A Thought on Philosophy Before Sleep

[mishalak]

A work of philosophy's worth is directly proportional to the clarity of its language.

Certainly not all works should be written for beginners. However the use of language to make a work difficult to understand, as seems common in too many academic circles, is the modern equivalent of keeping the bible in Latin so the unwashed masses need the priests of academia to interpret it. In my opinion this form of elitism is an intellectual crime. Locking away ideas rather than making them accessible to as many people as possible goes against the best interests of philosophy as well as humanity in general.

Ideas are not delicate things that need protection from consideration and free debate. Only hollow ideas need such protection to prevent people from easily discovering this fact. And if an idea is good and useful why should it be only available to a few professional thinkers tucked away in universities? Sometimes I agree with conservative critics that some of the real world needs to be introduced to these ivory towers.

Comments

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I'm never sure how much jargon is the result of ingroup protection and how much is that it's *hard* to make a new idea generally comprehensible.

Have you read any of the books about philosophy in popular culture (Buffy, Star Trek, etc.)? Do you think they do a decent job of making philosophy accessible?

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

Actually what I was thinking of deconstructionism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction) in particular when writing this. Apparently it is not exactly new and as near as I can tell is purposefully incomprehensible gobbledygook.

I've not read any of those books. The most useful philisphoical books I've read are the older once that seem to be written for a sort of general audience more than a century ago. I'm sure that there have been new ideas since Mills and so on, but it is a duecedly hard subject to get into.

[gomeza.livejournal.com]

Hey - it was nice to see you out last night. Sorry we didn't get much chance to talk.

PS: nice pants.

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

No worries you were doing hosting things. I got to have a fun talk with Paul and managed not to say something spectacularly angry/stupid to Bill Lewellyn about politics. So I did all right.

Thanks. Those pants were too expensive, but I like them.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I do my part to make philosophy comprehensible, whenever I copyedit a book of philosophy. At the very least, the sentence structure can be straightforward instead of convoluted.

However the use of language to make a work difficult to understand, as seems common in too many academic circles,

Yes, and certainly not confined to philosophy. A substantial number of people, most but not all of them in academia, seem to think that the fewer people who can understand your writing, the smarter it shows you to be. I think the contrary is usually true: the smartest people can make difficult ideas the most comprehensible to the most people.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

And believe me, conservative academics are just as bad as liberal academics.

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but liberal politicians don't hit conservative academics about the head and shoulder with such facts so we know more about the liberal idiocies.

[priyatelka.livejournal.com]

Totally agree.

My husband taught English at the college level for a couple of years and that was one of his biggest rants: making writing accessible, especially analytical writing.

Since his main focus was medeival and renassaince literature, his peers were especially prone to making the language impossible to slog through.