Should philosophy be easy to understand?

If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough. While some things are more complex than others I still think there's a lot to that statement, and philosophy is the same I feel. But on the other hand I think philosophy shouldn't be anything, you either explain in adequately or you don't.

 

i think the problem about language in philosophy is that most philosophers were rejected weirdos aka poets / language artists, not actual philosophers, so you know, that's what you get.
then the other so called philosophers, the lesser ones with (perhaps and this is an hypothesis) no soul / students saw gold in the show and decided to label these and those to build up their industry and make it look more real.
a passionate showbiz.
this is how mostly everything works in humanities.

 

My point is that I think the concepts on which we base our philosophies are what they are. There's no should, or ought to, to that. The crux lies within how well we convey these philosophies or ideas. You can have an adequate explanation for something, but what's the point if no one understands what you're trying to convey.

Personally I find beauty in taking something seemingly complex and making it simple, and what can be very hard to grasp at first might be perfectly tangible once you delve into it.

 

Well you know Tractatus 4.116: "Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly."

But that statement in itself is problematic because clarity of expression is subjective. I don't know if Wittgenstein himself thought his expressions are clear, but they sure have made a lot of people to wonder what he meant.

Also, notation of logic may be consistent and clear, but I don't think a layman would consider it easy to understand. Yet it's probably the simplest way to present the ideas, so the difficulty really depends on the background of the reader. It would be nice to make it easier for everyone, but I don't know if it's possible.

Philosophy discusses topics that may be hard to understand even without obfuscation, but I do think a lot of philosophers make simple things appear needlessly complicated through their choice of grammar or vocabulary. Often when philosophers talk about abstractions and come up with new words to describe them, or new meanings for old words, they aren't actually presenting some new worldview except to the extent that their subjective experience is unique. In other words, specialist vocabulary can be a way to make the subjective experience appear universal, or the concrete appear abstract. Or sometimes philosophers even try to borrow words from natural sciences, completely misunderstand some concept, and then use that misunderstanding as a basis for ontology, a set of abstractions that has nothing to do with science. The French postmodernists are especially guilty.

 

Yeah, what I was going for was it being technically correct, just maybe not right for the specific audience to comprehend. I agree with you, I just thought I wouldn't mix up my language too much.

 

First the original question...yes to a point...and then from a certain point if you are not challenging your own mind and thinking then it’s worthless for making new discoveries or coming up with new concepts...or even just bettering oneself.

And the above ^^^
Yes I do think that, having had numerous numinous experiences that I absolutely could never put into existing words.

 

I suppose I say it should be as easy to understand as possible without screwing with the usual goals it has...I think one annoying effect of the nature of the field on terminology is that there are so many *names* you end up running across, because there are so many positions on every issue.

Usually, I try to avoid getting sucked into too many such names, and try to spell out the main arguments directly, but I imagine it becomes more important to keep track of all the names when you're trying to contribute professionally to the literature, just to make a buzzword for what your position is and what positions you're responding to.


The other type of 'easy to understand' it would be helpful to have is to make the motivation for a position clear. I find sometimes the literature is more interested in completeness and precision in stating the given position than in motivating the position.


But overall, I think this latter issue is shared with a lot of fields!

slight addendum -- I think the best way to fix the first issue for professionals is to try to mention at least the different flavors of positions and their motivation at play before getting bogged down in the very specific mucking around they're going to do.

This lets people read at different levels of interest -- I think some people really do want all the mucking around, but some accessibility to nonspecialists is nice at least if the subject could be of broader interest.