ยป If No One Hears a Philosopher, Do They Make a Sound?
Science is notoriously hard to read. When I feel like defending this, I say that scientists are not writing for you and me, they’re writing for their colleagues. The job of scientists is not to explain science, it’s to do science. It’d be nice if our society had someone whose job it was to explain science, but there’s no one who does that job adequately (especially people with journalism degrees).
Philosophy is also notoriously hard to read. The defence I usually give is that philosophy is hard to write about because the concepts are not intuitive, otherwise the reader would have already figured it out on their own. Most philosophy is actually written in the style of saying the same relatively-simple idea over and over again in different complicated ways, because philosophers can’t figure out how state it simply.
But unlike science, philosophy studies things that are important to everyone.* So it’s not just unfortunate if everyone can’t read it, it may not be useful to do philosophy if it can’t be widely communicated. I recently found a great statement of this argument in a review of an influential cultural studies book titled The Practice of Everyday Life:
De Certeau’s text claims to address the roles [of] “average people” yet his style creates a virtually impenetrable barrier to any “average people” ever benefiting from his ideas. His writing style consistently maintains this elitist and arrogant attitude in which he postures as the high priest: only those willing to pass the “trial by reading” which he poses are admitted into the sacred circle of his wisdom.
* Even metaphysics: if I need to follow certain rules or face eternal damnation, I’d like to know that sooner rather than later.
Quirks and Quarks once talked about the role of the science writer. Their idea was that science writing is a separate discipline combining elements of both journalism and science, and is inherently political (when science leaves the lab it enters public discourse).
I imagine the same is the case for philosophy.
One of my writing teachers once said, “uncommunicated ideas don’t exist”. By that standard philosophy that can’t be communicated metaphysically degenerates.
Jack
1 Apr 09 at 4:21 pm
Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence is all the philosophy of the everyday anyone should need.
Jack
1 Apr 09 at 4:28 pm
Something to consider here is that de Certeau was not writing as a philosopher, nor was his intent to communicate with “average people.” ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’ came out of a research project commissioned by the French Government and de Certeau was researching/writing as a sociologist. Specialized language for a specialized audience. These contextual details are laid out in Vol. 2 of ‘The Practice of Everyday Life.’
Vol. 2 marks a shift in audience. It takes the theories from Vol. 1 and maps them in concrete and accessible terms. If the “average person” is bewildered by de Certeau’s complex analysis, a read through the case studies in Vol. 2 can help to clear it up.
That said, I have a point to make on style in works on the everyday. Philosophers of the everyday have long grappled with the problem of rendering it into discourse. When you subject the everyday to critical scrutiny, it loses its “everydayness.” This is why Maurice Blanchot describes it as that which “escapes.” Consequently, much everyday philosophy is as much about trying to find a style that will emulate “everydayness” as it is about describing or defining the terrain. [I'm still hesitant to include de Certeau here because of the disciplinary nature of his work].
Nietzsche is a good starting point – but there is much more to philosophies of the everyday. De Certeau, Blanchot, Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, the list goes on. Each has something significant to add. And what de Certeau adds is a program to use established systems against themselves in the struggle for political power.
tara
2 Apr 09 at 11:12 am