Why It Is (Maybe) Safe To Conclude Some Legendary Thinkers Are Charlatans Without Reading Much Of Their Work
Sometimes appeals to authority are okay!
There’s an annoyingly young and talented writer and philosopher named Matthew Adelstein, a.k.a. Bentham’s Bulldog, who is worth reading, even — perhaps especially — when you think his arguments are weird.
Recently, he stuck his hand into a hornet’s nest called continental philosophy. First came a post titled “How Continental Philosophers ‘Argue.’ ” Here’s a key early bit:
For those who don’t know, continental philosophy is a particular strain of philosophy that grew out of Europe and was tragically imported to America. Prominent authors include Hegel, Sartre, Butler, and Heidegger. While analytic philosophers strive to be clear, continental philosophers don’t; as Michael Huemer says “Continental writers are generally much less clear about what they’re saying than the analytic philosophers. They won’t, e.g., explicitly define their terms before proceeding. They use more metaphors without any literal explanation, and they use more idiosyncratic, abstract jargon.”
If you read continental philosophy, you’ll notice something strange about the jargon. The prose will be unintelligible; the stylistic equivalent of tar. While you suspect that the author is under the impression that they’re making an argument, and there are some words present that suggest that they are engaged in the arguing enterprise (e.g. thus, therefore, etc), you have no clue what the argument is supposed to be, and suspect that if the author was forced to put their argument in premise conclusion format, they could not do so. You suspect similarly that if you got five different readers, and asked them the number of premises in the argument, you may very well get five different answers.
Adelstein argues that
while continental philosophy doesn’t really make arguments, what it does isn’t altogether different from making argument[s]. It’s a hideous admixture of literary analysis, gibberish, and argument. They start by saying some things, then say other things that they suggest follow from the earlier things, and have orderly norms governing the relationship between premises and conclusions. The only problem is that the norms don’t involve the use of either logic or any other sound inference rules.
Naturally, Adelstein’s post annoyed the sorts of continental (or pro-continental) philosophers who spend time on social media and who read Substack. You can find some links in his latest response to the response to the re — I’m not sure exactly where we are in this sequence, to be honest. The responses to his first post shouldn’t be surprising. While cogent, his post was also provocative; he was trying to both make a point and get a rise out of the people who embody the intellectual styles that annoy him.
I have strong feelings about all of this and might write about it more in the future. For now, I want to make a fairly narrow point about how I came to be skeptical of thinkers who write in a certain way and why I’m comfortable dismissing their work without having read much of them. (I realize that I am violating my own normal standards here! I’d argue that this is a very specific case in which this sort of approach is justified. If you think I’m being unfair and want to explain what I’m missing out on by generally dismissing the below-mentioned thinkers, please send me an email.)
This is a decades-old dispute. Depending on the time and place, the intellectual style being criticized might be called continental philosophy or postmodernism or Theory (I like writing it that way, with the capital T). These are different yet frequently overlapping intellectual traditions, many of them traceable — like so many forms of human error — to France. And whatever name(s) you give the thing(s) being criticized, someone is going to pop and claim that you don’t really get it, you haven’t done the reading, and here, look at this thinker from that school who doesn’t write in that way.
More important to me than denouncing entire academic fields is identifying this style of writing. The term obfuscation is key here; it’s defined as “the action of making something obscure, unclear, or unintelligible.” Since this accurately captures the effect of this style of writing, I call such writers obfuscators, regardless of their intellectual or ideological lineage. Obfuscators simply ignore, or in some cases run in the opposite direction from, well-established rules of clear writing and thinking.
Consider this a very partial list of the differences between normal professional writers and obfuscators:
—normal writers seek to present their ideas clearly, even when they fail; obfuscators often dress up even fairly simple points in as much heavy-handed verbiage as possible
—normal writers define their terms clearly; obfuscators often refuse to do so and frequently use the same word to mean different things at different times
—relatedly, obfuscators will somehow refuse to define X consistently and then speak very confidently about the properties of X, Judith Butler and “gender” being the clearest example — she has explicitly said that there is no one consensus definition on “gender,” seems to jump between definitions unguided by any particular rule or principle, and yet makes very strong claims about the nature of gender all the time
—normal writers follow agreed-upon rules of what constitutes an argument; obfuscators often engage in rhetorical Calvinball, plowing ahead and treating their claims as having been established despite having done none of the traditionally understood work of doing so (imagine the difference between building a house and building a superficially convincing facade of a house)
—normal writers and obfuscators treat the practice of posing questions very differently; whereas normal writers will generally answer the questions they pose or at least explain their relevance, obfuscators often treat the posing of a question as (somehow) proof that the answer is “yes”
—normal writers and obfuscators treat the practice of referencing other writers’ ideas quite differently; whereas normal writers will explain why they are referencing a given idea and respond to it in some way, obfuscators will just rattle off such references, machine-gun–style, without explaining their relevance, but often treating the existence of an idea as proof of its correctness
When obfuscators write about subjects I have some grounding in, I find their writing and thinking to be generally terrible. In other cases, though, I can confidently say that their writing sucks but I can’t be sure their argument is actually as stupid as it sounds, because I haven’t Done The Reading (™). Am I being anti-intellectual by throwing my hands up and walking away from these writers? Am I Part of the Problem?
I don’t think so. I believe that in most cases, when it comes to the most famous Theorists, there’s actually very little there there. And I’m comfortable using a couple of shortcuts to get to this opinion.
Occam’s Razor Argument 1: My Close Personal Friend Noam’s Usenet Post
Let’s take legendary thinkers like the philosopher Jacques Derrida and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. They are considered transcendent geniuses by their followers and in certain courses of academic study, you will be exposed to heavy doses of them. Within these disciplines, questioning whether it’s worth the time to wade through Derrida and Lacan is like questioning whether physics students need to waste their time with Newton and Einstein. To others, they are considered charlatans — what I would call obfuscators.
I had a tiny bit of Derrida as an undergraduate and it mostly bounced off me. I think there was some Lacan in there too, but again — if there was, it didn’t stick. Over the years I’ve poked my head back in from time to time but it just never seems worth it, to be honest.
I know this sounds anti-intellectual! Am I missing out, as an adult who (somehow) makes a living shooting ideas and opinions into the world, by not having a firmer grounding in Derrida and Lacan? Here’s how I look at it. I could be wrong and your mileage may vary.
I’m basically using a shortcut to determine that no, my lack of grounding in Derrida and Lacan isn’t costing me much. There are some much smarter, more accomplished people than I — well-qualified intellectuals who I don’t think would have any reason to lie about this — who have done the work (insert clapping emojis if you want) and strongly believe that there is little here worth understanding. Noam Chomsky is the foremost example. Weirdly, his most famous demolition of French Theorists, Derrida and Lacan foremost among them, came in a posting to Usenet (which is this) from about 1995. (In 2021 I emailed him to ask him if he’d really written this, and he confirmed that he had.)
You should really just read Chomsky’s post, both because it’s cathartic and I think it transcends the mere question at hand and gets to larger points about public intellectuals, cultishness, and where we should spend our finite cognitive energy. But his basic point is that he (Noam Chomsky) is generally capable of understanding at least the basics of all sorts of different concepts and arguments, even fairly complex ones. When it comes to certain trendy French and French-inspired thinkers, however, he hits a wall. He (depending on the thinker and argument in question) doesn’t understand what they’re saying, or how it hasn’t been said better and simpler before, or simply thinks that their work is insanely sloppy (here he calls out Derrida’s Of Grammatology), and no one can quite explain to him what he’s missing or how he’s wrong.
Therefore:
Since no one has succeeded in showing me what I’m missing, we’re left with the second option: I’m just incapable of understanding. I’m certainly willing to grant that it may be true, though I’m afraid I’ll have to remain suspicious, for what seem good reasons. There are lots of things I don’t understand — say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat’s last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I’m interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. — even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest — write things that I also don’t understand, but (1) and (2) don’t hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven’t a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of “theory” that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b). . . I won’t spell it out.
I guess I’m unsure why, from my point of view, that shouldn’t be that. I am a busy, attention-addled guy whose brain has been melted by years of Twitter, and I can only engage with so much writing. Isn’t this signal from Chomsky (Chomsky being far from the only highly regarded intellectual to have made such claims) enough? Again, I’m not coming at this from square one. I have had some exposure to Derrida and Lacan and I found them really hard to make heads or tails of, and I’m not someone who shies from complex ideas and complex writing. (I also recognize that Lacan is a complex case because it isn’t just that some of his writing is totally nonsensical — more on which shortly — but also that he developed an entire field of psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis being an inherently weird discipline that often asks readers and clinicians in training to accept sweeping claims and unprovable claims about human nature and desire and development.)
I guess I would just circle back to Chomsky’s request: What am I missing? What are the super important concepts imparted by Derrida and Lacan that I won’t have encountered some version of elsewhere, stated more simply?
In light of the available evidence, I think Occam’s razor suggests that Noam Chomsky is right, confirming my own suspicion there is very little there there. That’s the simplest and most sensible explanation. Other explanations would involve things like Chomsky simply being intellectually incapable of comprehending the depths of the Frenchies’ work (seems unlikely) or Chomsky lying (also seems unlikely, especially given that there are elements of nuance to his post, including a bit of a hat tip to Foucault and an acknowledgment that Lacan’s earlier work was “sensible” and worth engaging with.)
