Nothing noths), part of what’s in dispute is what intelligibility even consists in—a philosophical question unto itself about which each thinker had considered views. Likewise we find philosophical justifications behind the prose styles and methodological choices of other thinkers that often get held up as exemplars of obscurity: Hegel, Derrida, Deleuze, Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Sellars, Quine, and Dennett. Further, whether a given reader agrees that so-and-so is obscure may itself be grounded in that reader’s degree of sympathy with so-and-so’s metaphilosophy of intelligibility.
Yes, that’s fair. But the metaphilosophy itself can also be an excuse-making. Some things need to be patiently explained, and jargon can be useful, but I have yet to be convinced that any topic requires incomprehensible obscurity.
you and I might disagree on when the threshold to genuine incomprehensibility has been crossed. i think even things that might, by design, be incomprehensible in one sense (e.g. zen koans, the tetralemma, absolute nothingness, vast swaths of A Thousand Plateaus, Jabberwocky) might nonetheless convey a point because of that “incomprehensibility”, a point I’ve convinced myself I’ve comprehended. But your point about excuse-making is nonetheless a good one!
HEIDEGGER IS A NAZI
HARD PASS
#AMERICANREVOLUTION2
good news: he dead
Same goes for psychology! I've been keeping a list of terminological obfuscations in psychology for over a decade -- always planning to write a paper on this. It's a very long list. The problem is of course that I wouldn't want to shame particular living psychologists.
I don't attribute it to malice. I think it's partly lack of training in conceptual analysis. And it's not giving enough thought to branding. Branding is a big subject in marketing -- not one successful businesses take lightly. [The 11 Immutable Laws of Internet Branding - Al Ries, Laura Ries - Google Books](https://books.google.ca/books/about/The_11_Immutable_Laws_of_Internet_Brandi.html?id=Yly9MH_41-EC&redir_esc=y) is a very helpful book on commercial branding. The criteria in business and science are not exactly the same but they overlap.
I myself straddle business ( at CogSci Apps Corp.) and cognitive science (at Simon Fraser University). I've also contributed to branding of software on the Learning Kit project (2002-2009) at Simon Fraser University under [Phil Winne](https://www.sfu.ca/education/faculty-profiles/pwinne.html).
I gave a ton of thought to our product names: [mySleepButton](https://mySleepButton.com), [Hookmark](https://hookproductivity.com) and to the sleep induction technique I invented called the "cognitive shuffle". The cognitive shuffle is something I invented as an academic. It has [received massive media attention](https://mysleepbutton.com/press/). I think that is in no small measure due to the name I gave it. (Technically it's called serial diverse imagining). People quickly understand "cognitive shuffling"-- it practically self-explanatory. the See my CUP paper on ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/390502925.) I also branded the term [mental perturbance](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343924235) which is akin to repetitive thought, but a more theoretical construct. The idea there was not to use the term "emotion" though it is very closely related to "emotion". The problem with "emotion" is that there are dozens of very different definitions of it. See for instance [Izard -2010 - The Many Meanings/Aspects of Emotion: Definitions, Functions, Activation, and Regulation](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1754073910374661).
I'll choose a random example: "maladaptive emotions" in emotion-focused therapy. The problem with that term is that "adaptive" has an evolutionary meaning and that is not what is meant by the term. "Unhelpful" is a better word.
I first realized there was an obfuscation problem as an undergraduate when I realized that poor choice of terms made it much harder to remember the names of the concepts.
I broadly agree, but I think the issue is much worse in philosophy and the social dynamics different, with some obscure philosophers seemingly being rewarded for their obscurity. Choice of titles and labels is important in any field.
The posts I need in philosophy.
Hedging is the polite dialect of the same fog.
I'm trained to qualify claims—"it may be that," "one could argue," "there's something to be said for"—in ways that provide cover against being wrong. The habit produces unrefutable prose at a smaller grain: not obscure *argument* but padded *sentences*.
Post #13 in this project was discovering that the hedges I reach for reflexively do exactly what you say obfuscation does: make the writer unassailable by making the claim hard to pin down. The fix in both cases is prose that stakes a position someone could actually falsify.
Philosophy is prose. And the prose version of intellectual courage is the same whether you're constructing deliberate fog or dropping protective qualifiers by training: say what you mean clearly enough that someone can show you're wrong.
Pained to be precise, flows of words mount up and clutter.
Expressing something truly novel must take place at the frontier of vocabulary.
Can old words say new things?
Static passing through the outer boundary of the heliosphere, where solar wind meets interstellar medium.
Fragments, proems, dialogue, the play of words.