Philosophy Is Hard to Read Because It Had to Be

I have written before about philosophy's refusal to define its terms. That post was about the consequence. This one is about the cause, because I think the cause is more interesting and less flattering than the usual account.

Start with the experience every student of philosophy has had. The book is hard to read. Not because the ideas are hard, but because the terms are never defined, or because a familiar word is being used with a private meaning that the author declines to announce. You assume the ordinary meaning, follow the argument into absurdity, slowly realise the word must mean something else, and then work backwards from the argument to reconstruct the definition the author never gave you.

In any other field this is bad writing, and it does not get published. In philosophy it is treated as depth. Some teachers will tell you, straight-faced, to read the book twice: once to infer the definitions, once to follow the argument. Nobody asks them the obvious question. Why were these books written so badly in the first place?

The Puzzle Reading Feels Like

For a long time I took the difficulty as a feature. There is a pleasure in decoding a text, the same pleasure as a puzzle, and I mistook that pleasure for the presence of something profound.

What cured me was reading profound books in other fields. The best science writing is about matters far harder than anything in Kant and is perfectly clear. Difficulty, it turned out, was not a property of deep subjects. It was a property of a particular kind of author. Which raised the question of what that kind of author was doing.

What They Were Selling

Here is my answer, and it is an economic one.

A philosopher has to be read to exist. To be read you must address the questions people actually care about: what a good life is, whether there is a purpose, where morality comes from, what the mind is. Nobody buys a book about the circumference of an atom.

But for almost the whole history of the discipline, those questions had no answers available. Philosophy did not know what life was. It did not know how morality had developed, or how the diversity of living things arose, or what computation is and how a computing system can look as if it has intentions. It had no statistics, so it could not handle anything with more than one cause. It had no game theory, which is the single most useful tool for explaining what large groups of people do. It had not yet noticed how little armchair reasoning is worth.

So the philosopher was in a specific position: obliged to answer the largest questions, in possession of none of the tools, and facing an audience that wanted an answer anyway. Religion had held that market first and was losing its grip. Philosophy took over the stall.

Under those conditions, sounding as if you have a foundation matters more than having one. And the way to sound founded when you are not is to leave the terms loose. A defined term can be checked. An undefined one can shift its meaning between the premise and the conclusion, quietly, and carry the argument across a gap that no defined term could cross. Kant and Hegel are the monuments to this technique.

I do not think most of them did it cynically. The really able ones half-knew that the ground was not there, and the obscurity grew around the weak points the way scar tissue grows around a wound. The effect is the same whether it was intended or not: equivocation that the reader cannot catch because the reader was never told what the words meant.

The Control Case

If this account is right, philosophers who write about things we actually understand should not need the technique, and they should write clearly.

They do. Daniel Dennett spent his career on the parts of philosophy that border on working science, and his prose is plain to the point of bluntness. The philosophy of science generally reads like this. Where there is a real subject matter underneath, the fog lifts, because it was never doing any work except covering the absence of one.

Go the other direction and you find the technique alive and well. Ask a modern celebrity philosopher a direct question about God and watch the words begin to move. The obscurity is not a period style that we have grown out of. It is what happens whenever someone has to defend a position that has no reasons under it and does not want that fact examined.

What Follows

Two things.

First, stop reading the difficulty as a compliment to the author. When a text cannot be understood on first reading, the default hypothesis should be that it is badly written, and the secondary hypothesis should be that it is badly written on purpose. Profundity is a distant third.

Second, notice what the technique tells you about the field. A discipline whose classic works cannot be read without a decoding pass is a discipline that spent its history selling answers it did not have. The obscurity is not incidental to the tradition. It is the tradition's way of surviving the fact that, on the questions it chose to own, it had nothing to say that could withstand being said plainly.