Coming with a mathematical background, my feelings are that there is a need for
- precision , comprehensibility, refutability, utility (in developing further deep insight), etc
- comprehensibility, enthusiasm, supprt, utility (in everyday life, politics, personal development), etc
These are not fully compatible.
Let me give you an example from maths - here is a statement and proof of Green's theorum:
It can't be made any more comprehensible to a layman than this and retain the precision and facility with which it is expressed - you need to have a maths background for that level of understanding. But a layman could understand that it relates what happens around the boundary of something very precisely to what happens throughout the interior. It's like being able to say precisely what is going on at every point within a meadow by simply surveying what is happening along the hedge around it. Very important in understanding things like how complex fluid flows behave.
I feel the same about philosophy - there needs to be two ways of expressing it to achieve both these needs. One for the guys who are steeped in it, are developing it and are working on the boundary of understanding maybe; and another for the interested "lay-people" who would like to understand and even participate, but not at the level of a professional. There are many really superb popular science books that do this sort of thing brilliantly, written by people who themselves are very able professional scientists.
Interesting perspective and comparison, John. I agree with you for the most part. It does suggest, however, that philosophy in its "pure form" should not be too concerned with accessibility, for fear of making too many compromises in terms of subtlety, precision, depth, and the like. In other words, that philosophy need only be accessible to
some people - who may then be able, in turn, to make it accessible to a larger audience, if they think the work is worth it. Do you think some philosophers have a proclivity for difficult, original thought, and others for making the thought of others accessible, though they may not have original ideas themselves? Or is there no correlation to speak of here?
Hi Ren,
I was thinking about this myself actually after one of your recent notebook posts. In it, you actually said something like 'I write in thick, difficult, tangled prose... to stimulate the minds of my readers' and my first reaction was 'for God's sake Ren are you fucking with us?'
In general, as a matter of style I think any idea should be presented as simply as possible - like the mathematical concept of 'elegance', there is a definite beauty to simple but precise expression. Purple prose and grandiloquence should be avoided (I was a git for this myself in the past btw), as a lot of the time additional verbosity actually serves only to dilute the power of an idea rather than clarify it.
Someone mentioned the French postmodernists, and yes they can be a pain to read. Take Foucault's _The Order of Things_. I've got to say, that first chapter analysing the painting was _just obnoxious wank_. It may be the case that that was his point to a certain extent ('language cannot adequately represent vision') but did he have to write the most obnoxious chapter in philosophy to make it? There are some great ideas in that book, and when we get to them, I often feel like they coukd be expressed much more easily.
So there is my literary reflection. Efficiency, elegance and simplicity are not only preferred with regards to style, but I find that the firmer the idea I have, the more concretely I can express it - weak, misunderstood or ill-formed ideas tend to have the quality of vagueness.
Now there's another problem, and it relates to scientific testability. Your idea needs to be expressed such that it can be tested. This lends itself to simplicity. Popper wrote about this (and I can find you the reference if you'd like), but:
When you express an idea in more complex language you risk (but not necessarily actualize) introducing what Popper called 'subordinate clauses'. These are adjunct ideas to the main idea that actually serve to erode the main idea's testability, sometimes to the point of making it unscientific. They try to explain away its weaknesses.
Someone published a sociological paper which summarises this rather nicely: 'Fuck Nuance'.
Subordinate clauses - or 'nuance' - are the hallmarks of fearful and evasive writing and should be avoided at all costs. Derrida is rightly lambasted for his obscurantusm fir thus reason.
So in these senses simplicity, elegance, efficiency are all preferred. Otherwise you risk dilution and erosion of your concepts.
I share your frustration with the first chapter of the
Order of Things, haha. I wonder if the 2018 version of Foucault would be still happy with it. The style and writing of the chapters that follow is much more palatable. In fact, I think Foucault can write beautifully sometimes. I think that the
Order of Things is a very profound book, perhaps the most influential on my doctoral thesis. It is probably unfalsifiable for the most part, though.
Which brings me to the heart of your post. It's possible for philosophy to take scientific method either as its law, or as its guide (I feel). In the former case it follows it strictly and systematically; in the latter, more loosely, allowing itself departures from it, though the general direction is towards striving to be as scientifically sound as possible. Personally, I can see two arguments for taking the method as a guide only:
- The first is that, like
@John K was saying in a recent post, when you're engaged in a philosophical investigation, you're not really doing the same work as when you're presenting the results of that investigation in a clean book. I very much sympathize with Popper's notion of subordinate clauses, and I think he's right about that in a lot of cases, but subordinate clauses can actually be quite useful heuristically speaking, when you're just investigating, feeling your way around, trying things. When you have found something, and articulated it, you might then clear the clauses that were only brought into the picture for investigative reasons and only keep what is essential to the concepts.
- The second is that, well, maybe certain subjects of philosophical exploration are not adequately tackled with the tools of science. It's possible to see certain domains of aesthetics under that light, and perhaps of ethics too. Existentialism, phenomenology, etc. are not likely exhausted by purely scientific method. I think it's no surprise that analytic philosophers have often excluded such fields (including ethics and aesthetics) from their purview. Personally, I think this leads to a potential impoverishment of philosophy. Some of the questions that it asks probably require answers of a non-scientific kind. I feel like the "postmodernists" fall into that latter category. Derrida included.
