"Ordinary language," antiintellectualism, and language as a barrier to understanding

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Let's discuss. Obviously we've all encountered genuinely impenetrable philosophical writing that seems designed to prevent understanding on the part of people the writer considers insufficiently simpatico rather than to encourage it (like Judith Butler's infamous habit of writing paragraph-long strings of rhetorical questions that Martha Nussbaum tore into in "The Professor of Parody"). At the same time, I'm sure anybody posting on or reading this particular board has also been in situations where somebody demanding that people "SPEAK ENGLISH" was clearly just allergic to being asked to consider a complex idea. So where's the line? Where do philosophers like, say, Kant and Hegel, who are extremely difficult to read but whose ideas are fairly lucid when explained by other people, fall? Do they just happen to be good thinkers but bad writers, or is something else going on? What about Paulo Freire and others who insist that their writing is Perfectly Clear, Actually despite many readers disagreeing--are they full of crap, or do most of their critics genuinely Just Not Get It for one reason or another? Is there a difference between using highly specialized terminology and using colloquial terminology in turgid, confusing, or unsystematic ways, and if so, is either habit better or worse writerly or philosophical practice than the other?

...oh. I'm doing the Judith Butler rhetorical-questions thing myself. QED, I guess.

[afleitch]

I think it depends.

Despite heavy philosophising myself (at least I think) I generally don't like philosophy. As much as Judith Butler is a bit of meme, I can understand her, through my own self editing of what she says as opposed to say Jordan Peterson who just talks absolute bollocks. And people mistaking absolute bollocks for wisdom or intelligence is as bad, if not worse than 'Pez' philosophy as the latter doesn't pretend to be anything greater than it is.

But likewise people mistaking genuine complexity for absolute bollocks because they can't understand it or just want to discredit it (as is happening with Butler recently on THAT ISSUE) is just laziness and at times malice on their part.

I have a real visceral dislike of 'thought experiment' secular ethical philosophy; trolley problems or 'imagine you woke up attached to another person' etc. If you have to construct an almost impossible set of conditions in which to play, then what you're postulating is effectively worthless. All of us, no matter when or where we are tend to face variations of the same ethical and philosophical problems as the next person and otherwise complex philosophical exercises are best served by bearing that in mind.

I think what you say about 'lucidity' is true, but one persons inspirational advocate is another persons obvious fraud. So there always has to exist, for example, both Kant and Kantianism, as distinct theatres. You aren't served better by grasping Kant directly or by espousing a more accessible interpretation. Hume's treatise are relatively easy to understand now, in comparison to a lot of his contemporaries but he had to re-write them and often add unnecessary complications to them for the palette of his own audience.

As long as everyone doesn't talk across each other, I think better conversations can be had by people with different levels of engagement.

[John Dule]

I don't know where the line is, but Hegel is way over it.

[PSOL]

Is Paulo Freire’s work really that complicated to understand? I don’t know how it reads in Portuguese, but in the English translation while it wasn’t the easiest work to get through, it isn’t that far off from most academic writing and for the most party the important bits of a) the self-destructive and crablike mentality of most people is due to capitalist alienation b) education must be used to uplift peoples mentality and teach them against the bull•••• of hating themselves and each other and preach for solidarity action against injustice. He used very easy metaphors and examples of such things in the book. At some point the point that his work is too complicated to read or that he’s being unhelpful in calling out concern trolls is gaslighting by people opposed to the book, plain and simple.

I don't know where the line is, but Hegel is way over it.

A significant portion of Marx’s ethos is dumbing down Hegel’s elitist obscurantism enough to be understandable to most people, and his work remains even more readable and less dry than any of his antecedents—like Ricardo or Smith—and fellow contemporaries.

Hegelism, in its being, is utilizing reality and common sense to perpetuate elitism. Hiding the truth from those of lesser stock is entirely the point, as they can say people calling out their bull•••• are dumb and that they are far enlightened and have reached a new phase of consciousness. You can see this in action at the nonsense spewed by regulars on Atlas After Dark, a hotbed of Young Hegelianism and peak Karen liberalism envisioned by Fillo whatevs, Geoffrey Howe, Xahar, Snowstalker contrasting with the equally incomprehensible elitist conservatism of Georg Ebner and MarkD.

[John Dule]

Hegelism, in its being, is utilizing reality and common sense to perpetuate elitism. Hiding the truth from those of lesser stock is entirely the point, as they can say people calling out their bull•••• are dumb and that they are far enlightened and have reached a new phase of consciousness.

Yeah, he has all that going for him and I still don't like him.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Is Paulo Freire’s work really that complicated to understand? I don’t know how it reads in Portuguese, but in the English translation while it wasn’t the easiest work to get through, it isn’t that far off from most academic writing and for the most party the important bits of a) the self-destructive and crablike mentality of most people is due to capitalist alienation b) education must be used to uplift peoples mentality and teach them against the bull•••• of hating themselves and each other and preach for solidarity action against injustice. He used very easy metaphors and examples of such things in the book. At some point the point that his work is too complicated to read or that he’s being unhelpful in calling out concern trolls is gaslighting by people opposed to the book, plain and simple.

I think this is a totally reasonable question about Freire, to be clear. It's usually obvious what he's getting at, so it's fair to ask, that being the case, whether the into-the-weeds nature of some of his specifics is really that big a deal when it comes to understanding him.

[PSOL]

Is Paulo Freire’s work really that complicated to understand? I don’t know how it reads in Portuguese, but in the English translation while it wasn’t the easiest work to get through, it isn’t that far off from most academic writing and for the most party the important bits of a) the self-destructive and crablike mentality of most people is due to capitalist alienation b) education must be used to uplift peoples mentality and teach them against the bull•••• of hating themselves and each other and preach for solidarity action against injustice. He used very easy metaphors and examples of such things in the book. At some point the point that his work is too complicated to read or that he’s being unhelpful in calling out concern trolls is gaslighting by people opposed to the book, plain and simple.

I think this is a totally reasonable question about Freire, to be clear. It's usually obvious what he's getting at, so it's fair to ask, that being the case, whether the into-the-weeds nature of some of his specifics is really that big a deal when it comes to understanding him.

From the examples of the worker drinking too much due to alienation and the peasants being confused on what to do with the landowner they kidnapped, Freire provides pretty self-explanatory examples and he even states why they act the way they are.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

This is a good topic and I am following this thread with interest.

[Antonio the Sixth]

As someone with, at this point, over a decade of experience in social sciences academia (wtf is wrong with me), this is something that I have increasingly struggled with. My hope was always to write things that I actually would enjoy reading, but if I'm honest with myself, my doctoral dissertation was a total failure on this front. It contains quite a bit of technical jargon, and its tone is dry and does very little to engage the reader emotionally into the stakes of what's discussed. This isn't how I set out to write, but it's how it came out anyways. I think this goes to show that abstruse academic writing isn't necessarily something people only do to confuse or impress their readership with a false sense of profundity. A lot of academics (myself often included) simply don't know how to phrase our thinking in ways that are easily intelligible and engaging to a general public.

There are a few reasons for that. One is simply that many concepts we discuss simply don't have a common, everyday term that adequately describes them. To take an example most people here are familiar with, how do you translate "realignment" to someone who isn't into politics that much? You can, but you have to spend a lot of time and probably multiple sentences just laying the basic groundwork for the term to make sense. This is something I've had to do in real life to explain to people what my research is about (you know, the first question everyone asks a PhD!) and it's awkward as hell. Obviously that's not a viable solution in an academic paper, where you have very little space to work with. But this can rapidly become a vicious cycle, as academics who have a habit of discussing a given subject in depth develop increasingly intricate conceptual shortcuts that people on the outside can hardly follow. Even within political science, people in a subfield often have no idea what another subfield is up to anymore. And then, you might be actively encouraged to show off all that jargon to show people you've learned it, as an indicator that you have mastered the full depth of the discipline. Once you have that, the conditions are set for a sort of terminological arms race, where even academics who dislike jargon are forced to engage in it in a competitive setting.

This experience has really made me respect the work of vulgarizers - people who take all this abstruse academic pablum and make an effort to translate it into understandable, everyday language. They're often shunned by "pure" academics (although thankfully attitudes are beginning to change) but their work is arguably the most important of all, as otherwise academia would be an entirely closed system with no impact on the real world. Honestly, even I often feel like I've learned more in the past few years from vulgarizers than from academic works. Historians like Alessandro Barbero and Mike Duncan, or recently even a lots of Youtube channels I've been binging about physics, math or linguistics, have really expanded and enriched my understanding. I would encourage everyone, if they've ever had a curiosity about a discipline they didn't pursue academically, to get back into it through that vehicle. No, it won't substitute for a decade of academic study (I for one find most political science vulgarization really pat and trite, but I know I'm not the target audience), but it will get you pretty damn far. I think we should all aspire to becoming polymaths, even if the pressure of society is toward hyper-specialization.

But that gets us to a final, really important point. Public intellectuals, and especially those who are involved in political activism SHOULD be vulgarizers. If your work is supposed to directly impact the goals and strategies pursued by movements that seek to change society, then it ought to be broadly understandable by society. I think that's where the real problem comes with Judith Butler and a lot of postmodern academics in their vein. Entirely aside from the question of whether their work is more abstruse than others in the discipline (which I'm not really qualified to judge on), the fact remains that they are using her to advocate for policies in the real world, without bothering to explain it to the people these policies would apply to. That's, dare I say, a fundamentally antidemocratic impulse. It gets even worse when people who are just plain activists adopt this kind of language - as they usually dumb it down to slogans that are entirely abstracted from the context where they made sense. That's how you end up with idiocies like the "only white people can be racist" canard or ranting against "ciswhiteheteropartiarchy" and whatnot. This kind of language is actively alienating to most people, and left-wing parties should make an effort to actively banish it from their ranks. At that point though, my problem isn't even with the academics anymore - more so with the kind of people who fetishize academia.

As a final note, I should make it clear that there's nothing wrong with good highbrow writing. There is nothing wrong with a rhetorical flourish, even one that is added just to sound fancy, as long as it works for its stated purpose. Being pretentious and pedantic can be fun and you have every right to be. God knows I like a good condescending retort as much as anyone. The important thing is to make sure you're writing in such a way as to actually be understood.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

a hotbed of Young Hegelianism and peak Karen liberalism envisioned by Fillo whatevs

Not at all. I'm a massive small 'c' conservative who also happens to be a fifth generation Social Democrat for reasons of filial piety and good old fashioned material self-interest. It is important to get these things right.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Butler, of course, once infamously argued that her execrable and obscurantist prose style represented a radical act in itself. Certain things are impossible to parody effectively as they're so close to parody in the first place.

Anyway, my general view is that a) the point of language is to communicate, that b) sloppy language is invariably a cover for sloppy thought but also that c) none of this ought to entail debasing oneself and writing solely for people with a sub-adult reading age.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Where do philosophers like, say, Kant and Hegel, who are extremely difficult to read but whose ideas are fairly lucid when explained by other people, fall?

Another example would be Gramsci. These cases are rare but interesting: you do have to worry a little bit that the explanations provided by other people are not always entirely free of corruption. Having said that, Hegel isn't quite as difficult to follow as might be assumed: he just writes like a legitimately insane man, but the general flow is usually pretty obvious. Which is a different situation to consciously arcane academic prose styles.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

The difference between Kant and Hegel and modern day "intellectuals" is that the former weren't posting on social media. That sounds a bit snippy and silly but certain people really need to understand how ineffective it is to write such dense prose on somewhere like Twitter and then act shocked when ordinary people don't understand or relate to them. Similarly telling a "normie" "go read Judith Butler" is not a great way to make your case for obvious reasons. The Onion nailed this in one of their best ever videos.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

The difference between Kant and Hegel and modern day "intellectuals" is that the former weren't posting on social media. That sounds a bit snippy and silly but certain people really need to understand how ineffective it is to write such dense prose on somewhere like Twitter and then act shocked when ordinary people don't understand or relate to them. Similarly telling a "normie" "go read Judith Butler" is not a great way to make your case for obvious reasons. The Onion nailed this in one of their best ever videos.

That one was a classic.

[sting in the rafters]

I can't really speak with respect to a lot of these philosophers because frankly I've felt my socioeconomic status has always forced me to put intellectual pursuits on the back-burner in favor of either an education which had/has tangible career prospects or the cheap thrills of being an adolescent/young adult in the greatest city on planet earth and all the curvy baaaaad jawns up in Manayunk the throes of a late-stage capitalist dystopia. Nonetheless, at least for me I've found the most useful way to learn about them in a useful manner was via applying them either in an academic setting or to my own personal experiences.

For example, I understood Kant only after having to analyze the movie The Insider for an Ethics elective I was taking to pad out my course-load. The Insider is a dramatized biopic on Jeff Wigand's crusade against Big Tobacco, and the latter's endeavors to keep him silent. The relevant concepts I applied were while Brown & Williamson, a tobacco company, had a hypothetical imperative to follow their fiduciary duty and deliver a profit to their shareholders, they have zero categorical imperative as their business model revolved around preying upon tobacco smokers as a means unto Brown & Williamson's own ends. Their attempts to conceal the harmful nature of tobacco violated the categorical imperative of providing transparency and honesty. Furthermore, Wigand despite signing an NDA had no obligation to follow the categorical imperative of "do not make false promises", as the criminal investigation into Big Tobacco superseded this, and I created my own categorical imperative of "If one enters into an occupation, they accept the ethical duties and obligations consistent with such.". Finally, , Wigand only signed the NDA under duress of needing to pay for his kid's meds. And of course, consent is central to Kant's concept of reciprocal altriusm.

You can repeat the above framework for Aquinas, Aristotle, Stirner, Rosseau, et al. The theme is I found the best way to understand different philosophical lenses was to apply them to various real life situations. Which is um..... WHAT THEY'RE PHUCKING MEANT FOR IN THE FIRST PLACE YOU PHUCKING NERDS.

From the examples of the worker drinking too much due to alienation and the peasants being confused on what to do with the landowner they kidnapped, Freire provides pretty self-explanatory examples and he even states why they act the way they are.

This right here embodies so much of my issues with Atlas in one post. Y'all had to READ about alcoholism to understand how quarterly capitalism deprives certain occupations/socioeconomic groups of a quality of life, whereas I graduated from the School of Hard Knocks. My own  abuse of codeine and xanax as an adolescent, my mother's continued struggles with alcoholism as a single parent during the height of the Great Recession, and my former Toyota mechanic of an uncle committing suicide via opioid overdose because he figured his Social Security/life insurance payout was worth more than his own life to his children taught me all I needed to know. So it is a rather laborious task to engage Atlasians on issues of poverty when so few of them possess any firsthand experience with how the other half lives.

[Benjamin Frank]

When specialized terminology or jargon is used, it would be helpful to post a link explaining what the terminology means.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Butler, of course, once infamously argued that her execrable and obscurantist prose style represented a radical act in itself. Certain things are impossible to parody effectively as they're so close to parody in the first place.

Tanaka Mitsu, a Japanese feminist philosopher from the early 70s whom I much admire and have been thinking about a lot lately, said similar things, but the difference is that Tanaka's brand of terrible writing consisted of blazing hot Nietzsche-esque aphorism-takes* and doodles where she confuses GNI and Gini coefficient, which I unironically think is a more respectable way to operate than its Butlerian equivalent on the other side of the #populist /#elitist x-axis.

*Our own Battista Minola described Tanaka's analysis of The Abortion Issue as "[Inks]ing insane, but in a good way" when I explained it to him.

[kaoras]

For what is worth, I found Paulo Freire extremely easy to read in Spanish and a complete different galaxy from other academic texts I had to read in college like Hegel, Maturana, Paul Ricoeur and even Marx. I genuinely struggle to understand what could be confusing about him.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

For what is worth, I found Paulo Freire extremely easy to read in Spanish and a complete different galaxy from other academic texts I had to read in college like Hegel, Maturana, Paul Ricoeur and even Marx. I genuinely struggle to understand what could be confusing about him.

It's possible that at the time he developed a reputation for abstruseness in English his work tended to be exceptionally badly translated. I'll have to look into if that's the case and, if not, whether it's changed.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Butler, of course, once infamously argued that her execrable and obscurantist prose style represented a radical act in itself. Certain things are impossible to parody effectively as they're so close to parody in the first place.

Tanaka Mitsu, a Japanese feminist philosopher from the early 70s whom I much admire and have been thinking about a lot lately, said similar things, but the difference is that Tanaka's brand of terrible writing consisted of blazing hot Nietzsche-esque aphorism-takes* and doodles where she confuses GNI and Gini coefficient, which I unironically think is a more respectable way to operate than its Butlerian equivalent on the other side of the #populist /#elitist x-axis.

*Our own Battista Minola described Tanaka's analysis of The Abortion Issue as "[Inks]ing insane, but in a good way" when I explained it to him.

Side note:

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

Butler, of course, once infamously argued that her execrable and obscurantist prose style represented a radical act in itself. Certain things are impossible to parody effectively as they're so close to parody in the first place.

Tanaka Mitsu, a Japanese feminist philosopher from the early 70s whom I much admire and have been thinking about a lot lately, said similar things, but the difference is that Tanaka's brand of terrible writing consisted of blazing hot Nietzsche-esque aphorism-takes* and doodles where she confuses GNI and Gini coefficient, which I unironically think is a more respectable way to operate than its Butlerian equivalent on the other side of the #populist /#elitist x-axis.

*Our own Battista Minola described Tanaka's analysis of The Abortion Issue as "[Inks]ing insane, but in a good way" when I explained it to him.

Side note:

Well this is probably the most interesting thing I'll have learned about today.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

Where do philosophers like, say, Kant and Hegel, who are extremely difficult to read but whose ideas are fairly lucid when explained by other people, fall? Do they just happen to be good thinkers but bad writers, or is something else going on? What about Paulo Freire and others who insist that their writing is Perfectly Clear, Actually despite many readers disagreeing--are they full of crap, or do most of their critics genuinely Just Not Get It for one reason or another?

Kant I'd say is simply a bad writer. His meaning is pretty clear and there's not that much disagreement over it, just the style is turgid, although partly because he's labouring to be very precise in his discussion of complex ideas.

Hegel IMO is wilfully obscurantist at times (I agree with Schopenhauer here), although in the PoS he's trying to do something recursive in having thought analyse itself, and involving creative narrative. His lectures are fairly comprehensible. But unlike Kant there's been serious academic disputes over the nature of Hegel's system, given how it's not precisely stated.

I think it's much more of an issue in 20th century French Theory and its epigones, to an extent inspired by Hegel. There's the famous anecdote of Foucault telling Searle that you need to write 10% nonsense to be taken seriously in France, and Bourdieau commented that it's much worse than 10%

[Pedocon Theory is not a theory]

Stopping in here for the first time after coming to a realization about the quasi-religious role of a certain brand of American civil religion in my life and the effect that had on my flawed understanding of theology.

I concur with slimey that frankly, a huge portion of academics, especially on here, seem to display an inability to relate to most people, let alone speak in their language. Hell, I did the IBDP and all that where they try and teach you how to be a classical Renaissance Person and none of that philosophy sank into my head. They talked about Spinoza and Bentham (actually that was one of the few that took hold) and the trolley problem and the roots of modern philosophy but it all amounted to jack because there was nothing to relate it to my life.

And then I studied game design and we asked "What is a game?" and we learned what Wittgenstein, Callois, Costikyan, Salen & Zimmerman, and Suits think a game is. Which kinda sunk in a little bit but also asking a buncha college freshman "What is a game?" about 50 times turns it into a meme instead of provoking further introspection into the nature of language.

And then this week, it hits me, not because someone explained it to me or rattled off a bunch of names and concepts. After reading about the history of American secularism and what faith and salvation really are, it hits me. F**k. F**k. Religion doesn't mean what I think it means. That's what Wittgenstein means by 'language game'. 

Then again, I'm probably an edge case as a CS major who learned first-order logic before really studying rhetoric. But it's not like that's the only case. Like slimey, I learned philosophy from media analysis. Junior year, I picked 2001: A Space Odyssey and frankly now my entire criticism of modern English education is that kids aren't given the chance to pick personally-affecting media for analysis (I get why but also seriously, Victorian lit killed any chance I had at liking lit analysis).

Taking a real look at that movie for the first time was an epiphany after bullsh**tting my way through every single lit analysis assignment I'd had till then. If you'd said 'Nietzsche' to me before then I'd have been clueless. Coming out of it, I finally understood what all that academic bullcrap actually meant within my understanding of the world.

I get that florid language and high-minded discussion of abstract issues go together, but modern philosophy is a bit like trying to cross the 405 on foot at 5.15 pm on a weekday. It's like the expectation is to understand all these philosophers in the abstract but that's just so fundamentally incompatible with any normal person's worldview that it immediately comes off as unparseable gibberish. I can testify. My brain literally shuts off halfway through half these posts.

[Aurelius]

Philosophers and specialist academics often come up with very specific definitions of words, that are well understood within their specialty but are completely different from the widely understood definition. The most obvious example is the very specific definition of "racism" used in critical race studies and certain parts of sociology.  If some nonwhite guy targets white guys for crimes based on obvious racial animus, and people are discussing this, two things are guaranteed to happen:
1. People start talking about how this is racist.
2. Someone else drops in to haughtily declare that "only white people can be racist".
And then the discussion turns to even more of a dumpster fire than it probably already was.

It's one thing to use very specialist neologisms in generalist discussions, because I can look them up and at least attempt to understand what they mean (although don't expect everyone else to agree with the implications and of the term - just because some academic comes up with a neologism for some behavior or worldview, with the clear subtext that such behavior or worldview is Problematic or Bad, doesn't mean that it actually necessarily is, or that said academic's way of looking at it is even useful or relevant). It's much worse to demand everyone else use your very special secret definition of a word that everyone else uses to mean something very different.

A different thing that irks me more than anything is when someone says something like "lmao, you're completely wrong, read <obscure 1,000 page book>" instead of explaining why they think you are wrong, based on concepts drawn from said 1,000 page book. No, I am not going to read the entire works of Proudhon just to satisfy some internet stranger. At lower levels of discourse, the same thing happens with 3-hour youtube videos.

A lot of modern philosophy, especially in the continental tradition, is built upon generations of previous philosophers whose work often is also very abstruse. I'm learning this the hard way right now, as I've been trying to pretty much learn the basics of the western philosophical tradition from scratch (and because I've been reading a lot of arguments between historians, especially Lincoln historians, in the Claremont Review of Books and these guys love the 20th century continentals). During undergrad I was way too immature and unfocused to approach this in a good way. I mostly just tried to label everything as "right" or "wrong", where right was that which I could twist into my preexisting worldview, and wrong was everything else, which I simply rejected. I'm thinking about studying history at the graduate level, and my big area of interest are the foundings of the various American colonies, the various ideas they were based on, and how these went on to influence the trajectories of these colonies, and then eventually the Founding and the course of the nation as a whole. This requires understanding a lot of philosophy. It's a big slog, and I've only just scratched the surface. It's like learning to read and understand a whole different language, and when people post stuff that looks like it could have been cribbed from a Judith Butler diatribe they should be mindful of that.

(Fun fact: a high school English teacher thought it would be a great idea to assign us something by Judith Butler to read. It was short, but none of us even began to understand it. Not sure what she was thinking on that one.)

[Aurelius]

The other possibility to consider is that sometimes people are using abstruse philosophy jargon simply to overwhelm or intimidate people, not out of a genuine desire for good-faith discussion. So yes, sometimes "speak English" is the only appropriate response."

When I'm talking about obscure history stuff to laypeople, I have no idea how much context or background knowledge they have already. So what I do is I tell them a little bit, ask if I'm making sense, if not then zoom out a bit and try again, repeat until I'm making sense. Spewing out five paragraphs of Derrida doesn't allow that to happen.