This morning I returned to Knowledge and Christian Belief by Alvin Plantinga, the Templeton-prize winning genius who’s arguably one of the best prose-stylists in modern philosophy.
Tucked in at the beginning of the book, in a throwaway paragraph, Plantinga makes a wonderfully incisive comment about dismal quality of much academic prose-writing.
In a discussion of Kant—notoriously one of the worst philosopher-writers ever—Plantinga sagely quips:
Now Kant is by no means easy to understand, which is no doubt part of his charm. If you want to be a really great philosopher, make sure not to say too clearly what you have in mind (well, maybe that’s not quite enough, but it’s a good start); if people can just read and understand what you say, there will be no need for commentators on your work, no one will write PhD dissertations on your work to explain your meaning, and there won’t be any controversies about what it is you really meant. Kant must have heeded the above advice, and the fact is there are dozens, maybe hundreds of books written about his philosophy, and endless controversy as to his meaning.1
There are many reasons academics write badly: language barriers, the “curse of knowledge”, intellectual insecurity, a lack of professional incentives to write stylishly, etc.
But one that’s less often discussed is that some humanities academics might be incentivised to write badly because, as Plantinga notes, it’s a good way to increase the odds that they won’t be forgotten by history.
Of course, tortuous academese is bad for the academy and bad for everyone, so it would be good to get rid of this incentive if possible.
One solution would be to encourage academics to be more virtuous, less ego-driven, etc. But that’s not a serious suggestion. Sure, it’s desirable and possible for individual academics to become less image-focused and more focused on the collective pursuit of knowledge; but there’s no way to implement that kind of virtue systemically.
Another solution, thinking mainly about philosophy here, would be to drastically downsize the amount of research devoted to interpreting dead philosophers, which some people already think would be a good idea anyway. Most people don’t think this way, though, so the incentive is probably going nowhere.
Plantinga, Alvin. 2015. Knowledge and Christian Belief. Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company: p. 2.
Nietszche (himself hardly a model of argumentative clarity) has a similar complaint: "they muddy the water, to make it appear deep". Basically, it's not just that unclear writing gives work for interpreters. It also lets you seem deep, and let's you (or better, your acolytes) respond to objections to your work with charges that the objectors have misinterpreted you.
I think the use of unclear or confusing language can be levelled against a lot of philosophers but some philosophers, arguably Kant included, are difficult to read just because they're working with very fine-grained concepts. Take this typically confusing passage of Sartre's Being and Nothingness:
"Let us look more closely at this dimension of being. We said that consciousness is the knowing being in his capacity as being and not as being known. This means that we must abandon the primacy of knowledge if we wish to establish that knowledge. Of course consciousness can know and know itself. But it is in itself something other than a knowledge turned back upon itself."
Sartre is perhaps saying something substantial, but he's couched everything in this very difficult to parse way that leaves the reader unsure whether perhaps some trick is being played. Compare first with an easy passage in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason:
"Holding for true, or the subjective validity of a judgement in relation to conviction (which is, at the same time, objectively valid), has the three following degrees: opinion, belief, and knowledge. Opinion is a consciously insufficient judgement, subjectively as well as objectively. Belief is subjectively sufficient, but is recognized as being objectively insufficient. Knowledge is both subjectively and objectively sufficient. Subjective sufficiency is termed conviction (for myself); objective sufficiency is termed certainty (for all). I need not dwell longer on the explanation of such simple conceptions."
He uses technical philosophical language (what philosopher doesn't!) but his meaning is very clear and it's all well expressed. Kant isn't always the best stylist but he's not a deliberate obscurantist. So we have more trust when we read more difficult passages, such as:
"Immanent physiology, on the contrary, considers nature as the sum of all sensuous objects, consequently, as it is presented to us—but still according to à priori conditions, for it is under these alone that nature can be presented to our minds at all."
The meaning of the sentence doesn't give way entirely on first glance, but we know that he'll explain himself well in the lines to come and that the full sense can be unpacked. Kant didn't have a career incentive to be hard to read, but that sort of accusation could be levelled against someone like Derrida or a lot of published critical theory.