I do not like a lack of clarity. However, writing is never”clear” or “unclear” in itself. It is clear or unclear to some reader. A paper written in formal logic may be incomprehensible to some people, but very clear to others (clearer, even, then any any translation of it into ordinary English). Scientists often use terminology that makes what they say clearer to other scientists, but less clear to the other folk, and it is alright that they do so. To my mind, the problem in philosophy is not that we write in ways that can’t be understood beyond our clique or sub-clique, but that we don’t attempt to also say the same things in language that is as ordinary as possible. Our failure to do so has not only resulted in two camps within philosophy who can barely understand each other, but leaves us incomprehensible to the world beyond professional philosophy that we theoretically serve.

“Scientists often use terminology that makes what they say clearer to other scientists, but less clear to the other folk, and it is alright that they do so.”

Agreed, but I don’t think philosophy is any different. We have no more obligation to “serve the world beyond professional philosophy” than mathematicians or theoretical physicists have to serve the outside world; in all these cases, what professionals in the field normally serve is just the project of discovering the truth.

Applied scientists, yes. But I don’t think philosophy is akin to medical research or technological innovation; it’s much more akin to pure science. (And, like pure science, it may have downstream social benefits, but that’s not the immediate reason for doing it.)

“We have no more obligation to “serve the world beyond professional philosophy” than mathematicians or theoretical physicists have to serve the outside world; in all these cases, what professionals in the field normally serve is just the project of discovering the truth.”

and this is why some say philosophy is dead

Vincenzo Politi #3 has this in the bag. But I’ll give my 10cents.

There are philosophical untruths in our ordinary language, there are superstitious phrases and of course there is ‘gendered’ language and knowledge and so on. That makes commitment to ordinary language tout court philosophically ignorant and dangerous. Insofar as ‘clarity’ means the interpellation (and yes I meant to specifically reference that word to be as ‘clear’ as possible) of thought into an appropriately common sense distribution (‘I’m for this’, ‘I’m against that’), it becomes impossible to say something someone else couldn’t always-already have expected you to say. Of course you’re either for or against rights for women or homosexuals – why be so complicated about it, philosophy guy? Because it’s not the friggin’ point of what I have to say!

In my view, and in my personal experience, analytics use ‘clarity’ as a bully word, and yes they mean it objectively. Either everyone can understand what you say (and you have been exorcised of your demons by whatever initiation they come up with), or you are disallowed to have anything but garbled thoughts and ‘confusion’ either for yourself or your group (continentalists of this stripe or that stripe). At root I’d wager that it’s a colonial attitude. Gregg Littmann #4 put it correctly when he says “writing is never”clear” or “unclear” in itself. It is clear or unclear to some reader”. This is basic philosophy that many analytics avoid because it undermines their status as experts.

I strongly believe that Pr. Stone just can’t comprehend how full of life any european language is for any continental philosopher. When you have thousands years of history and ideas, you can’t possibly strive to “clarity” in the meaning that she asks for. I can just advice her to come to live in Europe for at least few years.

Grad student:

I think your analogy is apt only if one thinks that philosophy operates like a science, i.e. that it is primarily a piece-meal accumulation of knowledge through the work of specialized experts. But I don’t think everyone thinks this is the best description of large parts of philosophy (or at least not the best description of those parts done well). For those, like me, who think that philosophy rightly belongs in the humanities, it is vital that it not be opaque to the folk to the same degree that work in science often is.

I agree with what said by Matthew #12. It is in fact true that “analytics use ‘clarity’ as a bully word and that they mean it objectively”, but for continentals “objectivity” itself is a problem. A language which is thought to be as “objective” as possible is already presupposing what is objective and what is not – like “clarity”, in this case. To make Matthew’s example clearer (what an irony!), when one says that “you’re either for or against rights for women or homosexuals”, one is already presupposing that it is correct to classify people using the categories of “men and women”, or that there are such things as “heterosexuality” and “homosexuality” and one also presupposes which types of “rights” one is either in favour or against. All these things are not critically discussed, but presupposed by the very language one uses to discuss these things. Of course, in your daily conversation you use ordinary language. If someone asks you whether you are for against gay rights, you cannot spend three days wondering “are we sure there is such a thing as gay? are we sure there are such things as rights? are we sure the rights we are talking about are the rights that gay people really need? and what are real needs?”; however, ‘as philosophers’, continental are very ‘critical’ about the ‘myth of the given’ and they try to challenge the obviousness of objectivity (instead of justifying it, as many analytics do).

I keep on being surprised by the author’s reference to Phenomenology. Phenomenologists were the first to say that we should suspend any presupposition about the objectivity of the given world and begin from the our immediate subjective experience. Phenomenologists themselves defined Phenomenology as an “unnatural” activity. So, I really don’t see how “phenomenology can play a helpful role in revising common sense thought and ordinary language use”.

I’ve always tended to distinguish two (sometimes opposed) sorts of ‘clarity’. In the first sense, clarity is *ready* understanding: the reader has a sense of what is meant quickly and without mental effort. In the second sense, clarity is *reliable* understanding: all readers, with enough time and effort, will tend to converge on a single interpretation of what is meant. Jargon typically makes things ‘clearer’ in the second sense at the expense of making them less clear in the first. My impression is that often the accusation that analytic philosophers direct against (certain) continental philosophers is not really anything to do with clarity in the first sense (ready understanding), but rather with clarity in the second sense (reliable understanding). The accusation is that *even if* you spend the time – even if you look up definitions, consult experts, etc. – you can’t be certain of what is meant. That at least is what seems to be meant, whether or not it’s true.

Agreed with Vincenzo Politi #19. But I’d like to suggest that the interest in ‘phenomenology’ could be just the interest in having a specialised way of talking about the world that makes philosophy appear systematic, for which experts might be needed. And so analytics might want to stake claim to ‘the way things appear to us’ as to a kind of real estate (a Jerusalem of sorts). Of course it need not have anything to do with the motivations of phenomenology as you mention them, but a ‘moderate, modern’ version that could be explicated in a thousand back-patting books and articles.

L #20 I have to disagree. Deleuze and Guattari, for example, may be difficult to read at first, but one does not meet with wild variations in definitions of their concepts given by different scholars familiar with their work. I’ve always found that philosophers in fact have a grasp of where ‘continental’ concepts come from, what motivates them, and can give examples of what they mean. This is also true for the analytic philosophers – they know full well what this or that means, but they want to insist on incoherence because the values involved in many of those concepts aren’t the values they find workable: ‘well, I know that A means B and is related to C in such a way, but *shrug*’. It’s all about values. And of course, clarity itself is not a value, it’s an impulse to purge made into a value. The fact that analytics call it a ‘virtue’ should ring your alarm bells. (something something Nietzsche…)

I am surprised that the author did not mention a conspicuous sign of clear academic writing – whether it is easily translatable to a foreign language (even better when it is genealogically distant from the original language). As a philosophy student whose first language is not one of the philosophically-major-Western-languages, translatability is more or less the clarity for me. I believe many would agree with that the analytic tradition tends to offer, in this way, clearer literature than the other. (ironically, Quine’s writing is still very clear, or “translatable”)

It seems like some consider using formal languages is on a par with using “terms of art”, which is embarrassing to me. Usage of formal language in an academic discipline is indeed a promising news for many scholars worldwide. If you compare the proportion of non-native English speakers’ publication record in STEM fields with that of humanities, the answer would be obvious.

Of course, every ordinary language has some aspects hardly translatable to another language, and some fundamental insights are. I doubt, however, that philosophical discourse is the one, if it is to be the subject of argumentative inquiry.

(1) “In philosophy, clarity is a courtesy.” (Ortega y Gasset)
(2) “Never speak more clearly than you can think.” (I’ve seen this attributed to both Niels Bohr and Jeremy Bernstein)

“He simply said that you would have to read the philosophy who introduced it, in the original language, if you wanted to really understand the term. This is, I think, what many analytic philosophers mean when they complain about ‘lack of clarity.’”

That’s not lack of clarity. That’s being an elitist jerk.

Thank you very much for your reply to the comments, although I am not entirely convinced by some of the things you said.

For instance, you say that “I acknowledge (in my essay) that there are various perfectly good reasons to raise critical questions about clarity as an ideal or goal. Nonetheless, I suggest, those reasons don’t ultimately show that we should reject clarity utterly or that there is no merit in clear work.” But are there philosophers who deny the merit of clarity? Or are Continental philosophers *intentionally* unclear? I don’t think so. I think that even people like Heidegger and Sartre were convinced that their writing was clear (once you understood their terms of art) and that was also the reason why they literally created new words and expression: to be clearer and to go beyond the ambiguities of the common language. Of course, this is not to say that Heidegger’s and Sartre’s writings are clear, but only that Heidegger and Sartre did not reject clarity utterly or saw no merit whatsoever in clarity. So, I really don’t know what or who you are reacting against.

Also, when you speak about phenomenology, you say that “phenomenological reflection can help us to clarify features of our experience and the world as we experience it and in that way can line up with, not against, clarity.” If I may, I think there is a bit of confusion here between what will become clear “to me” about my own conscious experience in the world and what is clear at an intersubjective level. I can have some pretty clear insight and a deep level of understanding about my private experience, but that does not mean that the way I will describe these things to other will be “clear”.

I don’t know enough continental philosophy to directly compare the ease of translating analytic and continental philosophy into ordinary English. I do know that I see much more analytic philosophy conducted in ordinary English. Perhaps that is due to where I’ve been looking, though.

Am I alone in thinking it ironic that this article is hidden by a paywall that invites me to pay Wiley $26 to read the full piece? A failure of transparency there. Or did I miss an open version?

#Another Grad Student 33:

While postmodernism can be said to belong to the so-called Continental Philosophy, the whole Continental Philosophy cannot be reduced to postmodernism. Indeed, “Continental Philosophy” is a rather unclear label which is constantly used by analytic philosophers (who claim to be very clear) to indicate several different doctrines, currents, schools of thoughts. Continental Philosophy can be used to indicate postmodernism, neo-Kantianism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism, idealism, philosophical psychoanalysis, marxism, early feminism, and so on. What happens than is that some people show that postmodernism is self-defeating and, therefore, they assume that Continental Philosophy is useless.

Vincenzo: I completely agree, which is why I deliberately used the phrase “postmodernism” rather than the phrase “continental philosophy”. Obscure language still tends to be a problem in broader forms of what is called continental philosophy, but in many of the traditions it tends to just be a sort of stylistic choice. I think it is really only in fairly specific schools of thought (i.e. postmodernism) that it really serves as a pernicious smoke-screen. I identify as an analytic, but I am more than willing to hear what any continental philosopher has to say, but just know that I’m going to try translate it into my analyticalese.

Matthew… the notion of objectivity, much like truth, is only meaningful if relativized to a specific form of representation. For a representation to be objective is for it to not involve some sort of interference or projection on the part of the representer. One can only make sense of the notion of interference or projection (e.g. optical illusion) relative to some background theory about how the type of representation in question works (e.g. a theory of perception in cog sci). Most of us “analytics” came to realize this long ago due to the work of Tarski, Quine, Carnap, and others. All we can do is either translate things into our home language or adopt another language for pragmatic reasons. The problem is that this lack of “absolute objectivity” (which is an incoherent notion to begin with) is philosophically neutral, whereas the postmodernist wants to use it selectively to critique certain notions (e.g., gender, race, property, etc.) rather than others (e.g., justice, equality, freedom, rights, autonomy, morality, etc.). Really, they just have to develop one more competing way to represent the world and then attempt to show that it’s more useful than its competitors. Any language that lacks some internal notion of objectivity/logical inference is going to be utterly useless.

Vincenzo, you ask: who rejects clarity? Well, on this thread, Matthew says philosophers should line up against clarity. But I wasn’t so much arguing against any named individual, but suggesting – ‘here are some reasons why one might be suspicious of clarity – but on the other hand, each of these reasons also suggests a counter-case for clarity’.
As has been mentioned above, the slightly pre-final version of my essay can be accessed on academia.edu for free.

Thanks to Alison Stone for this constructive (and clear!) piece of metaphilosophy. Among several other things, it addresses a persistent feature our discipline today, the two-culture problem. I completely agree with the basic point that there are many ways to be obscure, and many ways to provide insight. Understood in a broad sense, it is not the case that only the so-called analytic tradition values clarity. For what it is worth, I think Kris McDaniel (#43) makes a very valuable practical point that writers should attempt to express their ideas in several different ways, both to liberate their own thinking from a particular idiom and also to help communicate to a wider audience.

A minor note: I was little surprised with the choice of “transparency” as the gloss on clarity. The contrast to clarity, Stone writes, is opacity. She compares clear writing to a clear phone connection which allows you hear through the medium to the voice on the other end, with a minimum of static. But in general, text and language don’t seem analogous to perceptual/motor tools in this way. One doesn’t read through a text to its referent – even when the referent is a concept rather than a state of affairs – and one cannot causally interact with the domain of reference. Instead, the reader and writer must interact with the text. In this sense, all writing is intrinsically opaque! Admittedly, one kind of good writing is writing that doesn’t call attention to itself. But this is not the only way to make ideas clear, and sometimes just the opposite. That is, sometimes it is the new way of speaking that throws new light on the subject (hence McDaniel’s suggestion at #43). While opacity is one good contrast to clarity, “obscurity” seems slightly preferable in this context though both are inescapably metaphorical. Part of Stone’s main argument, it seems to me, is that a text can be clear – even transparently clear – by the standards of some particular discourse, and yet it may systematically *obscure* (elide, distort, disguise, decontextualize, or otherwise fail to illuminate) the very issues it purports to address. Of course, “obscurity” is not clearly defined, so perhaps this doesn’t help matters at all! But then, part of the self-sealing nature of the demand for one particular kind of clarity is that it precludes (obscures?) a critique of that kind of clarity. Finally, I get that the notion of “obscurity” stems from the root metaphor of enlightenment, and that this is part of what is criticized by those wary of analytic clarity. But I don’t see how transparency fares much better on this score. If anything, transparency seems quite directly tied to contemporary procedural and technical values.

Thanks again for the useful paper. I intend to share it with my students, who struggle daily with navigating the two cultures in our curriculum.

Dear Alison,

sorry if I insist on this point but – apart from some Matthew guy commenting in the internet about your paper – I haven’t found in your paper (or in the version you have uploaded in academia.edu and which I have had a look at) the mention of someone who defend unclarity as an ideal norm in philosophy. In your paper, I have only found the reasons for why you think some continental philosophers may be wary of clarity, although (as I have already said in previous comments) I am not sure whether continental philosophers regard themselves as being wary of clarity.

I like what you say about clarity and I also like your pluralistic view on philosophical values (and, under this respect, I agree with Kris McDaniel above on the necessity of specifying what are the other values in philosophy and why they are indeed valuable). However, I still think that in your paper you argue against a strawman of sort. (Or perhaps I haven’t read your paper very carefully, in which case I apologise.)

Vins