Liking Clear Writing Isn't A Fetish, Actually!

Responding to professor Ellie Anderson's reply to me on continental philosophy

Once upon a midnight dreary, I wrote a piece criticizing continental philosophy. This set the internet ablaze, ended up being read by 30,000 people, gave rise to several follow-ups, increased the number of subscribers to my blog by about 500, and resulted in lots of people on the internet claiming I couldn’t read. Fun times! Now philosophy professor Ellie Anderson has written a reply.

One of my main complaints in the article was that continental philosophy is unclear. You can sort of get a garbled sense of what the argument is supposed to be, but normally it isn’t very precise. This is a bad thing; arguments often have many subtle errors which can’t be spotted unless one writes clearly. If one writes unclearly about a subject, one will think unclearly about a subject, and then think bad arguments are good and good arguments are bad. Because mental confusion is one of the chief ways people go wrong, anything that masks confusion seriously undermines reasoned thoughts. I gave examples of unclear writing in continental philosophy like the following:

The epoch of the logos thus debases writing considered as mediation of mediation and as a fall) into the exteriority of meaning. To this epoch belongs the difference between signified and signifier, or at least the strange separation of their “parallelism,” and the exteriority, however extenuated, of the one to the other.

(I’ve been reliably informed that if you have any uncertainty as to the precise meaning of that sentence, you are simply illiterate!)

Anderson’s piece is titled Continental philosophy and the fetish for clarity. In it, Anderson criticizes the idea that clarity is a virtue. The piece is also respectful, unlike the kinds of lowbrow sniping that many leveled in response. There is just one big problem with it: the objections raised are incorrect! Seeing as professor Anderson took the time to write a response, and many on the internet are claiming I was thoroughly wrecked, I thought I’d write a response. Friend of the blog Daniel Muñoz also wrote an epic response which I recommend reading. I particularly enjoyed this bit from Daniel:

One recent piece even calls clarity a “fetish.”

At the risk of sounding freaky, I’d like to defend the demand for clear writing, starting with its most infamous nemesis.

Early on in the article Anderson claims that I made basic errors. What are those basic errors? Well:

The piece suffers from basic errors, such as the bizarrely oversimplified claim that “continental philosophy is a particular strain of philosophy that grew out of Europe and was tragically imported to America.” As my Overthink co-host David Peña-Guzmán pointed out in our recent Substack Live, this is, hilariously, at least equally true of analytic philosophy.

I found the claim very puzzling that this was a basic error. I did not claim that continental philosophy was the only thing in history that grew out of Europe and got imported to America. So did Fascism and olive oil. Merely giving another example of something that was imported from Europe to America does not show I was wrong—nor that I made a “basic error,” or “bizarrely oversimplified claim.” I have not been debunked by olive oil.

This is like calling claims that Bill Clinton was once president of the United States a basic error by noting that George Bush was also president. It is also strange to call single sentences that are only a small part of a discussion of some subject “bizarrely oversimplified.” It isn’t as if that’s all I said! Certainly I don’t think that the fact that analytic philosophy came from Europe makes the claim that continental philosophy did too so absurd as to be “bizarre” or “hilarious.”

Moreover, ‘continental philosophy’ only emerged as an identifiable subfield once analytic philosophy (an even later ‘import’ to the US) consolidated power and excluded its ‘other’ around the mid-twentieth century, in no small part out of fears of the decadent and/or commie European philosophers during the McCarthy Era.

How is this relevant? I said nothing about how continental philosophy came about. The fact that a distinction only emerged during the McCarthy era tells us nothing about the legitimacy of that distinction. Now, for the record, I’m perfectly willing to grant that the boundaries of analytic philosophy and continental philosophy are a bit fuzzy. But so what? Nearly every concept has fuzzy boundaries. Fascism has fuzzy boundaries, but I’m still opposed to it! The mere existence of fuzzy boundaries doesn’t preclude one from speaking meaningfully about a subject.

Far worse, though, are baseless claims in the piece such as, “continental philosophers seem to mostly agree that reality is subjective.” Whomst?

Foucault is one example. In The History of Sexuality, he repeatedly talks about the production of truth, in a way that seems to indicate that it is societies and cultures that decide, in some way, on what is true. He seemed to endorse the idea that truth was constructed by society in Power/Knowledge, 1972-1977, saying:

Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true ; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned ; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.

Similarly, Berger and Luckmann wrote a popular book in continental circles called “The Social Construction of Reality,” in which chapter two was titled “Society as Objective Reality.” One could produce many more examples—Latour, for example. But these ideas are widespread. If you suggest to continental philosophers that something is objective, they’ll regard you as a sort of naive fool. Chomsky once recounted that when he gave a talk about the history of the Israeli Palestinian conflict, attempting to give particular analyses of events (e.g. who screwed up the Taba deal) various postmodern faculty members called him naive for thinking that there was an objective fact about such things.

Now, the problem is that such people tend not to be very clear about exactly what they’re denying. They’ll look at you suspiciously if you say anything is objectively true, but because of the unclarity of their writing, it’s usually very difficult to pin down exactly what they deny. They can always suggest you misunderstood them. It is no surprise that in his hoax paper accepted by a prestigious continental philosophy journal, Sokal seemed to deny that there was any objective truth.

Next Anderson writes:

Many continental philosophers share a suspicion of the correspondence theory of truth, or the idea that truth is a correspondence between a belief and an actual state of affairs. This suspicion of the correspondence theory often goes hand in hand with a questioning of the relation between beliefs and the language used to express them. In much analytic philosophy, language is presumed to have a direct relation to beliefs and other states of mind: language transparently expresses states of mind. This means that language ideally should communicate as clearly as possible. Hence, the norm of clarity is taken in analytic philosophy as an obvious good.

However, thinkers such as Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Adorno point out that the dogma of clarity brings with it a host of philosophical assumptions that should be subjected to scrutiny—such as the correspondence theory of truth I mentioned above.

I found this very baffling. Writing clearly does not commit one to the correspondence theory of truth. Parfit wrote very clearly, just about as clearly as any analytic philosopher, but he, in his later years, denied the correspondence theory. Many analytic philosophers reject the correspondence theory. Beyond the fact that some analytic philosophers like the correspondence theory and they also like to write clearly, I haven’t the foggiest clue what the connection is supposed to be. This connection might be alright as an item of continental philosophy slam poetry word association, but as an argument, it is considerably weaker.

Also, the correspondence theory doesn’t imply that “language [has] a direct relation to beliefs and other states of mind.” This just doesn’t have anything to do with the correspondence theory! It’s also either trivially true or false depending on how its construed. If the claim is merely that language bears some relation to the contents of one’s mind, then surely that is correct. If I write “there is a dog next to me,” that captures what I’m thinking. If the claim is supposed to be that language perfectly captures one’s mental contents, then that is obviously false and not assumed by analytic philosophy.

I have heard many arguments for clear writing. Writing clearly:

1. Allows you to accurately convey the profundity of your thoughts, rather than fluffing them up with rhetoric.

2. Isn’t a chore to get through.

3. Makes it clear whether arguments have subtle errors.

4. Make it clear how good an argument is. If an argument is clothed in elaborate garb, it is often difficult to gauge its force or the plausibility of its premises. Not so if an argument is written plainly.

5. Prevents unclarity of thought.

Now, perhaps someone, somewhere, has given an argument for clear writing on grounds that it follows from the correspondence theory, but I have no idea who has made this argument or how it’s supposed to work. As a result, this seems like an obvious red-herring.

In the essay “Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel,” Adorno points out that clarity has in the twentieth century become autonomous from the philosophies in which it originated, most notably Descartes’. Descartes’ desire for clear and distinct ideas, taken from mathematics, trickled from philosophy into the natural sciences and has persisted there, only to trickle back into philosophy with the rise of positivism. Adorno writes, “the concept of clarity is taken from individual disciplines in which it has been preserved as dogma and reapplied to a philosophy that long ago subjected it to critical reflection and therefore ought not to have complied with it unquestioningly.”^[1] Under the pressures of logical positivism, analytic philosophy has fetishized clarity even as philosophy, at least beginning with Hegel, has provided ample reasons to be skeptical about it.

While continental philosophy is regularly accused of being unclear, this is often because the ideas propounded precisely rebel against the metaphysical assumptions that clear expression brings with it.

It is true, of course, that analytic philosophers like clarity and that continental philosophers have claimed that this has something to do with Descartes liking clear ideas. But as for what exactly it’s supposed to do with that, or why this is a problem for analytic philosophy, again, I’m at a loss. Clear writing didn’t originate from analytic philosophy. It certainly didn’t originate from Descartes (who wasn’t especially clear).

Now, is continental philosophy unclear because its “ideas…rebel against the metaphysical assumptions that clear expression brings.” No! One can rebel against any idea clearly—as Daniel Munoz points out, they can simply write “this idea is false.” If the correspondence theory of truth is supposed to be assumed by clear writing, well, it is very easy to write clearly and reject the correspondence theory. One can say, for instance: “the correspondence theory is the idea that for a statement to be true is for it to correspond to reality. The correspondence theory is false.” Defending Feminism is an example of a fairly radical feminist writer who nonetheless writes plainly, clearly, and legibly. Unsurprisingly, while I often disagree with her, I find her a lot more persuasive than those who write in opaque jargon.

Providing some broad historical analysis of how an idea came to be and noting that some of your favorite thinkers don’t like that idea does nothing to discredit it. I could not care less what Adorno had to say about clarity; I do not think that Adorno’s writings are inerrant, or even inspired, and so to convince me that Adorno devastated my thesis, you will have to describe why what Adorno said was right, rather than merely noting that he said something. While Sola Scriptura may be a perfectly fine method for Protestant Biblical analysis, I’m not a Protestant, and Adorno’s writings aren’t in the canon of scripture. As Daniel Munoz notes, “this just amounts to ‘my favorite philosophers said you’re wrong.’”

Anderson’s piece made many of the errors that I criticized in my original article. There is lots of pointing in the direction of favored thinkers, and guilt by association between some icky idea—seen as hopelessly outdated and naive—and whatever one is arguing against. But there is little of substance. Aside from wrongheaded assertions that valuing clarity requires a host of manifestly unrelated assumptions, there aren’t many arguments in Anderson’s article for why writing lengthy, protracted, unclear sentences is valuable.