Is Continental Philosophy Unclear Because the Subject Material Is Hard?

Why continental philosophy isn't like linear algebra

My article criticizing continental philosophy started a surprisingly large internet firestorm! My Tweet about it has been seen half a million times (the population of Wyoming is about 600,000), and hundreds of people were calling me unable to read (in many cases ironically with clear evidence that they hadn’t even read the piece). There was also some thoughtful engagement. I can’t hope to address all of it, so let me say at the outset what I think of the main criticisms.

The first is my criticism was likely overbroad. I think this is plausible. The kind of post-modern gibberish that I complained about isn’t spread across the entire discipline. Some kinds of continental philosophy may be better. I still think even the better kinds have a problem with unclear thought, unclear writing, and unimpressive arguments, but the kind of extreme dismissal in the article may not have been fairly levied at the whole field.

So while in this article I’ll continue using the phrase continental philosophy, know that there might be some good kinds; I’m talking fairly generally about the field, but I don’t intend to speak universally. I’ll continue using the term because there isn’t a better one to refer to what I have in mind, but note, I’m not being totally precise.

A second criticism is that analytic philosophers are unclear. Now, I say criticism, but I don’t really know how pointing out that analytics are unclear would, even if correct, say anything meaningful about continentals being unclear. It isn’t as if they get a pass because others are too. Unclarity is still unclarity, it is still bad, whether they are joined in it by their analytic neighbors.

As it happens, I don’t think analytic philosophers are particularly unclear. Some are, of course, bad writers, and so write unclearly because they write badly. Such is true in every discipline. But if you compare the average work of continental philosophy to the average work of analytic philosophy, it will be like comparing sludge to clear water. For instance, here’s a random passage from Parfit:

Of these moral solutions to each-we dilemmas, two are especially relevant here. We might be Act Consequentialists, who believe that we ought always to give the greater benefits to others, since we shall thereby do more good. If we all acted on this moral belief, we would all contribute to such public goods. But these solutions are seldom achieved, since there are few people who are both Act Consequentialists and often act on their moral beliefs.

You might not know exactly what he’s talking about, but it’s at least clear that he’s speaking English. He’s trying to express specific and concrete ideas. His sentences aren’t amorphous and muddled. And you know that if you read the full context, you’d have an easy time figuring out what he was talking about. Contrast that with, say, Hegel (who, I’m told, is one of the better ones). I’ll even quote his second paragraph from Phenomenology of Spirit, lest you think the paragraphs make sense when you have adequate background:

Moreover, because philosophy has its being essentially in the element of universality, which encloses the particular within it, the end or final result seems, in the case of philosophy more than in that of other sciences, to have absolutely expressed the complete fact itself in its very nature, for which the mere process of bringing it to light would seem, properly speaking, to have no essential significance. On the other hand, in the general idea of e.g. anatomy-the knowledge of the parts of the body regarded as lifeless-we are quite sure we do not possess the objective concrete fact, the actual content of the science, but must, over and above, be concerned with particulars. Further, in the case of such a collection of items of knowledge, which has no real right to the name of science, any talk about purpose and such-like generalities is not commonly very different in manner from the descriptive and superficial way in which the contents of the science -these nerves and muscles, etc.-are themselves spoken of. In philosophy, on the other hand, it would at once be felt incongruous were such a method made use of and yet shown by philosophy itself to be incapable of grasping the truth.

One can get a vague sense of what Hegel was intending to communicate. There are perceptible vibes, but not especially precise meaning. Reading this passage, the only thing that is clear is that Hegel had no intention of being clear; he aimed to communicate a sentiment, not a precise line of thought. Certainly this is horrendously overwrought prose, heavy enough to kill a team of oxen dropped from only a few feet up.

A great many people suggested that my inability to understand much of what was being said reflected my illiteracy. Now, perhaps I am illiterate. Perhaps Noam Chomsky and Kit Fine are also illiterate; for they have the same criticisms as I do. Perhaps a sizeable portion of analytic philosophers, who share my complaints, are illiterate too.

But I do actually read writings in many other fields, and I never have the complaints I do when reading continental philosophy—complaints of grotesque unclarity and conceptual confusion. While there are many things I do not understand—mathematical formalisms, say—in no other domain do I encounter the kind of meandering, obscurantist illogic that I see in continental philosophy. I do not think the problem is, therefore, my inability to read. It is their inability to write.

It is also notable that the complaints about obscurantism aren’t unique to me, nor even to me and Noam Chomsky, nor even to me + Noam Chomsky + the many high-quality analytic philosophers (Michael Huemer, Timothy Williamson, Kit Fine) who have delivered the same criticisms. The continentals made these criticisms of themselves. Searle recounts:

With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he’s so obscure. Every time you say, “He says so and so,” he always says, “You misunderstood me.” But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that’s not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, “What the hell do you mean by that?” And he said, “He writes so obscurely you can’t tell what he’s saying, that’s the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, ‘You didn’t understand me; you’re an idiot.’ That’s the terrorism part.” And I like that. So I wrote an article about Derrida. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quoted that passage, and he said yes.

This also explains why I do not buy what has been both the most popular and most serious criticism of my article—that if I do not understand what the continentals are saying, it is rather mysterious that I confidently declare in error. It is hard to know that someone is speaking nonsense if you do not know what they are saying. I don’t understand linear algebra. Why—this criticism goes—do I assume continental philosophy is more like gibberish and less like linear algebra?

There are many things to be said here. The first is that the people doing linear algebra have clear successes. They can build stuff which only works because of their mathematical acumen. I have objective, verifiable, third-party evidence that they are discerning important truths. I have nothing comparable for the continental philosophers.

Now, one doesn’t need this sort of evidence to be confident in the seriousness of a field. I have not studied, say, certain kinds of complicated advanced mathematics—of the sort that isn’t applicable to the universe—but I don’t think it’s nonsense. But certainly if a field does not seem intelligible and has no impressive achievements to show, that is a rather concerning sign.

Then there is the deeper problem for continental philosophy which is that I can actually talk to continental philosophers. I’ve done this many times. They do not strike me as people in possession of deep wisdom, and often are quite confused. The insights they treat as significant are, when unpacked, either totally trivial, literally unintelligible, or outrageously false. They are mentally muddled on just about every topic. When I talk with mathematicians about their chosen field, I do not find them confused even when they talk about things I don’t know about. Not so for the continentals.

Here’s an example from Butler:

In a move that complicates the discussion further, Luce Irigaray argues that women constitute a paradox, if not a contradiction, within the discourse of identity itself. Women are the “sex” which is not “one.” Within a language pervasively masculinist, a phallogocentric language, women constitute the unrepresentable. In other words, women represent the sex that cannot be thought, a linguistic absence and opacity. Within a language that rests on univocal signification, the female sex constitutes the unconstrainable and undesignatable. In this sense, women are the sex which is not “one,” but multiple.

Butler carries on like this for several more paragraphs. But this all strikes me as extremely confused! Women are not unrepresentable! There is a word for woman. The sentence “X is unrepresentable,” is self-defeating, for to write it, one must linguistically represent the thing that they are claiming cannot be represented. Even if one thinks that language is “pervasively masculinist,” that is a far cry from language giving one no ability to speak about women (which is a claim so ludicrous no one would ever dare make it in normal prose). And why does this imply that women are multiple sexes? And what is the “contradiction” supposed to consist in (certainly the fact that something can’t be spoken about meaningfully isn’t a contradiction)?

If analytic philosophy teaches a person any skill, it is spotting confusion. But continental philosophy may as well be the definition of confusion. One of the most common ways laypeople are confused is by having some vague term—e.g. emergence—which they use a stand-in for their own conceptual unclarity. How did consciousness appear? Well you see, it emerged—nothing mysterious there. By saying such a thing, one thinks they have a good explanation. The more abstract, the less specific and concrete, the more confusion there is. Sometimes people manage to erect impenetrable word-walls where their mental muddle can never be punctured.

But continental philosophy is almost entirely about slinging together abstract words. The tactic most conducive to covering up confusion is just about the only tactic employed by continental philosophers. And as I explored in the last piece, their method of “reasoning” involves bizarre errors, like assuming that because someone asserted something—paraphrased as “for [person] [thing being asserted]”—the thing must be true.

It is hard to cover up confusion if you use concrete words and short sentences. C.S. Lewis may have been wrong, but he never gets lost in his own language, and he could not be accused of saying nothing coherent. Continental philosophy uses big vague words to cover up their inability to communicate specific and concrete truths. That is because it is hard to communicate specifically and concretely when you are confused.

All this is to say that the reason I think continental philosophy is confused isn’t because I don’t understand it. I don’t understand a great many things; I understand continental philosophy better than advanced topology, for example. It is because it has all the hallmarks of confusion, and its practitioners go around saying confused things all the time. Just as I know a person is confused when they don’t get how thought experiments work, I know continental philosophers are confused when I talk to them. I find myself strongly agreeing with Chomsky when he writes:

I’ve dipped into what they write out of curiosity, but not very far, for reasons already mentioned: what I find is extremely pretentious, but on examination, a lot of it is simply illiterate, based on extraordinary misreading of texts that I know well (sometimes, that I have written), argument that is appalling in its casual lack of elementary self-criticism, lots of statements that are trivial (though dressed up in complicated verbiage) or false; and a good deal of plain gibberish.

Then there is the issue of their prose. It is obviously horrendous, almost the Platonic form of bad writing: wordy, imprecise, and long-winded. I don’t think this because I find it confusing, but because it has all the features of extremely bad writing. My friend Ethan Muse put it well:

I think the problem is that continental prose is neither perspicuous (easily understood), precise (unambiguous and exact), nor rigorous (inferences are intuitively impeccable).

When I’ve engaged with continental philosophers, they have confidently and condescendingly offered interpretations of texts that I have heard other continental philosophers interpret in radically different ways! Also, when I’ve sought justifications for the substantive claims they make, I’m totally unimpressed by what they say. Usually, I can either paraphrase what they are saying to something totally banal and uninteresting, I can come up with a trivial counterexample to a generalization that the entire argument rests on, and/or they don’t provide any evidence/reasoning that comes close to establishing their conclusion.

A simple explanation: being an obscurantist is an easy way to sound smart/insightful (both to yourself and others) without putting in significant effort or possessing rare aptitude. Meanwhile, writing clearly and precisely makes your insights sound less profound, makes them easier to refute, and requires way more effort than word association. Thus, ‘pseudointellectuals’ (who are extrinsically motivated to be perceived as smart) have flocked to intellectual communities where they validate each other for this behavior (and gaslight anyone that points this out by claiming they are just too dumb/ill-informed to understand).

This doesn’t apply to all continental philosophers (and certainly not to the same degree to all of them), but it is clearly a pervasive problem in that community - and the reaction to Matthew’s article is a perfect example of the insane gaslighting.

To judge that someone is writing badly and unclearly, you do not need to read their entire corpus of work. If you read the paragraph from Parfit, you can see the writing is not bad. If you see the prose from Hegel, for instance, it is clear to anyone with a sense for the written word that some dreadful perversion of the English language has occurred. The obscurantism is naked and obvious; the ideas communicated are, uniformly, either very simple or very silly. Across the board, the ideas are fit for either children or the residents of insane asylums.

Then there is the rather unfortunate fact that continental philosophers sometimes admit to being deliberately obscurantist. For example, here is Searle telling a story of Foucault (who, as far as I can tell, was one of the clearer writers of the bunch):

I once had a conversation with a famous French philosopher who’s a friend of mine. And I said to him, “Why the hell do you write so badly?” ... And this was Michel Foucault. He was a very smart guy and wrote a lot of very good stuff but in general he just wrote badly. When you heard him give a lecture in Berkeley, it was perfectly clear, just as clear as I am. ... And he said, “Well, in France, it would be regarded as somewhat childish and naive if you wrote clearly. ... In France you’ve got to have 10% incomprehensible.” Otherwise people won’t think it’s deep. They won’t think you’re a profound thinker.

And I gave a series of lectures in Paris at the Collège de France with another very famous French philosopher as my host, Pierre Bourdieu, and I told this story to Pierre, ... And he said it’s worse than 10%, more like 20%. And I have to say if you read Bourdieu, yeah, 20% at least ...

People suggested I read Foucault, because they said he was one of the better continental philosophers. I have no doubt this is true. And yet when one takes the time to analyze him, they discover many bonkers arguments, egregious factual errors, and other embarrassments. That such huge errors could have gone unnoticed is a bad sign.

Lastly, there is the Sokal Hoax, wherein many different nonsense papers were sent to continental philosophy journals. They were of different kinds—some about race and gender, while Sokal’s original piece was involved jargony science denial. A large portion got published. This sort of fraud is evidence for the unseriousness of the field. While there are bogus journals in other fields, the journals submitted to were well-regarded.

So now, let’s compare the theories: mine, according to which the field is mostly nonsense, and the pro-continental theory. The pro-continental theory must posit that many of the greatest geniuses of the last century—Chomsky, Williamson, Fine—developed a bizarre psychosis that left them unable to read perfectly intelligible texts which can be meaningfully grasped by undergraduates. This psychosis afflicts much of the field of analytic philosophy. Strangely, it even seems to be contagious—complaints about gibberish are made by other continental philosophers, including some of the best respected ones in the world. Even more strangely, the leading proponents sometimes admit to being deliberately obscurantist (a rather surprising fact if they are not).

This prose—claimed to be a paragon of good writing—is regarded by almost everyone outside the field as a serious affront to the English language. Few outside the field can parse the sentences. Curiously, while in analytic philosophy there seems to be quite a robust correlation between general competence and ability to read the difficult texts, such a correlation seems non-existent in the continental domain.

When one opens up to a random paragraph from the well-respected works in the field, they come across long, meandering sentences that trail on for days—where one, even after reading them seven or eight times, feels as if little more than a vibe has been communicated. Even very smart people are left scratching their heads in response to many of these sentences, yet undergraduates who are quite sure at the outset that something serious is going on can grasp them with ease. This makes sense if the texts are little more than Rorschach tests but is otherwise rather mysterious.

This field, despite allegedly being serious and ground-breaking, rarely seems to uncover the sorts of surprising conclusions that can be explained in plain English. Usually the conclusions will be impossible to explain to anyone outside the field. This is, once again, quite different from analytic philosophy. While analytic philosophy often has complex arguments for conclusions, the conclusions are typically easily expressible. Not so for the continentals.

It is curious that when asked to defend the field, its proponents rarely point to interesting and surprising insights it has produced. They generally tell you that you need to read more or call you names. If someone asked me what we’ve learned from analytic philosophy, I could easily give dozens of examples of powerful arguments uncovered for surprising conclusions—say, the repugnant conclusion or various judgments in infinite ethics and anthropics.

It is similarly curious that many of the leading continentals routinely employ terrible inferences—nonsense word games, acting like whatever is in scare quotes must be silly and naive, assertions that things are not other things but a third thing with no argument, assumptions that whatever some other continental philosopher said must be true. This would be rather like discovering that one of the major works of analytic philosophy began from the presumption that the Earth was flat.

And yet despite insisting that there is deep wisdom to be gained, few can agree on what the deep wisdom is. While there is a consensus that Hegel was really on to something, there is remarkably little agreement on what, exactly, he was on to. This is surprising, to say the least. I would consider it a failure of my articles arguing for shrimp welfare if half of their readers came away thinking I opposed shrimp welfare—and there was no general agreement on what my argument was even supposed to be!

Then, the critics of continental philosophy—those confused, naive, illiterates—go out and try to test their theory. They submit nonsense papers to many different decently respected journals. Against all the odds, a great many of them get published. Very curious! Certainly this pattern is more strongly predicted on the hypothesis that the field is largely obscurantist nonsense than the alternative. Not a proof, but certainly suggestive.

The pro-continental theory seems like a remarkably poor fit with the evidence. On every objective metric, continental philosophy seems to bear the marks of bad thinking and bad writing. The facts are each more consistent with the hypothesis that the field is largely charlatanism masked by big words than that it is serious.

Then, what is the alternative theory? That just as a great many fields have been mired in confusion in the past, continental philosophers became too enamored with big words and lost the plot. This theory fits all the data quite well. It additionally, if I may be impolitic for a moment, fits my perception of continental philosophers who strike me as, while not remarkable in terms of intellectual rigor, unusual primarily in their love of words with many syllables.

No doubt there is some good located somewhere in continental philosophy. But those looking for wisdom and clarity—both of thought and writing—would be better advised to read analytic philosophy. Unlike continental philosophy, analytic philosophers make arguments, write clearly, and think rigorously. Seriousness is the rule, not the exception, and one doesn’t need to search every crevice to find a point that isn’t completely worthless.