Why Are Philosophers Hard To Understand?
Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Husserl—these guys are pretty dense, each in their own way. And many smart, thoughtful people I know complain that at least some of them are altogether incomprehensible. Life is too short to spend reading a paragraph over and over in the hope that it will eventually break open and reveal its meaning. Why—if these thinkers are supposedly so brilliant—are they so incapable of writing clearly and directly to me.
I think it depends on the thinker, and there’s no general rule, but I’ll give a handful of hypotheses that may fit some cases. Let’s bracket the assumption that the thinkers are outright charlatans who use difficult language to conceal their own lack of clarity and assume some positive intent—(although when it comes to the French postmodernists one can never be too sure).
Adorno writes that “philosophy exists because to chance to realize it has been missed.” The thinker exists in an unredeemed world, but writes about what s/he thinks is holistically true. The question is how can the thinker grasp the truth if the social conditions in which s/he lives occlude it. Answer: The thinker sees and writes through a glass, dimly. Their dim clarity reflects the dim clarity of the age in which they write. But the work, Adorno says, is a message in a bottle. It exists not for the present age but the future in which it will be intelligible. (Note—this is quite self-justifying and has also been taken by a handful of contemporary thinkers to justify their poor writing as some kind of virtue, as if a formal-stylistic enactment of their radical politics.)
The density and opacity of great philosophers is deliberate. It’s a trial to weed out the amateur voyeur from the serious student. Leo Strauss would say philosophers conceal their true meanings for a few elite readers, who grasp its anti-social, subversive truth—and so we might add the bad writing is a sign or trace of their concealment.
It’s not you; it’s them. Being a good thinker doesn’t necessarily mean being a good communicator. We all have our strengths and weaknesses—good rhetoricians know how to move a crowd and are loyal to their audience; pure philosophers are loyal to their ideas. Whether by temperament or principle, they simply don’t care about crowd-pleasing. Think of this as the Platonic argument made in dialogues like Gorgias and Phaedrus.
Philosophical language is a specialized language, like C++ or Python. Each thinker invents their own terms and way of articulating their insight, and reading them requires time and effort, no different than learning any new skill. Why are people happy to put in the time learning how to stand on a surf board but not understanding Hegel? The question “Why are these guys so hard to read?” betrays our own culture’s anti-intellectual bias or what Allan Bloom called “The Closing of the American Mind.”
Works age with time—and not always for the better. Hegel was clearer in his time than now in the same way that a 19th century novelist like Dickens was a bestseller in his day but is found to be boring by today’s youths. Philosophy isn’t hard—it’s old. And old things are for squares and point dexters, especially if you’ve grown up on TV, airport novels, and self-help.
What am I missing? Why am I wrong?
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