Because they are so clear, they tell you nothing
Someone made a very funny comment on Stephen Law’s interview with Nigel Warburton on the subject of clarity. It’s hard to be sure whether the hilarity is intentional or accidental – I find myself hoping, perhaps maliciously, that it’s accidental, because if so it does so neatly make Nigel’s points for him. This point especially:
[M]any lightweight thinkers are attracted to Philosophy because it seems to promise them power through looking clever. Hiding behind a veil of obscurity is one way in which such people have traditionally duped their readership.
Now the dupe:
although you raise some good points about clarity, i think you are only rehearsing the rather tired analytic vs continental divide;clarity is certainly important, especially for politics and things of immediate public and moral interest…yet, philosophy to be philosophy should say things that are not just obvious; this is the problem with most analytic philosophy; it is one dimensional and the clarity reveals nothing. i mean, analytic philosophy is relatively shallow in its clarity, while that of hegel etc have great depth and enable us to think in ways that are perhaps not normal or obvious.this is what philosophy is for philosophy to be philosophy. For example, hegel and the traditions that follow hegel; or for that matter lacan and deleuze etc are not clear, they require repeated reading and thinking about, yet that is what is good about this kind of philosophy, after really wrestling with the language and the mode of expression, we feel that we are in fact thinking more deeply about the issues of philosophy. for me, nagel, ayer, etc are not the equal philosophically of hegel, deleuze, sartre etc because they are so clear, they tell you nothing.
That describes exactly the process Nigel meant, I think – ‘after really wrestling with the language and the mode of expression, we feel that we are in fact thinking more deeply about the issues of philosophy.’ Yes, we feel that we are, but that’s an illusion, created by the merely surface-level difficulty. And then the absurdity of saying that ‘because they are so clear, they tell you nothing.’ That’s so silly and so perverse that I hope it’s genuine and not a joke – but it’s so silly and so perverse that it probably is a joke. It’s too on-target to be accidental.
Actually, OB, I suspect that it’s not a joke. As with creationism, post-modern gibberish cannot be distinguished from deliberate, mocking parody of post-modern gibberish. Even the Theory* people cannot distinguish the difference, which Alan Sokal’s clever hoax so famously and amusingly proved.
*They always capitalize that T, even when they’re speaking rather than writing. It’s kinda funny to hear them give that special little capital letter emphasis to the word.
I’m mystified about why anyone cannot distinguish between (a) struggling to understand a difficult idea, and (b)struggling through bad prose to find out what is the intended idea (which, in itself, might be so simple that even a congressman could understand it).
I guess this distinction needs to be expressed more obscurely to get some people’s attention.
Oddly enough, even though Neil Bishop has a point, there IS a point of difficulty here.
Some ideas become obvious ony after they have been enunciated by some genius or other,
This is common in the real sciences.
The equations of special relativity are easily comprehensible by anyone with A-level mathematics.
Huxley, remember, said of evoulution: “How exremely stupid (of me) not to think of that” – or similar.
But it is only obvious afterwards.
Come to that, it took Newton & Leibnitz to eneunciate differential calculus, yet it is now routinely taught to 16-year olds ……
“for that matter lacan and deleuze etc “
Lacan is, and I use this term advisedly, a snake-oil merchant. His ideas are either trivial distortions, very stupid, or most often both. His habit of trying to dress up his vapidity in diagrams makes him the mid-C20th precursor of Death By Powerpoint.
“Deleuzian” is a synonym for “academic idiot”. I have met some serious thinkers who are interested in D&G, but I prefer their clothing line to their philosophy. That is them isn’t it?
I could go on but I might want to apply for funding one day.
i thought that lack of punctuation made it deeper
Deleuzian? I thought the word was Deleuzional…
Well, ideally, it’s Deleuzo-Guattarian.
One thing to remember is the difference between science and philosophy.
Scientific clarity is basically of two types, I think: mathematical and conceptual. The mathematical one is pretty obvious: the more decimal digits, the better. Conceptual clarity is a matter of defining one’s terms precisely. In ordinary language, for example, words like “energy” are very vague; one never knows exactly what the speaker means by them. In science, we know exactly what we mean by “energy.”
There is nothing comparable to the mathematical kind of clarity in philosophy, but one can practice more or less conceptual clarity. Hegelian, phenomenological, post-modernist philosophy is at the extreme low-clarity end; much (not all) “analytic” philosophy is at the high end.
Which end one likes better is largely a matter of preference, I think. It’s like the eternal argument between lovers of analog sound vs. champions of digital; they certainly sound different, but neither one is an exact reproduction of live sound. Neither fuzzy nor clear philosophy, similarly, is an exact presentation of reality, because both use the medium of language, which always distorts in some way. As the Zen expression says, the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.
Nooooooo.
I cannot agree. Of course clear philosophy is not an exact presentation of reality, nor is it thought to be, but that is not the issue; and the difference is much more than one of liking or preference. The issue is not aesthetics.
Actually, I think the “dupe” may be on to something, though he wastes it all by his simplistic comparison between Hegel, Sartre on the one hand and Ayer, Nagel on the other (I like what I have read of Nagel. It most certainly is not vacuous as the writer suggests).
What that “something” is the “dupe” might be on to is that, a priori, I can imagine an interesting argument stating that there is a connection between the difficulty of Hegel’s prose and the difficulty of the concepts he tries to transmit (his dialectic being very counter-intuitive); that “clear language” would simply be not adequate to transmit concepts which basically break with traditional formal logic; and that the difficulty of the prose does serve a purpose in focusing the attention of the reader on the small details, on a very close reading, necessary for understanding. A collorary of such a claim would be that the focus of (some varieties of) analytical philosophy on logic and linguistic analysis is Procrustean, that it by necessity ignores a lot of interesting issues.
I lack the philosophical grounding to make a sustained argument of such a nature, but it would seem to me such an argument is possible and not obviously ridiculous.
Some philosophers I like a lot write extremely clearly (Popper, Nagel, occasionally Whitehead, Peirce with regards to style); others extremely obscurely (Gadamer, occasionally Whitehead, Peirce with regards to structure, and Hegel is just maddening). I do not think either obscurity or the use of clear, relatively simple language are intrinsic virtues. Difficult language is not a sign of “true” philosophy – but it shouldn’t be taken as a sign of nonsense either.
But Nigel addresses that in the interview; he says that difficulty is sometimes necessary and inherent in the subject; so that’s not what Anonymous is addressing. Anonymous explicitly says that it is the extra effort and attention spent on reading difficult language that makes one feel ‘that we are in fact thinking more deeply about the issues of philosophy’ – in short, that it is an illusion. Anonymous doesn’t say anyting about focusing the attention of the reader on the small details.
Neither Nigel nor I anywhere said that difficult language is or should be taken as a sign of nonsense. And the subject is clarity, not ‘relatively simple language’; I for one dislike relatively simple language and have said so many times.
Anonymous might be on to any number of things, but Anon didn’t manage to say those things, Anon managed to say the things that are typed into the comment, so I chose to address those rather than the potential things Anon might have said.
Perhaps in the end it comes down to what one thinks philosophy is for, what its purpose is. Since no god has decreed what that is, I think there is room for a difference of opinion.
I tend to favor the clarity end of the spectrum myself; I don’t get much out of reading Hegel (but I find he does at least *seem* to make more sense in German than in translation), but now and then I get some ideas from reading Heidegger (at least Sein und Zeit). I guess I’m just more tolerant of the “continental” style than a lot of English-speaking philosophers are today; it doesn’t necessarily make me sick to my stomach.
But the post-modernists go entirely too far in the obscure direction for me. You can have them.
I seem to remember hearing about a study in which one group of people had to undergo ‘hazing’ of a sort in order to get into what amounted to be a pretty crappy club, and another group who were just given membership. The subjective ratings of how good the club was were significantly higher in the first group than the second. Something to do with cognitive dissonance. People seem to need to justify the effort expended in obtaining something by saying (and very possibly believing) that the outcome was worth it – even when it’s not.
A brief Google session gave me the information to back up my post above.
“In 1959, Aronson and Mills tested the hypothesis of the effort-justification model by utilizing two groups of women. In order to become a member of a certain crowd, group one had to participate in a rigorous initiation that constituted participation in an embarrassing activity, while group two was given a minor and boring task. As the effort-justification paradigm states, women in the first group looked much more favorably upon their entrance to the new crowd then did group two, purely because of their entry task”
Aronson and Mills (1959) The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 59, 177-181
Ah – very interesting! Thanks, Chris.
That makes a great deal of sense to me, because the truth is, I do in a way know what Anonymous means – I consider it an illusion, but I recognize the description of how it works. The effort-justification model makes sense of that.
Perhaps one considers a view more stunning if one has hiked to reach it rather than taking a cable car. And so on.
Interesting contribution in this context, Chris. As an academic philosopher, I’ve often thought that studying Hegel seriously required a scholar to get so far into a twisted mindset/approach that he has for all intents and purposes “swallowed the kool-aid.” Once they join The Cult of Hegel, they never really rejoin the rest of us in the ongoing academic conversation and pursuit of truth: They’re off in their own little world of vague aphorisms, ungrounded assertions, and “thoughts that think themselves” or whatever… (The “he” isn’t sexism, btw: I’ve never encountered a female Hegalian.)
Needless to say, the po-mo theory-with-a-capital-T people are ever so much worse than The Cult of Hegel. Drinking the Heidegger kool-aid is not just intellectually damaging, it’s lethal. Ditto for the Foucault/Derrida/Deleuze/Lacan/Gadamer gibberish. I’ve met very few people who can read that literature for the few good ideas contained within it without getting sucked in. When I was much, much younger, I narrowly escaped this trap myself. It was reading Judith Butler and deciding that feminism was too important to be left in the hands of such double-talking loonies that saved me.
I think what Chris pointed out above might be a reader-related aspect of what I’ve called the Protestant Work Ethic Fallacy. The writer-related version of this is the mistaken view that because you have spent a long time and much effort producing a piece of writing, it must be good, that somehow the hours of struggle inevitably pay off (and also that a swiftly-written piece can’t be of high quality because not enough effort has been put into it).
From the reader’s perspective, this fallacy is the mistaken view that what is difficult to read must be profound…the reader’s invested effort somehow proves that the writing is deep (or else why would this reader have taken so much of his/her life struggling with it?)…Of course difficult prose MAY be profound…but its obscurity doeesn’t guarantee profundity.
It’s an oddly thrilling experience to have people whose work you have read and admired for years ‘speaking’ to you, let me tell you.
Back on topic, the whole thing seems to emphasise that man is often a rationalising animal, rather than a rational one.
I’m not quite convinced that this is an instance of the protestant work ethic fallacy. After all, Heidgger (philosophy) and PoMo (social sciences) were the leading approaches in communist Yugoslavia ;)
But seriously: it seems to me that it has a lot more to do with “look at how smart I am”, and much less with “look at hard-working I am”. At least that’s my experience when talking to postmodernists: they criticize me for being dense and narrow-minded, not lazy.
I think it’s both – although I agree that it seems to have less to do with ‘look at how hard-working I am’. I think that aspect is internal rather than look at me: I think it’s about what happens in the experience of reading, and the way a certain kind of difficulty can give a feeling of profundity. As with Ulysses and The Wasteland for instance – I enjoyed both as an adolescent and I think part of the reason I did was because they were ‘difficult’. Yet I derived no such feeling from math or Latin – which was very stupid of me. There’s a particular kind of illusion at work here, I think, but I’m not sure what to call it.
>>> In order to become a member of a certain crowd, group one had to participate in a rigorous initiation that constituted participation in an embarrassing activity, while group two was given a minor and boring task. <<< I’ve heard of that one before. It’s fascinating stuff, and I think the research has been replicated since then. But in this particular type of test, I can’t help thinking there’s another explanation for the first group rating their club higher than the second: bonding. All of the first group have participated in a shared, demanding activity. Surely that will have created some relationships that wouldn’t have existed otherwise? Isn’t that why companies send staff on team-bonding exercises? In other words, the first group really *is* a better group than the second, because the relationships between people are better/stronger than those in the second. Doesn’t matter that both groups have the same “rewards” otherwise.