Aww! Your former roomie who got married at the Newberry Library thanks you for your kind words and the shout-out—and also agrees with you completely. When authors’ prose is so obscure that readers have to spend all their energies trying to figure out what the heck they are saying, that is a red flag that the authors have something to hide—even if it’s just the banality of their ideas. Writing clearly and simply is a mark of respect for our readers, whom we welcome into the conversation. I have become more of a curmudgeon on this issue as I get older—and I feel vindicated for having skipped that Derrida lecture.
I'm going to admit that "guy who doesn't like Continental Philosophers in no small part for their inscrutable prose doesn't like a specific Continental Philosopher for his inscrutable prose" isn't very surprising. Philosophy is inescapably dense reading because it has to account for everything that has come before, so once we got Hegel and Heidegger (may his name become an occasion for groggers), who were really wordy, the responses couldn't help but be. (But it is also related to what, at the time, was the norm in translation: try to capture the nuance of every word in a philosophical work, even if you need eighteen words to do that and some of those words need to be ones you make up." So, in the original, they are never quite as awful as they are in translation.)
But I'm not going to try to change your mind about the work of Buber or the other Continental Philosophers, because I know that's not gonna happen. So let me suggest at least a second thing to consider: the stunning beauty of Jewish men (because many of the most influential Continental Philosophers were Jewish) devoting their lives after the Shoah--several of them after surviving the camps--dedicating the rest of their lives to trying to knit back together a world in which ethics, and even morality, were possible.
I love some of their work (Levinas) and loathe some of it (Frankl), but in both cases I am in awe of the impulse to walk out of hell and, instead of trying to find safety and comfort for oneself, doing the work--flawed or not--to close the gates of hell before anyone else is pushed through them. And it was necessary in part because, if they hadn't done this work, we'd have been left with the philosophies of Nietzsche and Heidegger, upon which such horrors were built.
I offer this to you because I want you, too, to see that their attempts--flawed and partial as all such attempts are doomed to be--are themselves a particularly lovely, particularly Jewish, act of generosity. Even if you get nothing from reading the work, you get something from living in a world where the work was--and is still being--done.
Yes, this will continue to be yet another place of disagreement between us. I simply can't accept that philosophic language has to be "difficult" because there's so much to say. There are plenty of philosophers and philosophically informed people who write clearly about complex topics. Rabbi Sachs, I'd bet, was as well educated as Buber philosophically but writes super clearly. And even Soloveitchik, who can be difficult, writes with relative clarity. Nietzsche is not difficult to read, nor is Plato. And, actually, I find Nietzsche fascinating on many levels and consider him to the most honest and articulate voice of a post-religious world. And I can't imagine what there is to loath about Frankl.
I appreciate your empathy for these post-Holocaust writers, and I'm not saying they shouldn't have written or anything like that. I'm mostly saying I just don't get it. But I'm also saying that if they really wanted me to get it, they could have taken another approach. So that leads me to think they didn't really want me to get it, which makes me question their generosity. Either that or they lacked the skill. Either way, makes me feel like they are overrated, as I would argue, is that whole continental school.
And in the end, I don't feel any need to give them a pass because they were Jewish. Derrida was Jewish and did irreparable harm to the literary world.
I will expand a bit on this—I will also argue that writers who write obscurely aren’t generous, but are rather looking for something else apart from sharing their insights. They aren’t “teachers”. To expand on a point: both Plato and Nietzsche aren’t hard to read at the superficial level. For example, Plato’s “Apology of Socrates” is short and moves the reader to sympathize with Socrates. You come out seeing Socrates as a hero, and then you read it again, maybe because you are a bit confused about a little part—maybe that part after his conviction that he leaves his children to the care of Athens, the same Athens that killed him. Then you start to pick up oddities and contradictions. Maybe you realize that perhaps there is the “problem of Socrates” that Nietzsche was writing about. There is something deeper about Socrates that is a “threat.” Suddenly, reading the “Apology” comes alive in a different way, and more profound way than you first saw. Now you’re having a conversation with the text about what the hell Socrates was doing. Now go forward to Nietzsche and see what he is saying. And so forth and so forth.
This is what makes great art and great philosophy. At one level, Plato will live because of his “simplicity,” and Shakespeare because he can be entertaining, and Nietzsche because of his one liners. They can be read and “easy” on the palate. But as you digest them, something else happens. They’re nutritious meals. Hard to read writers end up somewhere else, like freeze-dried reconstituted vegemite you wouldn’t eat if fresh in the first place. Why bother? Life is too short.
I agree about Nietzsche- he is probably the most profound thinker after the “fall/death/murder of God”. That doesn’t mean I am a Nietzchean- I just don’t believe God is dead. But he does take you to places.
I agree with this, have often thought about the reification of pronouns, how they were turned into entities: "Only when the primal encounters, the vital primal words I-acting-You and You-acting-I, have been split and the participle has been reified and hypostatized, does the I emerge with the force of an element."
Yes, "It accounted for much of the enthusiasm for impenetrable yet facile thinkers such as Derrida, Lacan, Kristeva, and Judith Butler." I much preferred Heidegger and Foucault or Lyotard. Lacan is like astrology but not anywhere near as fun.
Writing clearly, plainly and simply, only using more complex language when it is absolutely necessary is the mark of true intelligence as well as respect for one's readers.
Yes. I didn't agree with Foucault, but I could at least understand him. Lyotard taught me to understand postmodernism. I've never tried Heiddeger. My dissertation advisor called Lacan "icky and impenetrable."
This will sound mean, but for a couple of weeks in grad school I went around asking people what they thought “the other” was. I secretly thought no one had any idea, and people’s rambling, confused responses to my question did not disabuse me of that belief!
Lacan had science envy and was constantly making unfalsifiable claims. His beginnings as a surrealist explain some of this as does the profit and power motive in the way he treated his patients. I know people who knew him.
When I was researching my one academic article, I did a citation comparison and found that lit people cited him more than any other psych theorist other than Freud in inverse proportion to those in his actual field, psychology.
I gave up on that book too. I was hoping to find spiritual guidance but it was like reading a book about nothing and explaining the meaning of nothing.
I know a few people (including myself) who went through what I would call “a Buber phase”. I was probably one of those who thought I “got it” and was entranced. Then, when I encountered Torah Judaism, Buber sort of faded into the sunset together with certain other philosophies.
Just remember: the greatest writer of the English language Shakespeare wrote his works for an average English theatre goer. The greatest artist of the Renaissance produced works for cathedrals and public buildings that both captivated peasants and nobles. It’s not that great art is “democratic” but that it appeals to different kinds of people in different ways that keeps you coming back. Writing in styles that deliberately obscure meaning is more than annoying. I think it represents a contradiction— you aren’t writing to communicate something good, true, or beautiful in substance but to demonstrate superiority in the art of saying nothing.
1. My wife calls what you describe the "emperor's new clothes" phenomenon, and she considers it to be far more prevalent than most folks (in most fields) care to admit. People become so dazzled by a writer/thinker/politician/theologian's grandiloquence or charisma or credentials, or just caught up in his sheer inexplicable popularity, that they never really stop to think (much less have the self-assurance to point out to others) whether the emperor has actually got any clothes.
Speaking of which, in the short time I've been reading your stuff, I've noticed your (admirable) tendency to go after "sacred cows" ("naked emperors"?): Faulker, this guy...
In that vein, I want to ask you (and your readers): other than Finnegan’s Wake (which is known for its opacity), what is one universally beloved/admired work of literature (or film, I suppose) that you alone recognize for the hot garbage it truly is?
Okay, so I looked into this, and "cognosco" means "I recognize," so Buber is playing on the Descartes phrase. I recognize instead of think.
And, if you get the joke, it's important.
My recognition of you constitutes my existence. I think therefore I am does not confer existence, as commonly believed. I recognize (you) therefore I am does. That's actually a cool riff on Descartes.
But, of course, he can't explain that plainly. He has to hide it behind a Latin rewrite that would have been lost to all but his most educated readers in a time before the Internet.
and what about Levinas and his Totality and Infinity! We can humbly admit, Whaaat? Though his Talmudic writings are quite accessible. He had different audiences in mind 😊.
Aww! Your former roomie who got married at the Newberry Library thanks you for your kind words and the shout-out—and also agrees with you completely. When authors’ prose is so obscure that readers have to spend all their energies trying to figure out what the heck they are saying, that is a red flag that the authors have something to hide—even if it’s just the banality of their ideas. Writing clearly and simply is a mark of respect for our readers, whom we welcome into the conversation. I have become more of a curmudgeon on this issue as I get older—and I feel vindicated for having skipped that Derrida lecture.
I'm going to admit that "guy who doesn't like Continental Philosophers in no small part for their inscrutable prose doesn't like a specific Continental Philosopher for his inscrutable prose" isn't very surprising. Philosophy is inescapably dense reading because it has to account for everything that has come before, so once we got Hegel and Heidegger (may his name become an occasion for groggers), who were really wordy, the responses couldn't help but be. (But it is also related to what, at the time, was the norm in translation: try to capture the nuance of every word in a philosophical work, even if you need eighteen words to do that and some of those words need to be ones you make up." So, in the original, they are never quite as awful as they are in translation.)
But I'm not going to try to change your mind about the work of Buber or the other Continental Philosophers, because I know that's not gonna happen. So let me suggest at least a second thing to consider: the stunning beauty of Jewish men (because many of the most influential Continental Philosophers were Jewish) devoting their lives after the Shoah--several of them after surviving the camps--dedicating the rest of their lives to trying to knit back together a world in which ethics, and even morality, were possible.
I love some of their work (Levinas) and loathe some of it (Frankl), but in both cases I am in awe of the impulse to walk out of hell and, instead of trying to find safety and comfort for oneself, doing the work--flawed or not--to close the gates of hell before anyone else is pushed through them. And it was necessary in part because, if they hadn't done this work, we'd have been left with the philosophies of Nietzsche and Heidegger, upon which such horrors were built.
I offer this to you because I want you, too, to see that their attempts--flawed and partial as all such attempts are doomed to be--are themselves a particularly lovely, particularly Jewish, act of generosity. Even if you get nothing from reading the work, you get something from living in a world where the work was--and is still being--done.
Yes, this will continue to be yet another place of disagreement between us. I simply can't accept that philosophic language has to be "difficult" because there's so much to say. There are plenty of philosophers and philosophically informed people who write clearly about complex topics. Rabbi Sachs, I'd bet, was as well educated as Buber philosophically but writes super clearly. And even Soloveitchik, who can be difficult, writes with relative clarity. Nietzsche is not difficult to read, nor is Plato. And, actually, I find Nietzsche fascinating on many levels and consider him to the most honest and articulate voice of a post-religious world. And I can't imagine what there is to loath about Frankl.
I appreciate your empathy for these post-Holocaust writers, and I'm not saying they shouldn't have written or anything like that. I'm mostly saying I just don't get it. But I'm also saying that if they really wanted me to get it, they could have taken another approach. So that leads me to think they didn't really want me to get it, which makes me question their generosity. Either that or they lacked the skill. Either way, makes me feel like they are overrated, as I would argue, is that whole continental school.
And in the end, I don't feel any need to give them a pass because they were Jewish. Derrida was Jewish and did irreparable harm to the literary world.
I will expand a bit on this—I will also argue that writers who write obscurely aren’t generous, but are rather looking for something else apart from sharing their insights. They aren’t “teachers”. To expand on a point: both Plato and Nietzsche aren’t hard to read at the superficial level. For example, Plato’s “Apology of Socrates” is short and moves the reader to sympathize with Socrates. You come out seeing Socrates as a hero, and then you read it again, maybe because you are a bit confused about a little part—maybe that part after his conviction that he leaves his children to the care of Athens, the same Athens that killed him. Then you start to pick up oddities and contradictions. Maybe you realize that perhaps there is the “problem of Socrates” that Nietzsche was writing about. There is something deeper about Socrates that is a “threat.” Suddenly, reading the “Apology” comes alive in a different way, and more profound way than you first saw. Now you’re having a conversation with the text about what the hell Socrates was doing. Now go forward to Nietzsche and see what he is saying. And so forth and so forth.
This is what makes great art and great philosophy. At one level, Plato will live because of his “simplicity,” and Shakespeare because he can be entertaining, and Nietzsche because of his one liners. They can be read and “easy” on the palate. But as you digest them, something else happens. They’re nutritious meals. Hard to read writers end up somewhere else, like freeze-dried reconstituted vegemite you wouldn’t eat if fresh in the first place. Why bother? Life is too short.
I agree about Nietzsche- he is probably the most profound thinker after the “fall/death/murder of God”. That doesn’t mean I am a Nietzchean- I just don’t believe God is dead. But he does take you to places.
I agree with this, have often thought about the reification of pronouns, how they were turned into entities: "Only when the primal encounters, the vital primal words I-acting-You and You-acting-I, have been split and the participle has been reified and hypostatized, does the I emerge with the force of an element."
Yes, "It accounted for much of the enthusiasm for impenetrable yet facile thinkers such as Derrida, Lacan, Kristeva, and Judith Butler." I much preferred Heidegger and Foucault or Lyotard. Lacan is like astrology but not anywhere near as fun.
Writing clearly, plainly and simply, only using more complex language when it is absolutely necessary is the mark of true intelligence as well as respect for one's readers.
Yes. I didn't agree with Foucault, but I could at least understand him. Lyotard taught me to understand postmodernism. I've never tried Heiddeger. My dissertation advisor called Lacan "icky and impenetrable."
This will sound mean, but for a couple of weeks in grad school I went around asking people what they thought “the other” was. I secretly thought no one had any idea, and people’s rambling, confused responses to my question did not disabuse me of that belief!
Ha, I was just thinking the other day about how all anyone talked about at grad school was "othering the other."
Lacan had science envy and was constantly making unfalsifiable claims. His beginnings as a surrealist explain some of this as does the profit and power motive in the way he treated his patients. I know people who knew him.
When I was researching my one academic article, I did a citation comparison and found that lit people cited him more than any other psych theorist other than Freud in inverse proportion to those in his actual field, psychology.
Interesting.
Ancillary comment, Freud was such a great writer!
Yes, all the really great thinkers were.
Derrida! Painful. I agree that obfuscation is not genius & more often than not, is simply a hiding place.
I gave up on that book too. I was hoping to find spiritual guidance but it was like reading a book about nothing and explaining the meaning of nothing.
I know a few people (including myself) who went through what I would call “a Buber phase”. I was probably one of those who thought I “got it” and was entranced. Then, when I encountered Torah Judaism, Buber sort of faded into the sunset together with certain other philosophies.
There ain’t nothin’ like the real McCoy.
Just remember: the greatest writer of the English language Shakespeare wrote his works for an average English theatre goer. The greatest artist of the Renaissance produced works for cathedrals and public buildings that both captivated peasants and nobles. It’s not that great art is “democratic” but that it appeals to different kinds of people in different ways that keeps you coming back. Writing in styles that deliberately obscure meaning is more than annoying. I think it represents a contradiction— you aren’t writing to communicate something good, true, or beautiful in substance but to demonstrate superiority in the art of saying nothing.
1. My wife calls what you describe the "emperor's new clothes" phenomenon, and she considers it to be far more prevalent than most folks (in most fields) care to admit. People become so dazzled by a writer/thinker/politician/theologian's grandiloquence or charisma or credentials, or just caught up in his sheer inexplicable popularity, that they never really stop to think (much less have the self-assurance to point out to others) whether the emperor has actually got any clothes.
Speaking of which, in the short time I've been reading your stuff, I've noticed your (admirable) tendency to go after "sacred cows" ("naked emperors"?): Faulker, this guy...
In that vein, I want to ask you (and your readers): other than Finnegan’s Wake (which is known for its opacity), what is one universally beloved/admired work of literature (or film, I suppose) that you alone recognize for the hot garbage it truly is?
Well, “hot garbage” might be a little bit too strong, But Cormac McCarthy‘s “Blood Meridian” comes to mind.
Haven’t read it. (sure does have a cool title though)
3 points: one primary, 2 ancillary. We'll do the ancillary ones first:
2. I love how it sounds like you and your chevreh were doing daf yomi with Finnegan's Wake.
3. Those Audible credits are precious, man.
Did the intellectual snob get a trophy wife in the end?
You know, I lost touch with him long ago. I don't know. He really was a nice guy, despite all that.
Now I’m wondering who it was? London?
No, not London. He was never a roommate. Are you in touch with him?
“Call me anti-intellectual; call me a philistine, but that sort of art is not for me. Life is too short.”
Amen
cognosco ergo sum
Is this “i think therefore i am” in Latin?
Okay, so I looked into this, and "cognosco" means "I recognize," so Buber is playing on the Descartes phrase. I recognize instead of think.
And, if you get the joke, it's important.
My recognition of you constitutes my existence. I think therefore I am does not confer existence, as commonly believed. I recognize (you) therefore I am does. That's actually a cool riff on Descartes.
But, of course, he can't explain that plainly. He has to hide it behind a Latin rewrite that would have been lost to all but his most educated readers in a time before the Internet.
Yo conozco is Spanish for I recognize.
I was guessing that it was a difference in conjugation.
I don't speak Latin, but I know that Descartes's more familiar maxim was "*cogito* ergo sum"...
Exactly. That’s what I was wondering. I thought it was “cogito”
Maybe this isn’t Latin?
I think "cognosco ergo sum" means "I know things therefore I am." It's a spin on Descartes.
Thank you!
and what about Levinas and his Totality and Infinity! We can humbly admit, Whaaat? Though his Talmudic writings are quite accessible. He had different audiences in mind 😊.
I have not read Levinas and, from what I've heard about his style, my trying to do so would just result in another peevish Substack post.