"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.

[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.

[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.

[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: