Philosophy is Pedantry

I love philosophy. In particular I love the human aspect of philosophy, the in person dialectics, discussions that leave people more enlightened (or at least annoyed) than when they started. Unfortunately “formal” philosophy is not something I can condone most people to get into. There’s an old saying that “understanding a topic is to be able to make the complex comprehensible”. Essentially if you “get” something, you should be able to explain it to someone else with relative ease. However you might feel about many famous philosophers, this is certainly not a strong suit for most of them, nor is it for most practicing philosophers I’ve found. Whether it’s an unnecessarily obscure vocabulary, redefinitions of dozens of words, or just simple poor communication skills, this is a hill I constantly found myself climbing.

The Danish Daemon

I loved Søren Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death¹, I thought some of the ideas were incredibly interesting and enlightening. I also had a professor to ask about the prose when I didn’t understand it. Kierkegaard is hard to understand at the best of times, and the writing is so impenetrable that people can come away believing completely different things at times (we literally went paragraph-by-paragraph with commentary in the course). There is even a cottage industry of writing overviews of philosophers²³⁴ to help understand them (and websites⁵). For people who have not experienced this before, consider the following three passages (or skip them when you’re sick of them):

Despair is a sickness in the spirit, in the Self, and so it may assume a triple form: in Despair at not being conscious of having a Self (despair improperly so called); in despair at not willing to be oneself; in despair At willing to be oneself

• Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death (Page 17) ¹

This part is not too bad, but I’m sure I’ve already lost some people. Essentially he’s just saying there’s 3 forms of despair, and they’re all tied in different ways to a concept called the “self”, so what is it?

Man is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation [which accounts for it] that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but [consists in the fact] that the relation relates itself to its own self. Man is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short it is a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two factors. So regarded, man is not yet a self.

• Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death (Page 17) ¹

Here is a partial explanation I wrote to this passage from another post. The additional context to add to this is that Kierkegaard believed you could define things by their relationships. For example a rock can be understood through its relationship to nature, and vice-versa. On top of what I explained, he also notes that the “self” doesn’t follow this same pattern. If you were to say “I wan to understand myself”, the first “I” implies something is already there. Essentially you can’t escape this aspect of a “self” that lurks at the bottom of your understanding of the world. Jumping ahead now for this next part.

The Despair of Infinitude is due to the lack of Finitude:

The truth of this is inherent in the dialectical fact that the self is a synthesis [of two factors], the one of which is constantly the opposite of the other. No kind of despair can be defined directly (i.e. undialectically), but only by reflecting upon the opposite factor. The despairing person’s condition of despair can be directly described, as the poet does in fact by attributing to him the appropriate lines. But to describe despair is possible only by its opposite; and if the lines are to have poetic value, they must contain in their coloring a reflection of the dialectical opposite. So then every human existence which supposedly has become or merely wills to become infinite is despair. For the self is a synthesis in which the finite is the limiting factor, and the infinite is the expanding factor. Infinitude’s despair is therefore the fantastical, the limitless.

• Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death (Page 17) ¹

I covered something like this topic here.

If you managed to understand these passages as they are, then you are better than I am. Even now I have to re-read them several times to remember their implications, and I’ve read the book multiple times, and written about Kierkegaard. Even with this difficulty Kierkegaard is one of my favorite philosophers for his ideas, but certainly not his failure to express those ideas well. In other words there is good content, and semantics, but bad syntax. As a field I think it would be a good idea to begin to do more “re-writing” as the introduction/collection books have. There are lots of good lessons in philosophy that everyone can benefit from, but the wording and opaque nature of the current texts makes them impossible to parse, or even worse, easy to misunderstand.

The Mini Mustached Man

There are endless debates about whether or not Nietzsche’s ideas are inherently fascistic, I’m not here to debate that point. Instead I think the fact that so many people who are fascistic use his ideas to their own ends is a problem. It’s one thing to be nuanced, it’s another to be so opaque in your writing that advocating cruelty is a reasonable reading. However that being said, Nietzsche is also commonly a victim to intentional deceit, for example:

Even among them [the priests] there are heroes; many of them have suffered too much—: so they want to make others suffer.

Bad enemies are they: nothing is more revengeful than their meekness. And readily doth he soil himself who toucheth them.

• Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (XXVI. The Priests)⁶

This passage seems to imply that “the priests” are bitter about their suffering, and that any who touch them are “soiled”. You might use a passage like this to justify attacking any who associate with “the priests”, however consider the passage in it’s fuller context:

Here are priests: but although they are mine enemies, pass them quietly and with sleeping swords!

Even among them there are heroes; many of them have suffered too much—: so they want to make others suffer.

Bad enemies are they: nothing is more revengeful than their meekness. And readily doth he soil himself who toucheth them.

But my blood is related to theirs; and I want withal to see my blood honoured in theirs.”—

And when they had passed, a pain attacked Zarathustra; but not long had he struggled with the pain, when he began to speak thus:

It moveth my heart for those priests. They also go against my taste; but that is the smallest matter unto me, since I am among men.

But I suffer and have suffered with them: prisoners are they unto me, and stigmatised ones. He whom they call Saviour put them in fetters:—

In fetters of false values and fatuous words! Oh, that some one would save them from their Saviour!

• Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (XXVI. The Priests)⁶

Within its full context it’s clear that the disdain is both non-violent, and a matter of disagreement with their faith in another, and not in themselves (something someone who’s read Nietzsche would understand). But that context is hard to understand, and requires a lot of patience. If I just gave you the first passage (with no source as is often the norm), you would need to go out of your way to resolve your own misunderstanding (assuming you thought yourself to be misled in the first place). This in and of itself would not be an issue, but unfortunately, as is often the case, we deify many philosophers. By virtue of putting Nietzsche’s name on the passage we have imbued it with the stamp of “wisdom” for many people, and this shallow-minded idolatry is what leads to a dangerous feedback loop of:

1. Reading a passage by a famous philosopher
2. Assuming they must be correct because of their pedigree
3. Believing the underlying statement

Instead of:

1. Reading a passage by a famous philosopher
2. Deciding if you agree or not based on the content alone
3. Investigating the underlying source and justifications
4. Deciding to agree or disagree with the statement
5. Iterating on this process when the passage is relevant again

Ironically this process is arguably pro-pedantry, but it also wouldn’t be necessary in the first place if we just treated the statements of a philosopher as the statements of anyone else. Likewise it wouldn’t be necessary if, for lack of a better phrase, the language was more precise and less “flowery”. There is an inherent aspect of ego that gets tied up in the explanation of philosophy, the want to “appear” clever. Whether you agree Nietzsche is guilty of this or not, if you spend enough time in philosophy you will run into these sorts of people for whom confusion is what they get off on. The less you get the better.

Conclusion

Simplicity is itself an art. Distilling some of these hard ideas is not easy, and sometimes you may lose some of the resolution of the original point. However, I think that philosophy as a field needs some of this distillation to remain culturally relevant. We need to rely less on pedigree and pedantry, and more on simplicity, pragmatics, and relevance. There’s a treasure trove of knowledge to find in the world, let’s spend less time putting esoteric keys in the way to keep people from unlocking it.