Obscurantism in Fiction and Non-Fiction

Hartigan - July 27th

In 1992, multiple scholars (including reputable names like W. V. O. Quine) signed a letter to oppose Cambridge University's granting Jacques Derrida an honorary degree. The basis of their opposition was a criticism that is commonly thrown towards Derrida and a vast proportion of other philosophers in the Continental tradition: obscurantism. The protestors accused Derrida of "tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists", and "little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship". It's interesting to note that in their letter, there isn't a single quoted passage from any of Derrida's texts. Is this criticism of Derrida and other notoriously complex philosophers justified? That is to say – is it really so criminal for a philosophical work to be difficult to interpret, lacking rigorous clarity?

Perhaps we can divide philosophical methodology into two broad styles: the literary and the analytic. To defend one or the other, it should be determined which one has techniques that are more likely to fulfil the purpose of philosophy. This is the first challenge. The second challenge is contained within the first, and that is: what actually is the purpose of philosophy? Some people will laugh at this question; it is so often asked of philosophy that it potentially reveals the inherent pointlessness of the subject. But this is, in fact, wrong: the only reason it is so often asked with regards to philosophy is because philosophy is an inherently questioning subject; the question is just as confusing and difficult when applied to any other academic subject. What is the point of biology? What is the point of mathematics? What is the point of psychology? None of these subjects, it would seem, have a pre-determined goal that they are heading towards.

I would like to use this conclusion – that academic disciplines take a path that is more meandering, rather than headed towards a certain ultimate conclusion – to suggest that all subjects may be closer to the arts and humanities than may initially be supposed. People don't often ask what the point of a novel, painting, or piece of music is, because it's generally accepted that works of art have individual purposes and interpretations for each of their readers. It may very well be the case for the sciences and philosophy. But we should return to the question – how can this defend the literary style of philosophy that is so often accused of obscurantism? We can compare fictional literature with non-fictional philosophy to explore this question.

Hegel said that "philosophy is in the element of universality": it is generally seen as part of the purpose of philosophy (whatever that may be) that it should address matters concerning universal characteristics of the world. A philosophical work concerning human understanding, for example, shouldn't address the human understanding of person X but instead of people in general. This is a contrast with fictional literature, which focuses on particulars: it would be very difficult to find a novel that is about everyone, as opposed to a person in particular. Even literary works with hundreds of characters and hundreds of settings never reach out into the realm of universality.

Despite this particularity, literature still remains valuable. How is this? Well, we should remember James Joyce's idea when referring to Ulysses: "In the particular is contained the universal". This can be interpreted as having a platonist meaning, referring to each particular being containing universally applicable characteristics, or it can be interpreted as an idea pertaining specifically to literature: in one, particular, work of literature, a universality is present in the infinite number of interpretations it can bring about. Every reader of Ulysses has read the same words (if we ignore the fact that there are multiple different editions, corrections, and so on), but it is very plausible to suggest that each of these readers has interpreted and responded to the text very differently. Would the same be the case if the novel had been laid out in as much analytical rigour as the protestors against Derrida valued?

I would like to suggest that the obscure, often metaphorical, and "wordy" nature of novels like Ulysses brings benefits that can be just as valuable in works of philosophy. While the rigorous and meticulously clarified works of Frege, Carnap, or whoever else are certainly valuable at answering particular and specific questions, the more interpretable and literary works of philosophers like Heidegger and Derrida provide us with not only potential answers to particular questions, but also with a wealth of additional questions.

Questions can be just as valuable as answers – if not more – because they contain within them assumptions concerning our understanding of the world and, paradoxically, they help us to clarify the world in some sense: while an answer is conclusive and terminating (provided it is correct), a question will always provide us with more, thus revealing not only the infinite capability of questions pertaining to the world, but also the limitations and workings of how questions can function. Raising a particular question may end up showing us that a question is illogical to ask, it may cause us to question the assumptions that led to us asking it, or it may indeed lead to an unexpected answer which, in turn, causes us to question its validity.

As such, it should be understood that the so-called "obscurantism" of some philosophical works is not something to be derided. Rather, it should be valued for its potential for raising interpretations and questions about the world, just as complex works of art and literature does. The purpose of these kind of philosophical works is incomparable with the purpose of more analytic works, which seek to rigorously provide one answer to one question. Of equal value are the works that provide us with many questions, without necessarily delivering decisive answers.

Addressing and Alluding-To

Hartigan – July 11th
In Cultural Criticism and Society, Adorno famously said that "Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric". What he meant by saying this was not as simple as rendering poetry post-Auschwitz as impossible, but that art in general post-Auschwitz would be engaging with the social structures that were present in the socio-political events that caused the Holocaust, allowing for the continued reification of such structures. Tragically, it is impossible for a poet to genuinely address the victims of  the Holocaust. But in Violence, Slavoj Žižek points out that poetry has always been an art form for those things that cannot be directly addressed to:

"Poetry is always, by definition, 'about' something that cannot be addressed directly, only alluded to. One shouldn't be afraid to take this a step further and refer to the old saying that music comes in when words fail."

What Žižek indirectly relates to here is that aspect of life according to which we rarely address anything directly. We, in fact, refer to them through a medium which essentially transforms things as they "truthfully" are into things that can be culturally understood. This medium may be used by way of metaphor (as in poetry), or – more often – by way of a construct of social reality. When we think we are referring to a material object (such as a car, a book, an animal, or more or less anything else), we are in fact referring to the social concept of that object: that is, the socially-determined implications, purposes, histories, categorisations, and associated terminologies of that object. As such, it is rare (or, perhaps, impossible) that we should ever refer to material things as they are in-themselves.

At first, especially from a metaphysical realist point of view, this doesn't seem plausible. Is it really the case that we cannot refer to an object without redirecting our reference to the object's participation in social reality? In his Logical Structure of the World, Carnap proposes that any scientific object can be defined purely by statements about already-defined objects. But this inevitably presupposes a definition of some axiomatic object which, given the empirical basis of Carnap's philosophy, would surely have to be some indivisibly fundamental material object. The problem with this is not only that it seems unlikely for the natural sciences to find such an object (which would presumably have to be some sort of material Form of the Good), but also that it is in fact impossible for us to genuinely grasp anything in purely material existence.

Regardless of how we comprehend and communicate about an object, it is always transformed from the object-in-itself to the object-for-a-medium. If I am to think of the desk in front of me, the thought in my mind is not the desk but the immaterial concept of the desk: my perception of it, with the immaterial attributes (the word "desk", my ownership of it, the socially determined purpose of a desk, the personally determined purpose of this desk in particular, and so on) appended to it. If I talk to someone about the desk (thereby moving the object-for-a-medium from my own consciousness to the public), there are similar immaterial attributes communicated. When I talk to somebody about a physical object, it is not as though my language somehow shoves the physical object in their mind; rather, the concept of the object is held immaterially in and amongst my language and our mutual understanding of it.

Of course, a response to this comes from reductive materialists, who will claim that such "concepts" are actually just physical objects in my brain – that is, a precise arrangement of electric charges inside my skull. However, this can be challenged by referring back to the example of communication: if two people are talking about a particular object, it is unlikely that the arrangement of electric charges in their brains are identical. What if one person has a particular understanding of that object that the other lacks? Accordingly it is seen that a concept is not simply a material thing because of the varying ways in which it can be manifested. However, this leads us on to the second response from class nominalism. A class nominalist would argue that, in fact, the variance of comprehensions of concepts is perfectly reconcilable with materialism, because when I conceptually refer to a seemingly universal concept (for example, the concept of dogs in the sentence "apples are fruits"), I am just referring to the set of all appropriate material things (following from the example, the sentence simply refers to all apples in the physical world). The objection to this is to ask: what are these "sets" or "classes"? When I refer to the abstract concept of "a class", am I referring to a group of physical things? What physical things are these? Furthermore, we can imagine a world in which the computer had not been invented, but the idea had been developed by some scientists. When these scientists refer to the abstract concept of a "computer", there are no physical things to refer to: does this render the concept meaningless?

As such, it can be concluded that any attempt to refer to material things inevitably condemns us to mere reference to immaterial concepts. To refer back to Žižek's response to Adorno, we can analogously see poetry as he refers to it as the social reality of concepts, and the things that poetry alludes to as everything that we ever think or speak of: just as poetry can never directly address the Holocaust, our thoughts and language can never directly address any of the material world before us.