Author: Ophelia Benson

Nigel Warburton is senior lecturer in philosophy at The Open University. He is one of the world’s foremost popularizers of philosophy, and has a particular gift for explaing things clearly. His books include Thinking from A to Z (about to come out in its 3rd edition this summer), Philosophy: The Essential Study Guide and The Basics of Essay Writing.

As the issue of clarity came up in the comments on a recent blog of mine, I asked Nigel five questions about clarity (questions in bold).

At the top of your website the Virtual Philosopher you quote John Searle: “If you can’t say it clearly, you don’t understand it yourself”. What is clarity, and why is it important in philosophy?

Clarity is expressing yourself in a way that allows readers to follow what you are saying. It minimizes the risk of misinterpretation. Clarity contrasts with obscurity. Obscurity leaves at least some readers in the dark about your meaning. I like the quotation from Searle. I like another quotation from the author Robert Heinlein too: ‘Obscurity is the refuge of incompetence’. Obviously in some sorts of writing obscurity doesn’t matter so much: some writers want to be interpreted in a variety of possibly contradictory ways. But Philosophy shouldn’t be like this.

Clarity is important in Philosophy because life is short. Another reason why it is important is that many 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. Philosophy thrives on debate: if you can’t understand what someone is saying the collaborative aspect of philosophy is likely to wither and much ink will be spent on the vexed question of what a particular philosopher could possibly mean by his or her oracular pronouncements. All that before we ever get on to the important question of whether what that philosopher said was true or worth saying. Philosophy thrives on debate and discussion, but if you don’t really know what someone is trying to say, how can you discuss it?

Clarity in Philosophy involves clarity at the level of 1) words, 2) sentences, 3)paragraphs, 4) arguments, 5) illustrations, and 6) underlying thought. This list is not exhaustive, but these six features are all important.

1 ) At the level of words, there is no excuse for obfuscation through polysyllabic abstraction (i.e. hiding behind long words). Some writers write Philosophy as if they were paid by the syllable with bonus payments for including untranslated Latin. They also use jargon which may or may not clarify meaning. For a spectacular example of obscurity through excessive use of jargon, see Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (almost any page).

2) Then at the sentence level, passive constructions or convoluted syntax can obscure meaning.

3) Poor use of paragraphs often indicates poor argument structure.

4) Philosophy involves building a case for a conclusion. The reader needs to be able to see how evidence, argument support the conclusion which purportedly follows from them. For examples of this kind of clarity, take a look at René Descartes’ first ‘Meditation’ or John Stuart Mill’s chapter on Free Expression in On Liberty.

5) Illustrative examples help most readers, even the highly sophisticated ones, to understand generalizations. When philosophers omit examples or applications of their ideas they sometimes float off into realms of imprecision – not all their readers will be happy to float off with them.

6) Some philosophers have a nose for the subject and what matters. Others don’t. Those who don’t can be particularly difficult to understand because it is very hard to see why they are bothering to think or write about a particular topic at all.

If I find something is said very unclearly, can I really be confident the author doesn’t understand it him or herself?

No. It is possible that the person saying it is just not a very good writer or speaker. But, on the other hand, obscurity cannot be good evidence that someone does understand something. My own experience has been that I’ve understood philosophical ideas far better once I tried to explain them to someone else. Teaching bright students, preferably students who aren’t afraid to ask difficult (or obvious) questions is one of the best ways to get straight about an idea.

Might the lack of clarity in the writing of some philosophers be due to the fact that what they are are dealing with is so deep? As we peer further into the depths, so the shadows inevitably grow deeper?

The history of philosophy includes many examples of beautiful clarity about deep subjects. Think of the writings of David Hume, for example. More recently, Thomas Nagel and Daniel Dennett have demonstrated that it is possible to write clearly about some of the most difficult philosophical problems about the mind; Jonathan Glover and Peter Singer have done the same in the area of ethics. Sometimes philosophers have to say very clearly ‘we are in the dark about this’. They might choose to communicate this indirectly rather than stating it directly. But that need not involve obscurity of language, nor even of meaning.

Philosophers in the analytic tradition sometimes accuse those in the continental tradition of a lack of clarity. Why is that? Is there any justice to the accusation?

One reason is that some so-called continental philosophers have inherited a style of writing from Hegel that leaves readers floundering, confused or pretending that they understand when they don’t. I think that some post-structuralist writers were charlatans who conned a generation (though this has been more of a problem in literature and fine art courses than in philosophy). If you don’t believe me, read Sokal and Bricmont’s brilliant exposé. But obviously not all continental philosophers fall into this category. Besides, it isn’t always obvious who is to count as a philosopher in the continental tradition: Descartes, Kant,, Schopenhauer, Frege, and Wittgenstein were all born on the European continent…each in their own way was capable of a high degree of clarity.

Even among the more poetic philosophers, though, such as Soren Kierkegaard, there are ways of showing things rather than saying them which can be clear. The different voices within Either/Or explore contrasting positions from within and we are not meant to read what is said as literally Kierkegaard’s view: I take it that Kierkegaard’s meaning lies in what is shown rather than what is straightforwardly said in this book. But he is not perversely obscure in the way that some philosophers are, despite dealing with ‘deep’ topics. Or, to take another example, Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness adopted the obscurity of phenomenological jargon, but through his brilliant use of extended examples and thought experiments manages great and memorable clarity in places in that book. We can forgive a philosophical writer who is sometimes obscure if he or she provides us with insight and occasional clarity; but obscurity can never be a virtue in Philosophy.

What would be your five key tips for thinking and writing clearly?

1) Care about being understood.
2) Read George Orwell’s essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946). It has excellent practical advice about writing to be understood.
3) Use examples. These can be highly imaginative and creative. This will force you to think through what you mean by generalisations and will also help your readers to understand what you mean. If you want your writing to be impressively obscure, don’t descend from abstraction and use as much jargon as you can.
4) Know what your conclusion is, how your reasons and examples support it and your response to obvious counterarguments and counterexamples. If you don’t know that, how can you expect your readers to work out what you are saying?
5) Don’t bullshit. Most people know when they are doing it. If you don’t, you are probably in the wrong subject.

This interview was first published on the website/blog of Stephen Law and is republished here by permission.

Pressed to apologize for a silly comment he’d made about the full-frontal atheism of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, the humanist chaplain at Harvard replied to Brian Fleming (The God who Wasn’t There, etc.) – the slightly offended party – as follows:

I think apologizing is really a wonderful, necessary thing to do often. We human beings are so imperfect, we hurt each other and fail to live up to our own standards so often that learning to properly apologize is practically a survival tool. At least in my life it has been – I fail often to be as loving, or as smart, or just plain as right as I’d like to be. And I have seen how liberating, how humanistic, it can be to simply apologize, admit I was wrong, and ask for forgiveness. The value of a good apology is one of those things that both religious people and secular people have done well to recognize the power of.

The hell you say? I remember reading something about wrongdoing and forgiveness eerily like this statement recently. Here it is: “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” The author is the unmistakable St Paul writing to the Christians at Rome in the mid-first-century. He is explaining how love is always having to say you’re sorry, not merely for individual acts of malice and thoughtlessness, but for the human condition itself which makes you naturally corrupt, or to use his favorite word, “sinful.” Human nature is purulent; what it produces is pus. Human nature causes us to “fail to be as loving or as smart or just plain as right” as we should be: “I can will what is right,” the clever apostle says, “but I cannot do it…What I do is the very thing I hate.” (Romans 7.1415ff.).

This isn’t humanism, of course. It’s Christianity. In fact it’s the central doctrine of Christianity. It begins with an overwhelming feeling of worthlessness and lack of self control, and ends with the happy recognition that since you can’t change your nature anyway, you’re just happy there’s someone out there who can: God (through Jesus) who takes away your sins. You only have to apologize for your worthlessness to the perfectly good God who made you the imperfect, worthless, purulent creature you are. The chaplain seems to have learned a lot from the saint: We are so imperfect, that we ought to apologize often “for failing to live up to our own standards.”

I don’t know what living up to imperfect standards means in that opaque sentence, but I personally endorse imperfect standards, on the off-chance I might attain them without effort. I do know that as a humanist I can completely reject the disguised theology behind the statement. Religion (not humanism) postulates a gap between God and man (and women, of course) as wide as the gap between the natural world and the supernatural order. It’s what sent Adam into hiding, Isaac to his near-death experience, Job to the dung heap, and Saul into insanity and retirement. You don’t screw around with this God because, as he reminds Job, little you can’t save the world, put the stars in the skies, subdue Leviathan, or send lightning down from the heavens. Given the total stupidity and blind wickedness of the race he created, about all his creatures can hope for is forgiveness and “salvation” from the humanity that ties us to this world. The school chaplain in Monty Python’s Meaning of Life had the Christian view right:

Chaplain: Let us praise God. Oh Lord…

Congregation: Oh Lord…

Chaplain: Oooh you are so big…

Congregation: Oooh you are so big…

Chaplain: So absolutely huge.

Congregation: So ab – solutely huge.

Chaplain: Gosh, we’re all really impressed down here I can tell you.

Congregation: Gosh, we’re all really impressed down here I can tell you.

Chaplain: Forgive Us, O Lord, for this dreadful toadying.

Congregation: And barefaced flattery.

Chaplain: But you are so strong and, well, just so super.

Congregation: Fan – tastic.

All: Amen.

True, the New Humanism will say that it doesn’t advocate frequent apology for “religious reasons” It’s not about striking your breast for God or laying your faults on Jesus. It’s about saying “Sorry” to each other—building community, making things right, hugging. Having lost all metaphysical pretenses and infinite gradations between this world and the next, we just need to be kind. If we disagree, we respectfully disagree. Better yet, we learn not to disagree, because, after all, isn’t disagreement unpleasant? Shouldn’t we apologize for needing to disagree? In the New Humanism, where Oprah! and Dr Wayne Dyer replace Socrates, the answer is Yes, as long as the apology doesn’t limit our ability to make self-affirming choices. Whatever that means.

What the New Humanism isn’t about is the intellectual self-confidence that calls a spade a spade and faulty judgment faulty. Intellectualism is unkind. Smart is mean. Spirited debate may incur feelings of low self-esteem, especially among the losers. But then, dumb is dangerous – in life, art, and politics. Never mind that it’s religion that encourages blind agreement and intellectual submission, or that what we look back on as “the enlightenment” was forged in the fires of the bitterest scholarly debates the West had ever seen, or that thousands of very, very bright men and women learned what being sorry meant because their apologies were extracted from them through violence to reason and conscience. Never mind the robust intellectualism of old humanists – a Huxley, a Dewey, a Santayana, a Lippmann, What would a New Humanist make of Lippmann’s comparison of an average voter to a theater-goer walking into a play in the middle of the third act and leaving before the last curtain? Should he apologize to hoi polloi? Or Russell on the same theme: “Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man.” Elitism. Pure elitism. We should apologize for that.

The legacy of great minds and bold ideas crashing like cymbals in the orchestra of human progress has become a sad reminder of the aristocracy of intellect that American democracy – for reasons unclear to me – has moved beyond. The New Humanism wants to move beyond it, beyond the cruelty of intellect to where truth is what you feel it is and where confession is good for the soul. But strangely enough, it preserves the Pauline model of the human person as imperfect. That’s why we apologize, after all: because we’re “wrong.” In the new humanist order we have returned to the religious evaluation of human nature as sullied, wanton, abandoning the gains that humanism has achieved since Pico della Mirandola first sniffed the spring-time air of human freedom and the essential givenness of human nature as a gift limited by years, but not by evil.

Oh, Chaplain, I do not believe apology is a survival tool. I do not believe I hurt people because I am “imperfect.” And I refuse to acknowledge that humanism has anything to do with the liberating power of forgiveness, or that this X marks the spot where religious and secular people can meet. Humanism, old and newer, as far as I know, consists ethically in the recognition that we are free to choose our actions and responsible for evaluating the consequences of our actions – as human agents. In that process, apology is very low down on my list of virtues and owning up to my imperfection is not there at all.

R. Joseph Hoffmann
Chair
Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion
Center for Inquiry
Amherst, New York

Larry Moran raised an interesting comparison over at Laden’s place. In response to this constant whining that loud-and-proud atheism ‘hurts the cause’, he brought up a historical parallel:

Here’s just one example. Do you realize that women used to march in the streets with placards demanding that they be allowed to vote? At the time the suffragettes were criticized for hurting the cause. Their radical stance was driving off the men who might have been sympathetic to women’s right to vote if only those women had stayed in their proper place.

This prompted the usual cry of the accommodationists: but feminists weren’t as rude as those atheists.

Were the women saying that men were stupid? Were they portraying them as rubes and simpletons? Were they falling into the trap of making themselves resemble the negative stereotypes of women at the time? IIRC, the answers are No, No, and No. Substitute “atheists” for “women” and “theists” for “men,” and the answers are emphatically Yes, Yes, and Yes. It is one thing to be assertive. It is another thing to be gratuitously rude.

This is so blind and ahistorical, I’m embarrassed for the guy. The suffragettes were ferocious firebreathers of a most admirable sort who did not mince words and went far further than atheists have gone – yet. As one example:

To attain the goal of universal suffrage, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU, known colloquially as the suffragettes) engaged in acts of protest such as the breaking of windows, arson, and the “technical assault” (without causing harm) of police officers. Many WSPU members were jailed for these offenses.

Try reading the literature of the feminist pioneers. They weren’t just rude, they were howling at injustice, they were breaking deep social mores, and they were abused, despised, and imprisoned for it — and they still are. Jebus. You think all women had to do to get recognition of their basic rights was to be polite? You think they got the right to vote by asking nicely? That soft voices and meekness are the answers?

I take it back. I should be embarrassed for us atheists. When I look at the history of feminism, I see a ferocity and a record of sacrifice that puts us tame godless people to shame. Maybe we need to get more outraged and outrageous.

If you read some of the great writers of the feminist movement, what you’ll find is an eloquence that people like Richard Dawkins echo today. Their speeches were rousing calls to action, not paeans to passivity. These are words that people found “rude” then, and that we still see deplored by chauvinists today (have you ever heard the word “feminazi”?)

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
“The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.”

“The whole tone of Church teaching in regard to women is, to the last degree, contemptuous and degrading.”

Lucretia Mott

“The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation because in the degradation of woman the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source.”

“I have no idea of submitting tamely to injustice inflicted either on me or on the slave. I will oppose it with all the moral powers with which I am endowed. I am no advocate of passivity.”

Mother Jones

“I’m not a humanitarian, I’m a hell-raiser.”

“Whatever your fight, don’t be ladylike. “

Susan B. Anthony

“Men their rights and nothing more; women their rights and nothing less.”

“The fact is, women are in chains, and their servitude is all the more debasing because they do not realize it.”

“Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences.”

These women were treated as if they were bomb-throwing anarchists by the press, by politicians, by the wealthy elite, by every institution that had an interest in conserving the inequities of society. Even today we’ve got people like Phyllis Schlafly who decry “intolerant, uncivil feminists whose sport is to humiliate men” — I think everyone can see the similarity to the accusations against those intolerant, uncivil atheists.

Every social movement – and I’d add the labor movement and the struggle for civil rights as equally strong examples – that tries to break the bonds of mindless convention and tradition and that defies established privilege gets accused of being rude and worse, much worse, and there are always weak apologists for the status quo who use that pathetic etiquette excuse to try and silence the revolutionaries. Successful revolutionaries ignore the admonitions about which fork to use for their salad because they care only to grab the steak knife as they launch themselves over the table.

Atheists are calm and mild-mannered, even leaders of the New Atheists like Dawkins and Harris and Dennett — no doubt because our oppression is minor compared to that of women, racial minorities, and labor – but we’re still getting these ridiculous claims that we’re too “rude”. They won’t stop until we’re completely silent, and there’s no point in compromise, so these faint-hearted enablers of superstition are going to have to excuse us if we ever so politely request that they go fuck themselves, beg pardon, and please, use a rolled-up copy of the Republican party platform to do it, if you don’t mind, thank you in advance.

This article first appeared at Pharyngula and is republished here by permission.