Along the lines of Ali's comment, there are writers I think had very good, important ideas, who I also regard as (objectionably!) unclear. In the analytic tradition, Wittgenstein is the one that comes to mind first. Why do I still regard him as objectionably unclear, if I also like his writing? Because I think it's very hard to defend the idea that his ideas could *only* have been expressed in his particular gnomic, oracular style. I love Kripke's "Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language", probably more than the passages of Philosophical Investigations that it's offering an interpretation of, in large part because Kripke's presentation is much clearer. I'm also a big fan of Wittgenstein's "On Certainty", but I think plenty of contemporary, less famous epistemologists--e.g., Crispin Wright--do a wonderful job expressing broadly Wittgensteinian ideas much more perspicuously than he ever did.
I think of Wittgenstein's later writings as a kind of philosophical Rorschach test. There are memorable images, examples, slogans, all of which can be developed in fruitful directions. But I think it's good to have norms that ask writers to do that work themselves, and it was only for very specific, largely bad reasons that Wittgenstein could write so cryptically and still have his writing get uptake.
How did he get away with it? He impressed Russell and others early on as a kind of prodigy, which I think fed a sense of entitlement that was then reinforced when he found plenty of willing disciples. It certainly didn't hurt that he was such a bizarre character; people will cut a lot of slack for someone they understand as a mad genius (plenty of such stories about Kripke too, though not relating to unclear writing...) It was everyone else's job to interpret his brilliant ideas, not his job to spoon-feed them to lesser intellects. We can find value in his work without approving of that whole dynamic; encouraging that writing style is extremely dangerous, for all the familiar reasons. Even if you *don't* have many good ideas, you can adopt the posture of the eccentric genius. If you've got a lot of charisma and confidence, you may be able to convince people. In an intellectual environment where that kind of writing isn't discouraged, you should expect a lot of imposters.
I remember thinking this reading Wright and other Wittgenstein interpreters as an undergrad. I was also really taken with On Certainty, but even now I am not sure whether I was more impressed by Wittgenstein or the interpretations. Occasionally I would come away from a paper on later Wittgenstein’s epistemology thinking “I have no idea whether Wittgenstein actually thought this, but it is such great philosophy that I love it either way”.
I suppose with Kripke and Wittgenstein we have the lovely “Kripkenstein” to pick his interpretation out specifically. If only all other interpreters had such portemanteau-able names.
Interestingly, in her biography of Frank Ramsey, Cheryl Misak makes a convincing case that he deserves credit for a lot of of the later Wittgenstein’s key ideas. But what is interesting here is that Ramsey was a clear writer, and also by all accounts not an asshole, but a very decent young man who died tragically young. (Wittgenstein by contrast comes out of the book very badly. The guy was straightforwardly a prick, it seems.) What I like about the Misak’s biography (amongst other things) is that it puts a bullet in the back of the head of the stupid "you're allowed to be a genius if you're an asshole/you have to be an asshole to be a genius” trope.
I think Ramsey kills the "you have to be an asshole to be a genius" trope, but nothing can kill "you're allowed to be an asshole if you're a genius" (any more than you can kill "you're allowed to be an asshole if you're popular" or "you're allowed to be an asshole if you're the only person with the password" or any other case where you are personally irreplaceable for something people care about, and therefore they will put up with bad behavior that they would never tolerate from anyone replaceable).
Carnap's comments on Wittgenstein paint him as approaching things as a kind of mystic.
"His point of view and his attitude toward people and problems, even theoretical problems, were much more similar to those of a creative artist than to a scientist; one might almost say, similar to those of a religious prophet or seer. When he started to formulate his view on some specific problem, we often felt the internal struggle that occurred in him at that very moment, a struggle by which he tried to penetrate from darkness to light under an intensive and painful strain, which was even visible on his most expressive face. When finally, sometimes after a prolonged arduous effort, his answer came forth, his statement stood before us like a newly created piece of art or a divine revelation. . . . The impression he made on us was as if insight came to him as through a divine inspiration, so that we could not help feeling that any sober rational comment or analysis of it would be a profanation.
Thus, there was a striking difference between Wittgenstein’s attitude toward philosophical problems and that of Schlick and myself. Our attitude toward philosophical problems was not very different from that which scientists have toward their problems. For us the discussion of doubts and objections of others seemed the best way of testing a new idea in the field of philosophy just as much as in the fields of science; Wittgenstein, on the other hand, tolerated no critical examination by others, once the insight had been gained by an act of inspiration"
This is spot on. I have the same attitudes towards Wittgenstein and Kripke. I think the former was a legit genius, and perhaps the fact that his mind worked in such odd ways was one of the reasons why he failed to be clear. I think he really, really tried hard to be as clear as he could, but he just failed. He even wrote about how he thought that each idea he had was intimately related to many other ideas that begged to be expressed too, and this played havoc with his writing.
Wittgenstein tells you at the beginning of the Philosophical Investigations why he writes "unclearly": "I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own."
I find his argument in the private language section of PI to be far richer than Kripke's discussion, precisely because he's willing to actually wrestle with tensions - he's torn between contradictory positions and he wants to get this down on the page. And he wants you to respond to the particular examples he discusses, rather than telling you what they "mean."
The overall effect of this, to me, is that you really start entertaining certain ideas (most prominently behaviourism) and then come to realise why you were wrong to entertain them. This brings you to understand at a deep level the attraction of different philosophical views on language while also understanding their problems - something mere refutation (even if it were clearer) could not achieve.
You've set up a false dichotomy between "subject where you accrue knowledge" and "subject that involves reading and interpreting things like novels." Thousands of people, myself included, spend their days doing the latter, and see themselves (rightly, I think) as doing the former at the same time. The same goes for "it's just a personal practice" - you've assumed that because a subject is based on a reader's individual, perhaps idiosyncratic, response to a text, it must be "personal practice." But as basically any critic will tell you, your interpretation is never "just" your own - it is always based on those of the others you have read, might change based on someone else producing a more convincing interpretation, and can always be challenged by others.
You might not be comfortable with this or feel like it produces certain enough knowledge - your remark about the Bible would indicate as much. But for what it's worth, and I say this only so you know where I'm coming from not to be a dick lol, but the analytic philosophy which sees itself as "accumulating knowledge over time" has tended to accumulate knowledge that I'm completely uninterested in. Other people are and that's great, but I do suspect that the difference in methodology produces different kinds of insights, which will be insights that different kinds of people care about having.
This subjective point is all I can really say against your point about the "clear version of Wittgenstein" - I went through five years of analytic philosophy undergrad, and didn't read anyone who really made me feel contradictory positions the way Wittgenstein does. Charles Taylor is someone often accused of doing a "ventriloquism" of positions he disagrees with, and for my money even he doesn't come close to Wittgenstein as a philosophical prose stylist able to bring you directly into your temptations towards different, contradictory positions.
As for your final point - there are a few philosophers who inspire less interesting thoughts in me than a blank page would, but Wittgenstein is not one of them.
I feel validated! My considered opinion is that Wittgenstein was mostly a charlatan. I studied the tractatus for months without finding a single insight. Plenty of incantations though!
But there is much more in Wittgenstein than what there is in Kripke’s book, but there is not much more in Ktipke’s book than there is in Wittgenstein.
I’m sincerely shocked that people argue like this — it’s akin to preferring the Oxford very short introduction to a philosopher to their own work because the very short introduction demonstrates that those ideas could be said in a more clear and coincise way.
But also what is straightforward and clear can be used as a projection of our ideas.
If I say “love is the most beautiful thing in the world” it is very clear and neither vague. But you can be sure a lot of projection will happen.
A lot of bad philosophy starts from geometric principles, or a=a. And also from quantum mechanics.
Actually the simpler the text the more people take it and superimpose their meaning on it. New age pseudo-science is clear and simple and obviously false, and it sells more than theory by a wide margin.
Yeah I'm certainly not sure where I'd draw boundaries, especially within the continental tradition, because I just don't know it well at all. I've heard plenty of people I respect say Foucault is much better than Derridas, and I can easily imagine that if I put the work in, I'd regard Foucault as someone with interesting, good ideas who used some of the same tricks as Wittgenstein, while I'd see Derridas as more of a charlatan who's just not worth the effort of reading. Maybe not! I haven't put the work in there--there's plenty of other stuff I havent read that's higher on my list of priorities--so I don't know.
Great analysis, but I think you leave something out. Clarity is essential for accountability.
I need to know for sure what you are saying, and _also_ have confidence that you will aver to _my understanding_ of your statement , in order to have confidence in any behavior you recommend or conclusion you draw. Otherwise, when I follow through on your writing and it blows up in my face, you can disavow responsibility by saying "no, _that's not what I meant_."
This is precisely why unclarity is acceptable in many areas of communication, such as fiction or poetry (Joyce, Faulkner) or in emotional venting to a close friend. But when the audience is supposed to do something with what you say, unclarity is a big problem.
I see this all the time when I peer review articles (I'm a social scientist, communication actually). Authors use unclarity to hide the weakness in their argument. They understand that the unclear argument is weak. But it's harder to refute. In particular, it's harder to find a contradiction between their bold, exciting claim and their weak evidence if you don't know exactly what they are promising did or did not happen. I often find myself writing reviews that say "if you are claiming this, then that's not supported for this reason. But if you are claiming that, then you need more data."
Where I can tolerate Butler et al is that they, and many such writers, often think of their audience as intimate cohorts. People who share their perspective and are inspired by the meaning they suggest but don't declare. Then, the book or essay blows up, and it becomes a political assertion. Now it can't stand. It's too evasive to compel anyone who doesn't already agree to follow its recommendations.
Muñoz has offered us an admirably perspicuous excursus on the normative desideratum of epistemic legibility. In an epoch saturated by the mystagogic fetishization of syntactic convolution, this intervention furnishes a paradigmatic instantiation of discursive transparency as a regulative ideal. It orchestrates an exemplary refutation in which clarity itself emerges as a kind of counter-hegemonic force, unraveling the cryptic semiotic torsions that have sedimented into our dialectical habits.
Your sentences are too short. To really imbibe the continental philosophy vibe, you need unnecessary complexity not just on the vocabulary level but on the sentence, paragraph, and conceptual level as well.
What does it mean for philosophical writing to have “clarity”? In an epoch saturated by the mystagogic fetishization of convuluted syntax and iambic bombast, Muñoz has offered us an way out, an admirably perspicuous excursus on the normative desideratum of epistemic legibility — this “intervention” thus furnishes, through elegance in pragmatic form and not just mere dispassionate argument, a postparadigmatic instantiation of discursive transparency as a regulative ideal, orchestrating an exemplary “refutation” in which “clarity” itself emerges as a kind of counter-hegemonic force, unraveling the “cryptic” semiotic torsions that have sedimented into “our” dialectical habits in the late capitalist era of Anglo-American digital correspondence in the 2020s.
Not all that much, but I like to understand the basic contours of a position/debate before I critique it. It helps me be overall more reasonable, hopefully! It's a version of the Ideological Turing Test, though style is usually easy to mimic than substance.
Whatever you can do, ChatGPT can do better 😛 (I asked for 2x length; it really outdid itself!):
Muñoz offers us a remarkably lucid and incisive exploration of the normative ideal of epistemic legibility, a notion that places clarity and transparency at the center of how we ought to conceive of and communicate knowledge. In an intellectual climate overwhelmed by the allure of mystifying complexity and the fetishization of syntactic convolution, where abstraction and obfuscation are often mistaken for profundity, this intervention stands as a paradigm of discursive transparency. It challenges the very norms that have come to govern the intellectual and cultural landscape, positing clarity not as a simplistic or reductive ideal, but as a robust, counter-hegemonic force capable of dismantling the cryptic, semiotic torsions that have become embedded in our rhetorical and dialectical practices.
At a moment when discursive opacity is frequently celebrated as a marker of intellectual sophistication, Muñoz’s approach offers a counterpoint that seeks to unravel the tangled web of signifiers and structures that have been sedimented into our collective modes of thought and communication. Far from being an endorsement of simplistic or reductionist thinking, this call for epistemic legibility frames clarity as an act of radical potential—one that resists the entrenched mechanisms of meaning-making that often prioritize the enigmatic and the complex over the accessible and the intelligible.
In this context, clarity emerges not simply as an aesthetic or formal preference, but as a regulative ideal—a standard by which we should strive to measure the transparency of our discursive acts. Yet, this is no call for a return to naive, simplistic forms of communication; rather, it is an invitation to reconsider how we have come to embrace the convoluted, the arcane, and the deliberately opaque as marks of intellectual authority. By confronting these tendencies, Muñoz articulates a vision of knowledge and communication that does not shy away from complexity but instead seeks to make even the most challenging ideas more comprehensible, more accessible, and more open to meaningful engagement.
This intervention functions as a paradigmatic refutation of the intellectual hegemony that has made complexity synonymous with depth and clarity with shallowness. By positing clarity as a counter-hegemonic force, Muñoz emphasizes its subversive potential. It is not merely a matter of simplifying ideas, but of reclaiming clarity from the grip of those who use obscurity as a tool to consolidate power and reinforce existing hierarchies of knowledge. In this sense, clarity becomes a political act—a way to challenge the mystifying forces that have twisted our epistemic habits, distorting the very process by which we come to understand and communicate the world around us.
The cryptic semiotic torsions Muñoz refers to are not just abstract linguistic phenomena, but part of a broader ideological structure that obscures the very processes of meaning-making. These torsions—twists and contortions in how meaning is conveyed—are a product of the historical and social contexts in which knowledge is produced, circulated, and consumed. Muñoz’s intervention asks us to look critically at the systems that shape our dialectical practices, to recognize the ways in which the conventions of intellectual discourse can serve to reinforce power relations, perpetuate opacity, and obscure the very knowledge that ought to be shared.
In this light, epistemic legibility is not just a preference for clarity; it is a revolutionary call to rethink how we engage with knowledge itself. It urges us to question the structures of power embedded within our linguistic and intellectual systems and to consider the ways in which complexity is often weaponized to maintain exclusive control over knowledge. Clarity, in this sense, is not just a tool for greater understanding but an active resistance against the intellectual monopolies that have long held sway over how we think, speak, and understand the world.
I think, “By positing clarity as a counter-hegemonic force…” and “The cryptic semiotic torsions Munoz refers to…” are a couple of my favorites from this.
You know, actually reading it now (I pasted it w/o having even dared to lol), I find it actually a lot clearer than the likes of Butler. It’s absurd in many ways ofc, but it seems to fundamentally maintain a machine-like non-circuitousness that’s somewhat of a piece w/the tendencies it’s hated for — and at odds w/the strains of writing it’s presumably emulating.
(For context, first I asked it about the pomo influences in the original, and then I asked it to “use these same influences to expand the original to something expressing the same thing, but twice the length”….)
I believe this is the OG generator of postmodern gibberish (redundant). I now recognize it as an even more brilliant accomplishment, in the pre-AI world, than I realized at the time.
“Those who know they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound.” Nietzsche, The Gay Science, sec. 173.
First off, let me be especially clear that I agree with nearly everything you say here. At the same time, this whole spectacle is just so exhausting.
Back in 2016, near the end of my undergrad days, I moderated a Facebook philosophy shitposting group. About once a month the community would have this exact debate all over again. It was like philosophical Groundhog Day. So it’s a little dispiriting to see (a) an undergrad’s hasty generalization-cum-ragebait being taken so seriously by the broader academic community, and (b) seasoned academics relitigating the same rote points—on both sides—that shitposters were making online nearly a decade ago.
I’ll just add two thoughts to the dumpster fire.
First, Anderson’s claim that there is a “fetish” for clarity is true—at least on one perfectly ordinary reading. You riffed on this yourself in a previous Note: analytic philosophers sometimes dismiss a difficult idea with a quick “what does this even mean?” That move is often premature, and it treats clarity as a blunt instrument for waving away positions that deserve more patient engagement (not to mention: as is often the case for more radical, revisionary projects). This misuse obviously doesn’t undermine the value of clarity, but it does show that clarity as an institutional norm can be deployed badly.
Second, the occasional value of unclarity is not hard to make sense of. It is deeply rewarding to grapple with texts that are obscure, dense, or conceptually murky. Nearly all philosophy pre-Moore/Russell requires this. There is intellectual satisfaction—and sometimes philosophical insight—in the act of making an unclear idea clear. That value is not had *despite* unclarity; it exists *because of* unclarity. One might say the value is parasitic on clarity, since the aim of the activity is to clarify what’s obscure. Yet, I suspect, the process itself can have value above and beyond that of the end product. And even if that's not right, the value of this activity should at least temper our impulse to think that all ideas must be expressed clearly from the outset.
None of this undermines your main argument. Clarity is a virtue. It’s good for writers to aim for it, and readers have a real claim to it. It's just annoying to see that Bentham's ragebait could inspire this level of response, which I guess I'm now guilty of feeding into too.
I completely agree with the first point. There are things that are worth saying, but that can't be said clearly (particularly to certain audiences). But I disagree with the second. To the extent that one gets enjoyment out of clarifying the obscure, you can get this by solving crosswords, cracking codes, or doing randomized controlled trials on statistical populations, among many other things. There's no shortage of places to get this enjoyment. If we think that the process of academic work produces things that are of value, then we should want to make those valuable things accessible to people who can benefit from them, with the enjoyment serving just as a way to lure people in. If the way you provide enjoyment is by making it hard for some of the target audience to access it, you are being counterproductive.
>"What’s the use of writing at all if nobody can understand it?” asked Caleb, energetically, quite preoccupied with the bad quality of the work. “Is there so little business in the world that you must be sending puzzles over the country?"
"analytic philosophers sometimes dismiss a difficult idea with a quick “what does this even mean?” That move is often premature, and it treats clarity as a blunt instrument for waving away positions that deserve more patient engagement (not to mention: as is often the case for more radical, revisionary projects). "
I'm not sure I would characterize this as "misuse". "This doesn't mean anything" would be a dismissal, but the question: "What does this even mean?" seems like the first step of engagement to me. Sure, the "even" implies some skepticism, but the writer can always counter that skepticism by.......wait for it........answering the question! After all, understanding "what this means" is the whole ball game, right?
This seems like a disagreement about who should bear the burden of doing the work of understanding a communicated idea, and of demonstrating or verifying that the idea is indeed meaningful and not just gibberish. Is it the reader's job to grapple with it, or is it the writer's job to make it clearer? (Of course, this question is sometimes freighted with the pre-existing mutual political hostility that the writer and the reader are bringing to the whole enterprise.)
The answer is obviously "both", to some extent. (As Munoz says, a book on set theory demands more from the reader than The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and that can't be helped). However, sometimes the reader can't immediately pick up what the writer is putting down, and then it's a question of who needs to do the work to close the gap.
Complaining about the question "what does this even mean" seems to imply that it's always the reader's job to "do the work", but that requires the reader to trust that this investment will pay off, that there *is* value in the idea, that the writer is not a charlatan spouting gibberish, and it is not obvious to me that trust should be unquestioningly granted. For me, a lack of clarity, and especially a hostile contempt for the sensible question: "what does this even mean?", is a very, very strong indicator that the writer is not a good thinker and my time would be better spent elsewhere.
I agree that analytic philosophers do often dismiss ideas as unclear without actually arguing against the substance of the argument presented. What I would add is that Muñoz also does not address the main point of Anderson's argument: that because analytic philosophy assumes that since the "ground can be cleared" and every metaphysical truth can be established through the verification principle, analytic philosophy has a tendency to ignore historical precedents (previous philosophers having already presented counter-arguments to the positions they argue), and thus tends to straw-man continental philosophy through ignorance of its actual contents.
One very example of this straw-man tactic would be "So far, this just amounts to 'my favorite philosophers said you’re wrong.'" This conclusion upon Anderson's argument engages with neither the substance of what Anderson writes, as mentioned, but moreover does not address Adorno's argument in "Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel". Muñoz does not address Adorno's point that "Clarity can be demanded of all knowledge only when it has been determined that the objects under investigation are free of all dynamic qualities that would cause them to elude the gaze that tries to capture and hole them unambiguously"; as Adorno mentions, the observer effect as an epistemological problem is central to Hegel's metaphysics. It is not possible to really critique the "unclarity" of 'continental philosophy' (aside from some easy postmodern targets) without first defining clarity. (Likewise, Hegel's critique of Wissenschaft, or reified science, in Adorno's terms, is also not addressed here either, which is also one of Anderson's main points.) Muñoz has critiqued Butler's propositions about syntax and grammar, but has not really addressed what "clarity" itself is aside from the assertion that "If your theory of gender or of ideology is literally inexpressible in language that I can understand—or if it loses its plausibility when shorn of flourishes and ambiguities—that is not the fault of my language: it is the fault of your theory." However, Muñoz has not "shorn of flourishes and ambiguities" Hegel's phenomenology, and likewise has not defined clarity as anything other than "theory... expressible in language that I can understand".
Muñoz writes:
"Nor is there any good reason to think that all clear language must be a part of existing common sense. Mathematicians, scientists, and humanists are constantly coining new technical terms, and often their definitions are as lucid as you could want. It takes a minute to understand what 'Möbius strips' and 'continuous deformations' are, but that’s not because topologists are obscure writers. They’re using clear terms to talk about difficult concepts that go beyond common sense. If they can do it, why can’t Butler?"
Likewise, I would respond that Hegelian terms such as "mediate"/"immediate" or "being-in-itself"/"being-for-self" are clear and technical terms, although they are difficult concepts that go beyond common sense (but not Sittlichkeit).
Clarity is certainly good, and it is an important project for German idealism and other epistemological structures of continental philosophy, especially paraconsistent logics, to be represented (and representable) by some kind of formal logic. That said, we should not hastily assume that this is an impossible task.
I concede that a lot of Continental philosophy makes clear, reasonable distinctions. This post isn’t meant as a broadside against anyone who’s ever read Hegel. (Some of my clearest friends love Hegel!)
I also admit in the post that additional clarity isn’t always worth it, because we might not (yet?) understand the subject matter well enough. To demand perfect clarity from the get-go is to abolish hunches and brainstorms. Here I’m with Anderson (whose post also makes a number of reasonable observations).
As for the Adorno point, I didn’t discuss it because Anderson doesn’t quote it. But now that I’ve read the passage, I’d say that we can use clear language even to describe ambiguous realities. For example, the Duck/Rabbit illusion is visually ambiguous, but we can clearly talk about this in language by saying “it looks like a duck and also like a rabbit, but we can only see it one way at a time.” This doesn’t *simulate* the experience of the Duck/Rabbit. But it does describe it in clear terms.
For what it’s worth, there’s a wonderful (and clear) literature in cognitive science about the differences between linguistic and imagistic representation. Images convey a totality of information simultaneously; language forces you to express yourself one word at a time. Parts of images represent parts of the thing they depict; parts of a sentence might not depict anything at all. (Compare “the” to “the cat meowed.”)
So my objection to Anderson/Adorno is similar to my objection to the appeal to “subject-verb requirements.” I don’t think their point makes sense in light of modern cog sci/linguistics—though I do think there may be some kernel of truth in what they’re saying.
As I understand it, and Daniel alludes to, a fair amount of phenomenology has already been made "more clear" by cognitive neuroscience, psychophysics, and statistical decision theory. Maybe those fields are all missing something big and important, but if philosophers want to be listened to on this stuff then they need to actively engage with contemporary social and cognitive science. That means being conversant in the (relatively) clear language of those fields.
For example, you cite Adorno saying: "Clarity can be demanded of all knowledge only when it has been determined that the objects under investigation are free of all dynamic qualities that would cause them to elude the gaze that tries to capture and hole them unambiguously". We do, nowadays, have very clear ways of describing objects that are highly dynamic and ambiguous! We have entire fields of mathematics about these things, and literatures on their relationship to mental and neurophysiological phenomena! If you think there are major, fundamental problems with these literatures, then I think the onus is on you to explain what those problems are.
(This is coming, fwiw, from a cognitive scientist who does have a lot of problems with the current state of cognitive science, and is very open to criticisms of it. I don't intend this as a statement of scientific triumphalism.)
My #1 writing advice to my graduate students is "Never try to sound smart at the expense of being clear." IMO, lack of clarity in writing reflects lack of clarity in thinking. I know that I personally get more convoluted and jargony in my writing when I'm slightly confused about what I want to say.
I’d say jargon is basically cliché for experts, and indeed a way of not just shortcutting ways of saying certain things but also short-circuiting ways of properly thinking about them. That is great advice for grad students and everyone!
I agree with most of this, but jargon can go either way. A lot of jargon develops because it actually enhances clarity for relevant audiences when used appropriately. But it also sometimes lets you skate over the surface of the ideas without remembering all the way to the depths of what that jargon is meant to talk about.
My biggest frusteration reading published research is how often it is “look at my fancy method that if you read closely you will see does not work at all”
This is so spot on, and it’s not just writing. I caught myself getting “jargony” in conversation the other day, and it was totally because I was trying to sound smart (cringe) and wasn’t clear on what I wanted to say.
Why would you do that to sound smart? Minimalism is in fashion. If anything, you’re likelier to have someone call you out for trying to sound smart than you are to have someone think you’re smart.
The really funny thing here is that Butler/Anderson aren’t totally wrong. There are ideas you can’t express in English because of its implicit commitments. Presentism is in the philosophy of time is one such example. Anything requiring second order quantifiers is another. The solution was to invent formal languages with even higher facility for clear expression, not resort to metaphor and other indirect means of communication.
Presentism vs. eternalism is a great example. The simplest way to express eternalism is to say something like, "The past, present, and future all exist," but presentists often respond to this by saying, "No, the past existed, and the future will exist, but they don't exist now." The issue is that eternalist means "exists" in a timeless sense, but there is no conjugation for timeless verbs in English, so they get misinterpreted as speaking in the present tense. But the way to resolve the unclarity is certainly not to come up with weird roundabout expressions, but simply to explain what you mean by "exists".
(On a side note, I think eternalism is undeniable once you understand what it actually means, and that the persistent debate is mostly the result of confusions brought about by time-based tenses being a grammatical requirement in most languages, but that just confirms the point that clarity is important. The fact that everyday language can make it hard to express certain propositions clearly only increases the importance of clarity when talking about those propositions, to ensure that what you say isn't confused, or an artifact of the English language.)
One wonders how important the concept of "eternalism" is? (or, in general, any concept that literally "can't be described"). What work can such a concept do?
Languages (including English) evolve to convey anything that anyone thinks necessary to convey.
We've built titanic edifices of industry, civilization, and culture, all without being able to conjugate timeless verbs or otherwise say the unsayable.
Therefore, maybe anything that literally "can't be said" is just not that important?
Eternalism *can* be expressed, it just that the grammatical rules of English make it difficult to talk about it clearly. I don't think that says that much about its usefulness that we didn't already know. I think it's useful in that it prevents from saying some confused things by showing that those things are actually incoherent. A lot of analytic philosophy is useful for this reason. It's also relevant to certain arguments for and against God's existence, so if you think the existence of God would affect how you should live your life, that also makes eternalism important.
Ugh this is bringing back flashbacks to my college days. When I tried applying French feminist theory (Cixous' "Laugh of the Medusa," primarily) to actual novels in my honors thesis, all I found was obscurity and mystical evasion. The central claim of the theorists, and my thesis advisor, was that language itself is phallic/masculinist. Which put me in an impossible position. If language is inherently oppressive, then how are you supposed to confront that? Any attempt to write in a non-masculinist way seemed to produce incomprehensible prose that prevented engagement with the actual work. Turns out you can't do literary analysis in the white ink of breastmilk or the red ink of menstrual blood. I gave up and wrote, in clear prose, that the whole project was basically bullshit. That was my thesis. I don't think my thesis advisor liked it much, but the committee did! I got my honors.
Thank you for writing this. I'm a little annoyed that I was too slow because my piece may call out Anderson too (maybe not now because you've done it for me me!).
But at the same time I'm not annoyed, because I'm very uncomfortable (unlike Adelstein, tip of the hat to him) at picking fights with academics who know more about the subject than I do. I'd like to think I'm both humble and agreeable in that way.
My personal experience leads me to think that "Continental" philosophy (whatever that is) main appeal is the allure of esoteric knowledge and insight, not unlike a conspiracy theory. Many of the defenses for the norms of obfuscation are really bad and just repeated as truisms and not contested. I think Anderson makes the same mistake, as the flaws in her arguments are somewhat obvious.
I personally reject this way of thinking because I used to be big into it as an undergrad and know that this is how the psychology works! It sounds deep but all it does is lead to more questions. When I adopted a clearer style (not all clear philosophy need be analytic) my philosophical competence skyrocketed. So this is a personal crusade for me lol
“Now Kant is by no means easy to understand, which is no doubt part of his charm. If you want to be a really great philosopher, make sure not to say too clearly what you have in mind (well, maybe that’s not quite enough, but it’s a good start); if people can just read and understand what you say, there will be no need for commentators on your work, no one will write PhD dissertations on your work to explain your meaning, and there won’t be any controversies about what it is you really meant. Kant must have heeded the above advice, and the fact is there are dozens, maybe hundreds of books written about his philosophy, and endless controversy as to his meaning.” — Alvin Plantinga
(1) It is best to be as clear as you can, all else being equal.
(2) In any given social context, some ideas can be expressed more clearly than others. Moreover, some ideas are harder to express clearly regardless of social context.
(3) A clearer expression of the same idea is better than a more obscure expression of the same idea, but an idea that is harder to express is not necessarily worse than an idea that is easy to express.
(4) I’m not an expert, but I get the distinct impression that continental and analytic philosophy tend to be divided, first and foremost, not so much by different ways of saying the same thing as by differences in the kind of thing being said.
Thus, while complaining about a “fetish for clarity” might sound silly to you if you are thinking of it as a negation of (1), I suspect that it makes perfect sense if it is in fact intended as an affirmation of (3).
In general, I wish academics worked a bit harder for clarity. I recently started reading Reasons and Persons for the first time. My impression is that it’s actually much clearer than most other works of philosophy! Yet I still find myself losing the thread of an argument frequently, and having to go back and reread sections to get myself situated. Basic tidiness - topic sentences, liberal use of subheadings, deleting throat-clearing phrases, etc. - would go a long way toward making the text even more accessible.
I get why optimal clarity is rarely achieved though. It’s a lot of work! Personally, I find most of my first drafts are awfully unclear, and the clarity of the final product is an almost exclusive function of how much time I spend editing *for clarity specifically.*
I completely agree that R&P isn't as clear as the legends say. Partly, I think it's because Parfit had an unusual arrangement with the press: to get the book out on time, he would finalize it chapter by chapter. So he couldn't go back and edit earlier parts of the book!
In the end, he had plenty of time to finish Part 4. But the earlier parts, especially Part 1, strike me as unpolished. Most students are totally lost in Part 1 at first.
I haven’t finished this piece, but Butler’s Nixon example is particularly galling because it _does_ demonstrate a virtue of clarity: we know and are able to say that Nixon was lying. The clarity doesn’t force us to believe that he was telling the truth; it makes an evaluation of his truthfulness (in this case, a negative one) possible and therefore worth the undertaking. In Butler’s terms, I guess, it doesn’t prevent the deployment of critical suspicion, it enables it.
Also, I met Butler once, and I got to ask them a question, and I found their response incisive and insightful (though I don’t now recall it very well). My main takeaway was that editors should push them more—the results would be fruitful!
For what it's worth, I think Butler was at their unclearest in the early 1990s, and over the decades since then they seem to have done a lot to get clearer in their writing.
It's so funny that the argument appears to be not "You said I'm unclear but I'm not" but instead "You said I'm unclear but I *like* being unclear." Like, a normative argument against clarity is such a funny and silly idea.
To steelman their argument a tiny bit: a strong version of the argument might be something like a bucking of the effects of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. If someone uses the lack of clarity of language in your argument to gesture to its falsehood, you might say, "Well, hang on; I'm trying to express an idea, the truth of which exists independently of the language used to express it. I'm doing my best to explain it clearly, but a given language is not equally capable of expressing all ideas. It would be a mistake for philosophy to be limited by what ideas the language being used is able to most easily express; if *any* field should be looking beyond that, it should be philosophy. My argument might be true or false, but the ease with which my argument can be understood shouldn't itself be used as proof one way or the other." Since we're talking about Butler and gender, an example might be the difficulty of expressing what gender dysphoria feels like to people who don't experience it. This obviously has implications for how we understand the relationship between sex and gender, and the fact that it's difficult to communicate clearly in words shouldn't be used to invalidate it as a contributing piece of information.
That being said, I'm reminded of a Jenny Nicholson line: "It's just when I hear a comedian say, 'Nobody likes my jokes because they're offended,' my brain filters that so all I hear is, 'Nobody likes my jokes,' which is a good warning to receive from a comedian." When I hear a philosopher say "Nobody understands my ideas because they have a fetish for clarity," my brain filters that so all I hear is, "Nobody understands my ideas," which is a good warning to receive from a philosopher.
I’m an analytic philosopher who has often defended continental philosophy to my colleagues, and I appreciate this even-handed post.
I do analytic philosophy of gender, and when I read GT a few years ago I thought it was quite insightful. I’m open to the possibility that I overestimated it because I was under a spell, and when I revisit Butler I will try to account for that risk. But I do think it’s pretty likely that she has very worthwhile things to say despite her decision to be a bad writer.
I also think it’s unfortunate that the analytic philosophy of gender has not adequately engaged with performance theory. If people don’t want to read Butler, then they should read West and Zimmerman’s “Doing Gender”!
Along the lines of Ali's comment, there are writers I think had very good, important ideas, who I also regard as (objectionably!) unclear. In the analytic tradition, Wittgenstein is the one that comes to mind first. Why do I still regard him as objectionably unclear, if I also like his writing? Because I think it's very hard to defend the idea that his ideas could *only* have been expressed in his particular gnomic, oracular style. I love Kripke's "Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language", probably more than the passages of Philosophical Investigations that it's offering an interpretation of, in large part because Kripke's presentation is much clearer. I'm also a big fan of Wittgenstein's "On Certainty", but I think plenty of contemporary, less famous epistemologists--e.g., Crispin Wright--do a wonderful job expressing broadly Wittgensteinian ideas much more perspicuously than he ever did.
I think of Wittgenstein's later writings as a kind of philosophical Rorschach test. There are memorable images, examples, slogans, all of which can be developed in fruitful directions. But I think it's good to have norms that ask writers to do that work themselves, and it was only for very specific, largely bad reasons that Wittgenstein could write so cryptically and still have his writing get uptake.
How did he get away with it? He impressed Russell and others early on as a kind of prodigy, which I think fed a sense of entitlement that was then reinforced when he found plenty of willing disciples. It certainly didn't hurt that he was such a bizarre character; people will cut a lot of slack for someone they understand as a mad genius (plenty of such stories about Kripke too, though not relating to unclear writing...) It was everyone else's job to interpret his brilliant ideas, not his job to spoon-feed them to lesser intellects. We can find value in his work without approving of that whole dynamic; encouraging that writing style is extremely dangerous, for all the familiar reasons. Even if you *don't* have many good ideas, you can adopt the posture of the eccentric genius. If you've got a lot of charisma and confidence, you may be able to convince people. In an intellectual environment where that kind of writing isn't discouraged, you should expect a lot of imposters.
I remember thinking this reading Wright and other Wittgenstein interpreters as an undergrad. I was also really taken with On Certainty, but even now I am not sure whether I was more impressed by Wittgenstein or the interpretations. Occasionally I would come away from a paper on later Wittgenstein’s epistemology thinking “I have no idea whether Wittgenstein actually thought this, but it is such great philosophy that I love it either way”.
I suppose with Kripke and Wittgenstein we have the lovely “Kripkenstein” to pick his interpretation out specifically. If only all other interpreters had such portemanteau-able names.
Interestingly, in her biography of Frank Ramsey, Cheryl Misak makes a convincing case that he deserves credit for a lot of of the later Wittgenstein’s key ideas. But what is interesting here is that Ramsey was a clear writer, and also by all accounts not an asshole, but a very decent young man who died tragically young. (Wittgenstein by contrast comes out of the book very badly. The guy was straightforwardly a prick, it seems.) What I like about the Misak’s biography (amongst other things) is that it puts a bullet in the back of the head of the stupid "you're allowed to be a genius if you're an asshole/you have to be an asshole to be a genius” trope.
Huh! I would love for that to be true (I'm a huge Ramsey fan).
It's a very good book, definitely recommend. Although it did make me very nostalgic for my King's (Cambridge) days.
Kind of a “lots of rock stars are heroin junkies so to be a rock star i just need to become a junkie” reasoning except for intellectuals
Michael Tooley loved to say that the two great tragedies of 20th century philosophy were that Frank Ramsey died so young and Wittgenstein didn’t.
I think Ramsey kills the "you have to be an asshole to be a genius" trope, but nothing can kill "you're allowed to be an asshole if you're a genius" (any more than you can kill "you're allowed to be an asshole if you're popular" or "you're allowed to be an asshole if you're the only person with the password" or any other case where you are personally irreplaceable for something people care about, and therefore they will put up with bad behavior that they would never tolerate from anyone replaceable).
Carnap's comments on Wittgenstein paint him as approaching things as a kind of mystic.
"His point of view and his attitude toward people and problems, even theoretical problems, were much more similar to those of a creative artist than to a scientist; one might almost say, similar to those of a religious prophet or seer. When he started to formulate his view on some specific problem, we often felt the internal struggle that occurred in him at that very moment, a struggle by which he tried to penetrate from darkness to light under an intensive and painful strain, which was even visible on his most expressive face. When finally, sometimes after a prolonged arduous effort, his answer came forth, his statement stood before us like a newly created piece of art or a divine revelation. . . . The impression he made on us was as if insight came to him as through a divine inspiration, so that we could not help feeling that any sober rational comment or analysis of it would be a profanation.
Thus, there was a striking difference between Wittgenstein’s attitude toward philosophical problems and that of Schlick and myself. Our attitude toward philosophical problems was not very different from that which scientists have toward their problems. For us the discussion of doubts and objections of others seemed the best way of testing a new idea in the field of philosophy just as much as in the fields of science; Wittgenstein, on the other hand, tolerated no critical examination by others, once the insight had been gained by an act of inspiration"
This is spot on. I have the same attitudes towards Wittgenstein and Kripke. I think the former was a legit genius, and perhaps the fact that his mind worked in such odd ways was one of the reasons why he failed to be clear. I think he really, really tried hard to be as clear as he could, but he just failed. He even wrote about how he thought that each idea he had was intimately related to many other ideas that begged to be expressed too, and this played havoc with his writing.
Wittgenstein tells you at the beginning of the Philosophical Investigations why he writes "unclearly": "I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own."
I find his argument in the private language section of PI to be far richer than Kripke's discussion, precisely because he's willing to actually wrestle with tensions - he's torn between contradictory positions and he wants to get this down on the page. And he wants you to respond to the particular examples he discusses, rather than telling you what they "mean."
The overall effect of this, to me, is that you really start entertaining certain ideas (most prominently behaviourism) and then come to realise why you were wrong to entertain them. This brings you to understand at a deep level the attraction of different philosophical views on language while also understanding their problems - something mere refutation (even if it were clearer) could not achieve.
You've set up a false dichotomy between "subject where you accrue knowledge" and "subject that involves reading and interpreting things like novels." Thousands of people, myself included, spend their days doing the latter, and see themselves (rightly, I think) as doing the former at the same time. The same goes for "it's just a personal practice" - you've assumed that because a subject is based on a reader's individual, perhaps idiosyncratic, response to a text, it must be "personal practice." But as basically any critic will tell you, your interpretation is never "just" your own - it is always based on those of the others you have read, might change based on someone else producing a more convincing interpretation, and can always be challenged by others.
You might not be comfortable with this or feel like it produces certain enough knowledge - your remark about the Bible would indicate as much. But for what it's worth, and I say this only so you know where I'm coming from not to be a dick lol, but the analytic philosophy which sees itself as "accumulating knowledge over time" has tended to accumulate knowledge that I'm completely uninterested in. Other people are and that's great, but I do suspect that the difference in methodology produces different kinds of insights, which will be insights that different kinds of people care about having.
This subjective point is all I can really say against your point about the "clear version of Wittgenstein" - I went through five years of analytic philosophy undergrad, and didn't read anyone who really made me feel contradictory positions the way Wittgenstein does. Charles Taylor is someone often accused of doing a "ventriloquism" of positions he disagrees with, and for my money even he doesn't come close to Wittgenstein as a philosophical prose stylist able to bring you directly into your temptations towards different, contradictory positions.
As for your final point - there are a few philosophers who inspire less interesting thoughts in me than a blank page would, but Wittgenstein is not one of them.
I feel validated! My considered opinion is that Wittgenstein was mostly a charlatan. I studied the tractatus for months without finding a single insight. Plenty of incantations though!
But there is much more in Wittgenstein than what there is in Kripke’s book, but there is not much more in Ktipke’s book than there is in Wittgenstein.
I’m sincerely shocked that people argue like this — it’s akin to preferring the Oxford very short introduction to a philosopher to their own work because the very short introduction demonstrates that those ideas could be said in a more clear and coincise way.
There's a reason I said "the passages."
But also what is straightforward and clear can be used as a projection of our ideas.
If I say “love is the most beautiful thing in the world” it is very clear and neither vague. But you can be sure a lot of projection will happen.
A lot of bad philosophy starts from geometric principles, or a=a. And also from quantum mechanics.
Actually the simpler the text the more people take it and superimpose their meaning on it. New age pseudo-science is clear and simple and obviously false, and it sells more than theory by a wide margin.
My annual short story https://nimnim1.substack.com/p/poly-hell
Yup, you've got me right.
Yeah I'm certainly not sure where I'd draw boundaries, especially within the continental tradition, because I just don't know it well at all. I've heard plenty of people I respect say Foucault is much better than Derridas, and I can easily imagine that if I put the work in, I'd regard Foucault as someone with interesting, good ideas who used some of the same tricks as Wittgenstein, while I'd see Derridas as more of a charlatan who's just not worth the effort of reading. Maybe not! I haven't put the work in there--there's plenty of other stuff I havent read that's higher on my list of priorities--so I don't know.
Great analysis, but I think you leave something out. Clarity is essential for accountability.
I need to know for sure what you are saying, and _also_ have confidence that you will aver to _my understanding_ of your statement , in order to have confidence in any behavior you recommend or conclusion you draw. Otherwise, when I follow through on your writing and it blows up in my face, you can disavow responsibility by saying "no, _that's not what I meant_."
This is precisely why unclarity is acceptable in many areas of communication, such as fiction or poetry (Joyce, Faulkner) or in emotional venting to a close friend. But when the audience is supposed to do something with what you say, unclarity is a big problem.
I see this all the time when I peer review articles (I'm a social scientist, communication actually). Authors use unclarity to hide the weakness in their argument. They understand that the unclear argument is weak. But it's harder to refute. In particular, it's harder to find a contradiction between their bold, exciting claim and their weak evidence if you don't know exactly what they are promising did or did not happen. I often find myself writing reviews that say "if you are claiming this, then that's not supported for this reason. But if you are claiming that, then you need more data."
Where I can tolerate Butler et al is that they, and many such writers, often think of their audience as intimate cohorts. People who share their perspective and are inspired by the meaning they suggest but don't declare. Then, the book or essay blows up, and it becomes a political assertion. Now it can't stand. It's too evasive to compel anyone who doesn't already agree to follow its recommendations.
If those recommendations can even be discerned.
Muñoz has offered us an admirably perspicuous excursus on the normative desideratum of epistemic legibility. In an epoch saturated by the mystagogic fetishization of syntactic convolution, this intervention furnishes a paradigmatic instantiation of discursive transparency as a regulative ideal. It orchestrates an exemplary refutation in which clarity itself emerges as a kind of counter-hegemonic force, unraveling the cryptic semiotic torsions that have sedimented into our dialectical habits.
Your sentences are too short. To really imbibe the continental philosophy vibe, you need unnecessary complexity not just on the vocabulary level but on the sentence, paragraph, and conceptual level as well.
What does it mean for philosophical writing to have “clarity”? In an epoch saturated by the mystagogic fetishization of convuluted syntax and iambic bombast, Muñoz has offered us an way out, an admirably perspicuous excursus on the normative desideratum of epistemic legibility — this “intervention” thus furnishes, through elegance in pragmatic form and not just mere dispassionate argument, a postparadigmatic instantiation of discursive transparency as a regulative ideal, orchestrating an exemplary “refutation” in which “clarity” itself emerges as a kind of counter-hegemonic force, unraveling the “cryptic” semiotic torsions that have sedimented into “our” dialectical habits in the late capitalist era of Anglo-American digital correspondence in the 2020s.
You, sir, have actually read leftist theory with your time. This was perfect.
Not all that much, but I like to understand the basic contours of a position/debate before I critique it. It helps me be overall more reasonable, hopefully! It's a version of the Ideological Turing Test, though style is usually easy to mimic than substance.
Fair points. I am going to take that with me.
Concepts? Paragraphs? Sentences? These are the building blocks of fascism!
Whatever you can do, ChatGPT can do better 😛 (I asked for 2x length; it really outdid itself!):
Muñoz offers us a remarkably lucid and incisive exploration of the normative ideal of epistemic legibility, a notion that places clarity and transparency at the center of how we ought to conceive of and communicate knowledge. In an intellectual climate overwhelmed by the allure of mystifying complexity and the fetishization of syntactic convolution, where abstraction and obfuscation are often mistaken for profundity, this intervention stands as a paradigm of discursive transparency. It challenges the very norms that have come to govern the intellectual and cultural landscape, positing clarity not as a simplistic or reductive ideal, but as a robust, counter-hegemonic force capable of dismantling the cryptic, semiotic torsions that have become embedded in our rhetorical and dialectical practices.
At a moment when discursive opacity is frequently celebrated as a marker of intellectual sophistication, Muñoz’s approach offers a counterpoint that seeks to unravel the tangled web of signifiers and structures that have been sedimented into our collective modes of thought and communication. Far from being an endorsement of simplistic or reductionist thinking, this call for epistemic legibility frames clarity as an act of radical potential—one that resists the entrenched mechanisms of meaning-making that often prioritize the enigmatic and the complex over the accessible and the intelligible.
In this context, clarity emerges not simply as an aesthetic or formal preference, but as a regulative ideal—a standard by which we should strive to measure the transparency of our discursive acts. Yet, this is no call for a return to naive, simplistic forms of communication; rather, it is an invitation to reconsider how we have come to embrace the convoluted, the arcane, and the deliberately opaque as marks of intellectual authority. By confronting these tendencies, Muñoz articulates a vision of knowledge and communication that does not shy away from complexity but instead seeks to make even the most challenging ideas more comprehensible, more accessible, and more open to meaningful engagement.
This intervention functions as a paradigmatic refutation of the intellectual hegemony that has made complexity synonymous with depth and clarity with shallowness. By positing clarity as a counter-hegemonic force, Muñoz emphasizes its subversive potential. It is not merely a matter of simplifying ideas, but of reclaiming clarity from the grip of those who use obscurity as a tool to consolidate power and reinforce existing hierarchies of knowledge. In this sense, clarity becomes a political act—a way to challenge the mystifying forces that have twisted our epistemic habits, distorting the very process by which we come to understand and communicate the world around us.
The cryptic semiotic torsions Muñoz refers to are not just abstract linguistic phenomena, but part of a broader ideological structure that obscures the very processes of meaning-making. These torsions—twists and contortions in how meaning is conveyed—are a product of the historical and social contexts in which knowledge is produced, circulated, and consumed. Muñoz’s intervention asks us to look critically at the systems that shape our dialectical practices, to recognize the ways in which the conventions of intellectual discourse can serve to reinforce power relations, perpetuate opacity, and obscure the very knowledge that ought to be shared.
In this light, epistemic legibility is not just a preference for clarity; it is a revolutionary call to rethink how we engage with knowledge itself. It urges us to question the structures of power embedded within our linguistic and intellectual systems and to consider the ways in which complexity is often weaponized to maintain exclusive control over knowledge. Clarity, in this sense, is not just a tool for greater understanding but an active resistance against the intellectual monopolies that have long held sway over how we think, speak, and understand the world.
Still too clear, and with sentence structures that aren't contorted enough.
I think, “By positing clarity as a counter-hegemonic force…” and “The cryptic semiotic torsions Munoz refers to…” are a couple of my favorites from this.
Tbh I’m always referring to cryptic semiotic torsions.
They’re part of my stretching routine.
🤣
You know, actually reading it now (I pasted it w/o having even dared to lol), I find it actually a lot clearer than the likes of Butler. It’s absurd in many ways ofc, but it seems to fundamentally maintain a machine-like non-circuitousness that’s somewhat of a piece w/the tendencies it’s hated for — and at odds w/the strains of writing it’s presumably emulating.
(For context, first I asked it about the pomo influences in the original, and then I asked it to “use these same influences to expand the original to something expressing the same thing, but twice the length”….)
It’s funny you say that! I actually had to read it twice and I was like “okay, it’s the joke I thought” but it still has more clarity than Butler.
I guess we can mark her safe from ChatGPT professionally at this time, because even imitating her it has more clarity.
Thanks for sharing your prompt.
I believe this is the OG generator of postmodern gibberish (redundant). I now recognize it as an even more brilliant accomplishment, in the pre-AI world, than I realized at the time.
https://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/
Well I find the whole thing shallow and pedantic
I find it too clear and am left wondering what it all means.
“Those who know they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound.” Nietzsche, The Gay Science, sec. 173.
First off, let me be especially clear that I agree with nearly everything you say here. At the same time, this whole spectacle is just so exhausting.
Back in 2016, near the end of my undergrad days, I moderated a Facebook philosophy shitposting group. About once a month the community would have this exact debate all over again. It was like philosophical Groundhog Day. So it’s a little dispiriting to see (a) an undergrad’s hasty generalization-cum-ragebait being taken so seriously by the broader academic community, and (b) seasoned academics relitigating the same rote points—on both sides—that shitposters were making online nearly a decade ago.
I’ll just add two thoughts to the dumpster fire.
First, Anderson’s claim that there is a “fetish” for clarity is true—at least on one perfectly ordinary reading. You riffed on this yourself in a previous Note: analytic philosophers sometimes dismiss a difficult idea with a quick “what does this even mean?” That move is often premature, and it treats clarity as a blunt instrument for waving away positions that deserve more patient engagement (not to mention: as is often the case for more radical, revisionary projects). This misuse obviously doesn’t undermine the value of clarity, but it does show that clarity as an institutional norm can be deployed badly.
Second, the occasional value of unclarity is not hard to make sense of. It is deeply rewarding to grapple with texts that are obscure, dense, or conceptually murky. Nearly all philosophy pre-Moore/Russell requires this. There is intellectual satisfaction—and sometimes philosophical insight—in the act of making an unclear idea clear. That value is not had *despite* unclarity; it exists *because of* unclarity. One might say the value is parasitic on clarity, since the aim of the activity is to clarify what’s obscure. Yet, I suspect, the process itself can have value above and beyond that of the end product. And even if that's not right, the value of this activity should at least temper our impulse to think that all ideas must be expressed clearly from the outset.
None of this undermines your main argument. Clarity is a virtue. It’s good for writers to aim for it, and readers have a real claim to it. It's just annoying to see that Bentham's ragebait could inspire this level of response, which I guess I'm now guilty of feeding into too.
I completely agree with the first point. There are things that are worth saying, but that can't be said clearly (particularly to certain audiences). But I disagree with the second. To the extent that one gets enjoyment out of clarifying the obscure, you can get this by solving crosswords, cracking codes, or doing randomized controlled trials on statistical populations, among many other things. There's no shortage of places to get this enjoyment. If we think that the process of academic work produces things that are of value, then we should want to make those valuable things accessible to people who can benefit from them, with the enjoyment serving just as a way to lure people in. If the way you provide enjoyment is by making it hard for some of the target audience to access it, you are being counterproductive.
Relevant bit I liked from Middlemarch:
>"What’s the use of writing at all if nobody can understand it?” asked Caleb, energetically, quite preoccupied with the bad quality of the work. “Is there so little business in the world that you must be sending puzzles over the country?"
But what does this even *mean*?
(JK, I swear!)
"analytic philosophers sometimes dismiss a difficult idea with a quick “what does this even mean?” That move is often premature, and it treats clarity as a blunt instrument for waving away positions that deserve more patient engagement (not to mention: as is often the case for more radical, revisionary projects). "
I'm not sure I would characterize this as "misuse". "This doesn't mean anything" would be a dismissal, but the question: "What does this even mean?" seems like the first step of engagement to me. Sure, the "even" implies some skepticism, but the writer can always counter that skepticism by.......wait for it........answering the question! After all, understanding "what this means" is the whole ball game, right?
This seems like a disagreement about who should bear the burden of doing the work of understanding a communicated idea, and of demonstrating or verifying that the idea is indeed meaningful and not just gibberish. Is it the reader's job to grapple with it, or is it the writer's job to make it clearer? (Of course, this question is sometimes freighted with the pre-existing mutual political hostility that the writer and the reader are bringing to the whole enterprise.)
The answer is obviously "both", to some extent. (As Munoz says, a book on set theory demands more from the reader than The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and that can't be helped). However, sometimes the reader can't immediately pick up what the writer is putting down, and then it's a question of who needs to do the work to close the gap.
Complaining about the question "what does this even mean" seems to imply that it's always the reader's job to "do the work", but that requires the reader to trust that this investment will pay off, that there *is* value in the idea, that the writer is not a charlatan spouting gibberish, and it is not obvious to me that trust should be unquestioningly granted. For me, a lack of clarity, and especially a hostile contempt for the sensible question: "what does this even mean?", is a very, very strong indicator that the writer is not a good thinker and my time would be better spent elsewhere.
what does that even mean
"It is deeply rewarding to grapple with texts that are obscure, dense, or conceptually murky. "
To each their own. Reality is complicated enough as it is, and I think there are more worthy challenges to tackle.
I agree that analytic philosophers do often dismiss ideas as unclear without actually arguing against the substance of the argument presented. What I would add is that Muñoz also does not address the main point of Anderson's argument: that because analytic philosophy assumes that since the "ground can be cleared" and every metaphysical truth can be established through the verification principle, analytic philosophy has a tendency to ignore historical precedents (previous philosophers having already presented counter-arguments to the positions they argue), and thus tends to straw-man continental philosophy through ignorance of its actual contents.
One very example of this straw-man tactic would be "So far, this just amounts to 'my favorite philosophers said you’re wrong.'" This conclusion upon Anderson's argument engages with neither the substance of what Anderson writes, as mentioned, but moreover does not address Adorno's argument in "Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel". Muñoz does not address Adorno's point that "Clarity can be demanded of all knowledge only when it has been determined that the objects under investigation are free of all dynamic qualities that would cause them to elude the gaze that tries to capture and hole them unambiguously"; as Adorno mentions, the observer effect as an epistemological problem is central to Hegel's metaphysics. It is not possible to really critique the "unclarity" of 'continental philosophy' (aside from some easy postmodern targets) without first defining clarity. (Likewise, Hegel's critique of Wissenschaft, or reified science, in Adorno's terms, is also not addressed here either, which is also one of Anderson's main points.) Muñoz has critiqued Butler's propositions about syntax and grammar, but has not really addressed what "clarity" itself is aside from the assertion that "If your theory of gender or of ideology is literally inexpressible in language that I can understand—or if it loses its plausibility when shorn of flourishes and ambiguities—that is not the fault of my language: it is the fault of your theory." However, Muñoz has not "shorn of flourishes and ambiguities" Hegel's phenomenology, and likewise has not defined clarity as anything other than "theory... expressible in language that I can understand".
Muñoz writes:
"Nor is there any good reason to think that all clear language must be a part of existing common sense. Mathematicians, scientists, and humanists are constantly coining new technical terms, and often their definitions are as lucid as you could want. It takes a minute to understand what 'Möbius strips' and 'continuous deformations' are, but that’s not because topologists are obscure writers. They’re using clear terms to talk about difficult concepts that go beyond common sense. If they can do it, why can’t Butler?"
Likewise, I would respond that Hegelian terms such as "mediate"/"immediate" or "being-in-itself"/"being-for-self" are clear and technical terms, although they are difficult concepts that go beyond common sense (but not Sittlichkeit).
Clarity is certainly good, and it is an important project for German idealism and other epistemological structures of continental philosophy, especially paraconsistent logics, to be represented (and representable) by some kind of formal logic. That said, we should not hastily assume that this is an impossible task.
Thanks for the fair-minded pushback, Ellie!
I concede that a lot of Continental philosophy makes clear, reasonable distinctions. This post isn’t meant as a broadside against anyone who’s ever read Hegel. (Some of my clearest friends love Hegel!)
I also admit in the post that additional clarity isn’t always worth it, because we might not (yet?) understand the subject matter well enough. To demand perfect clarity from the get-go is to abolish hunches and brainstorms. Here I’m with Anderson (whose post also makes a number of reasonable observations).
As for the Adorno point, I didn’t discuss it because Anderson doesn’t quote it. But now that I’ve read the passage, I’d say that we can use clear language even to describe ambiguous realities. For example, the Duck/Rabbit illusion is visually ambiguous, but we can clearly talk about this in language by saying “it looks like a duck and also like a rabbit, but we can only see it one way at a time.” This doesn’t *simulate* the experience of the Duck/Rabbit. But it does describe it in clear terms.
For what it’s worth, there’s a wonderful (and clear) literature in cognitive science about the differences between linguistic and imagistic representation. Images convey a totality of information simultaneously; language forces you to express yourself one word at a time. Parts of images represent parts of the thing they depict; parts of a sentence might not depict anything at all. (Compare “the” to “the cat meowed.”)
So my objection to Anderson/Adorno is similar to my objection to the appeal to “subject-verb requirements.” I don’t think their point makes sense in light of modern cog sci/linguistics—though I do think there may be some kernel of truth in what they’re saying.
Seriously, though, what does any of that even mean?
Spoken like Socrates indeed
As I understand it, and Daniel alludes to, a fair amount of phenomenology has already been made "more clear" by cognitive neuroscience, psychophysics, and statistical decision theory. Maybe those fields are all missing something big and important, but if philosophers want to be listened to on this stuff then they need to actively engage with contemporary social and cognitive science. That means being conversant in the (relatively) clear language of those fields.
For example, you cite Adorno saying: "Clarity can be demanded of all knowledge only when it has been determined that the objects under investigation are free of all dynamic qualities that would cause them to elude the gaze that tries to capture and hole them unambiguously". We do, nowadays, have very clear ways of describing objects that are highly dynamic and ambiguous! We have entire fields of mathematics about these things, and literatures on their relationship to mental and neurophysiological phenomena! If you think there are major, fundamental problems with these literatures, then I think the onus is on you to explain what those problems are.
(This is coming, fwiw, from a cognitive scientist who does have a lot of problems with the current state of cognitive science, and is very open to criticisms of it. I don't intend this as a statement of scientific triumphalism.)
My #1 writing advice to my graduate students is "Never try to sound smart at the expense of being clear." IMO, lack of clarity in writing reflects lack of clarity in thinking. I know that I personally get more convoluted and jargony in my writing when I'm slightly confused about what I want to say.
I’d say jargon is basically cliché for experts, and indeed a way of not just shortcutting ways of saying certain things but also short-circuiting ways of properly thinking about them. That is great advice for grad students and everyone!
I agree with most of this, but jargon can go either way. A lot of jargon develops because it actually enhances clarity for relevant audiences when used appropriately. But it also sometimes lets you skate over the surface of the ideas without remembering all the way to the depths of what that jargon is meant to talk about.
My biggest frusteration reading published research is how often it is “look at my fancy method that if you read closely you will see does not work at all”
This is so spot on, and it’s not just writing. I caught myself getting “jargony” in conversation the other day, and it was totally because I was trying to sound smart (cringe) and wasn’t clear on what I wanted to say.
Why would you do that to sound smart? Minimalism is in fashion. If anything, you’re likelier to have someone call you out for trying to sound smart than you are to have someone think you’re smart.
The really funny thing here is that Butler/Anderson aren’t totally wrong. There are ideas you can’t express in English because of its implicit commitments. Presentism is in the philosophy of time is one such example. Anything requiring second order quantifiers is another. The solution was to invent formal languages with even higher facility for clear expression, not resort to metaphor and other indirect means of communication.
Presentism vs. eternalism is a great example. The simplest way to express eternalism is to say something like, "The past, present, and future all exist," but presentists often respond to this by saying, "No, the past existed, and the future will exist, but they don't exist now." The issue is that eternalist means "exists" in a timeless sense, but there is no conjugation for timeless verbs in English, so they get misinterpreted as speaking in the present tense. But the way to resolve the unclarity is certainly not to come up with weird roundabout expressions, but simply to explain what you mean by "exists".
(On a side note, I think eternalism is undeniable once you understand what it actually means, and that the persistent debate is mostly the result of confusions brought about by time-based tenses being a grammatical requirement in most languages, but that just confirms the point that clarity is important. The fact that everyday language can make it hard to express certain propositions clearly only increases the importance of clarity when talking about those propositions, to ensure that what you say isn't confused, or an artifact of the English language.)
One wonders how important the concept of "eternalism" is? (or, in general, any concept that literally "can't be described"). What work can such a concept do?
Languages (including English) evolve to convey anything that anyone thinks necessary to convey.
We've built titanic edifices of industry, civilization, and culture, all without being able to conjugate timeless verbs or otherwise say the unsayable.
Therefore, maybe anything that literally "can't be said" is just not that important?
Related: I should add that Skow thinks you *can* express eternalism—just not in English, since English is tensed.
It’s not going to put food on the table, but I find philosophy of time fascinating.
Relevant Brad Skow paper that also talks about the nature of possibility and necessity:
https://web.mit.edu/bskow/www/research/moodless.pdf
Eternalism *can* be expressed, it just that the grammatical rules of English make it difficult to talk about it clearly. I don't think that says that much about its usefulness that we didn't already know. I think it's useful in that it prevents from saying some confused things by showing that those things are actually incoherent. A lot of analytic philosophy is useful for this reason. It's also relevant to certain arguments for and against God's existence, so if you think the existence of God would affect how you should live your life, that also makes eternalism important.
Ugh this is bringing back flashbacks to my college days. When I tried applying French feminist theory (Cixous' "Laugh of the Medusa," primarily) to actual novels in my honors thesis, all I found was obscurity and mystical evasion. The central claim of the theorists, and my thesis advisor, was that language itself is phallic/masculinist. Which put me in an impossible position. If language is inherently oppressive, then how are you supposed to confront that? Any attempt to write in a non-masculinist way seemed to produce incomprehensible prose that prevented engagement with the actual work. Turns out you can't do literary analysis in the white ink of breastmilk or the red ink of menstrual blood. I gave up and wrote, in clear prose, that the whole project was basically bullshit. That was my thesis. I don't think my thesis advisor liked it much, but the committee did! I got my honors.
That was a stressful semester, though.
Thank you for writing this. I'm a little annoyed that I was too slow because my piece may call out Anderson too (maybe not now because you've done it for me me!).
But at the same time I'm not annoyed, because I'm very uncomfortable (unlike Adelstein, tip of the hat to him) at picking fights with academics who know more about the subject than I do. I'd like to think I'm both humble and agreeable in that way.
My personal experience leads me to think that "Continental" philosophy (whatever that is) main appeal is the allure of esoteric knowledge and insight, not unlike a conspiracy theory. Many of the defenses for the norms of obfuscation are really bad and just repeated as truisms and not contested. I think Anderson makes the same mistake, as the flaws in her arguments are somewhat obvious.
I personally reject this way of thinking because I used to be big into it as an undergrad and know that this is how the psychology works! It sounds deep but all it does is lead to more questions. When I adopted a clearer style (not all clear philosophy need be analytic) my philosophical competence skyrocketed. So this is a personal crusade for me lol
Great post!
An underrated benefit of clarity is self-understanding. At last, you can see what your own ideas are really made of.
“Now Kant is by no means easy to understand, which is no doubt part of his charm. If you want to be a really great philosopher, make sure not to say too clearly what you have in mind (well, maybe that’s not quite enough, but it’s a good start); if people can just read and understand what you say, there will be no need for commentators on your work, no one will write PhD dissertations on your work to explain your meaning, and there won’t be any controversies about what it is you really meant. Kant must have heeded the above advice, and the fact is there are dozens, maybe hundreds of books written about his philosophy, and endless controversy as to his meaning.” — Alvin Plantinga
Let me be (heh) clear:
(1) It is best to be as clear as you can, all else being equal.
(2) In any given social context, some ideas can be expressed more clearly than others. Moreover, some ideas are harder to express clearly regardless of social context.
(3) A clearer expression of the same idea is better than a more obscure expression of the same idea, but an idea that is harder to express is not necessarily worse than an idea that is easy to express.
(4) I’m not an expert, but I get the distinct impression that continental and analytic philosophy tend to be divided, first and foremost, not so much by different ways of saying the same thing as by differences in the kind of thing being said.
Thus, while complaining about a “fetish for clarity” might sound silly to you if you are thinking of it as a negation of (1), I suspect that it makes perfect sense if it is in fact intended as an affirmation of (3).
Yes, this!
In general, I wish academics worked a bit harder for clarity. I recently started reading Reasons and Persons for the first time. My impression is that it’s actually much clearer than most other works of philosophy! Yet I still find myself losing the thread of an argument frequently, and having to go back and reread sections to get myself situated. Basic tidiness - topic sentences, liberal use of subheadings, deleting throat-clearing phrases, etc. - would go a long way toward making the text even more accessible.
I get why optimal clarity is rarely achieved though. It’s a lot of work! Personally, I find most of my first drafts are awfully unclear, and the clarity of the final product is an almost exclusive function of how much time I spend editing *for clarity specifically.*
I completely agree that R&P isn't as clear as the legends say. Partly, I think it's because Parfit had an unusual arrangement with the press: to get the book out on time, he would finalize it chapter by chapter. So he couldn't go back and edit earlier parts of the book!
In the end, he had plenty of time to finish Part 4. But the earlier parts, especially Part 1, strike me as unpolished. Most students are totally lost in Part 1 at first.
That’s good to hear, given I’m still in Part 1!
I haven’t finished this piece, but Butler’s Nixon example is particularly galling because it _does_ demonstrate a virtue of clarity: we know and are able to say that Nixon was lying. The clarity doesn’t force us to believe that he was telling the truth; it makes an evaluation of his truthfulness (in this case, a negative one) possible and therefore worth the undertaking. In Butler’s terms, I guess, it doesn’t prevent the deployment of critical suspicion, it enables it.
Also, I met Butler once, and I got to ask them a question, and I found their response incisive and insightful (though I don’t now recall it very well). My main takeaway was that editors should push them more—the results would be fruitful!
For what it's worth, I think Butler was at their unclearest in the early 1990s, and over the decades since then they seem to have done a lot to get clearer in their writing.
That fits my impression, as well.
That’s interesting, thanks for the insight.
You mean “ask her,” “found her response,” and “push her,” right?
My favorite argument in favor of intentional unclarity in prose is the Straussian argument:
(1) There is a perennial philosophy.
(2) The perennial philosophy is persecuted if expressed openly.
(3) People who agree with the perennial philosophy--true philosophers--want to make sure that it continues.
(4) The best way to make sure the perennial philosophy continues is if its advocates aren't persecuted.
(5) Thus, true philosophers should want to express the perennial philosophy cryptically.
(6) A future true philosopher is someone both desirous of and capable of detecting the perennial philosophy when it is expressed cryptically.
(7) True philosophers can express the perennial philosophy in such a way that only other true philosophers or future true philosophers can detect.
(8) True philosophers want the perennial philosophy to continue [see (3)], so they want future true philosophers to discover it.
(9) Thus, true philosophers want to express themselves cryptically, so that they can preserve the perennial philosophy.
I think (1), (2), (3), (6), and (7) are false, but I can at least understand why someone who accepted all the premises would want to write unclearly!
It's so funny that the argument appears to be not "You said I'm unclear but I'm not" but instead "You said I'm unclear but I *like* being unclear." Like, a normative argument against clarity is such a funny and silly idea.
To steelman their argument a tiny bit: a strong version of the argument might be something like a bucking of the effects of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. If someone uses the lack of clarity of language in your argument to gesture to its falsehood, you might say, "Well, hang on; I'm trying to express an idea, the truth of which exists independently of the language used to express it. I'm doing my best to explain it clearly, but a given language is not equally capable of expressing all ideas. It would be a mistake for philosophy to be limited by what ideas the language being used is able to most easily express; if *any* field should be looking beyond that, it should be philosophy. My argument might be true or false, but the ease with which my argument can be understood shouldn't itself be used as proof one way or the other." Since we're talking about Butler and gender, an example might be the difficulty of expressing what gender dysphoria feels like to people who don't experience it. This obviously has implications for how we understand the relationship between sex and gender, and the fact that it's difficult to communicate clearly in words shouldn't be used to invalidate it as a contributing piece of information.
That being said, I'm reminded of a Jenny Nicholson line: "It's just when I hear a comedian say, 'Nobody likes my jokes because they're offended,' my brain filters that so all I hear is, 'Nobody likes my jokes,' which is a good warning to receive from a comedian." When I hear a philosopher say "Nobody understands my ideas because they have a fetish for clarity," my brain filters that so all I hear is, "Nobody understands my ideas," which is a good warning to receive from a philosopher.
I’m an analytic philosopher who has often defended continental philosophy to my colleagues, and I appreciate this even-handed post.
I do analytic philosophy of gender, and when I read GT a few years ago I thought it was quite insightful. I’m open to the possibility that I overestimated it because I was under a spell, and when I revisit Butler I will try to account for that risk. But I do think it’s pretty likely that she has very worthwhile things to say despite her decision to be a bad writer.
I also think it’s unfortunate that the analytic philosophy of gender has not adequately engaged with performance theory. If people don’t want to read Butler, then they should read West and Zimmerman’s “Doing Gender”!