This is a patently unfair test. Without a doubt, someone with infinite patience could take the time to explain all this to Chomsky-- but the fact that he lacks the inclination to actually study Continental Philosophy, and there aren't any volunteers willing to take the time to spoon-feed it to him isn't a reflection on the subject matter.

As an analogy: imagine if Paul McCartney said that someone should explain Perelman's proof of the Poincare Conjecture to him, and that if they couldn't, it meant that it was bunk.

Sure, it's possible that Chomsky hasn't taken the time to truly understand Continental Philosophy or lacks the technical training to understand it even if someone were to explain it all to him.

But it's also possible that continental philosophy is just profound nonsense that thrives based on the following fallacy:

1. Profound stuff (general relativity, quantum mechanics, Poincare conjecture) is very often difficult to understand.

2. Continental philosophy is difficult to understand.

3. Hence, continental philosophy is profound stuff.

Frankly, applying the "looks like a duck, talks like a duck, walks like a duck" criteria, I feel it's more likely that continental philosophy doesn't qualify as a genuine area of human knowledge - it's all just nonsense. But it might serve some other important purpose (e.g., a form of harmless mental hashish that's genuinely pleasurable).

At any rate, pressure for greater clarity and simpler exposition is always good in any field.

Your "looks like a duck, walks like a duck" test would just as easily apply to nuclear physics or non-Euclidean geometry, if you are not already familiar with the terms of art of those fields.

And the pressure for greater clarity and simpler exposition is admirable, so far as it goes-- but (as many mathematics texts demonstrate) notation matters. Things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler-- and this latter part is often difficult.

The usefulness of Continental Philosophy could consist in insight into moral, political, and social problems, but providing insight to a few specialists is not much use in those fields, especially not in democratic societies. Looking back on the history of moral and social change in the United States, I don't see such philosophies playing a major role. The thinkers who have made a difference have written for a general audience and in a much more accessible style. (Karl Marx and Das Kapital would seem to be an exception, but he and his evangelists wrote plenty of accessible interpretations of his ideas. The Communist Manifesto, for example, is a brief, readable, and rousing document.) If Continental Philosophers want to justify their existence, they should point to some benefit that their work enables, instead of just complaining that nobody understands it.

I agree with you that greater clarity is good, so long as it doesn't sacrifice truth, or accuracy. But the context here is that Continental Philosophy/Deconstruction/the Humanities do not seem to even consider the pursuit of clarity to be worth its while. It seems, in fact, to value verboseness and unclarity above all else.

I can do it with jargon you already understand, for example,

The totality of the colour blue is the sum of all of the integrals from one meta-point to another meta-point, formed in to spherical husk that can be opened by neither being within or without.

Even though those words are all well-established with their meaning, they are nonsense when strung together.

That's true. And if you can find me a sentence from Derrida that is similarly nonsense, I'll tip my cap to you.

Honestly: it's not "designed to be unintelligible in order to conceal an absence of honest thought."

"And even if one wished to keep sonority on the side of the sensible and contingent signifier which would be strictly speaking impossible, since formal identities isolated within a sensible mass are already idealities that are not purely sensible, it would have to be admitted that the immediate and privileged unity which founds significance and the acts of language is the articulated unity of sound and sense within the phonic."

Taken from here: http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/f...

While reading it, I was honestly asking myself if there were major transcription errors from the original translation, because it's completely impenetrable.

-"In physics, a particle can have different properties at once!"

-"Some people think that the language you speak defines what you can think! There's even languages without numbers, and those people have trouble counting!"

-"There are political philosophies that say everybody should share in everything equally, and others where only the people who work the hardest should get the most stuff!"

-"If you eat more calories than you spend, you'll get fat!"

-"If too many people try to use the same wireless signal at once, it'll get jammed up and won't work right."

And this type of thing seems to hold true for most disciplines. It's possible to get similar layman explanations for just about anything except for, as he's pointing out certain brands of philosophy.

Since we know that a person cannot learn a complex topic at its most complex, they must take simpler stepping stones in a subject till they can achieve comprehension at a high level this implies a couple possibilities:

1) People in this field have worked up through these stepping stones, and by building on various axioms and following certain lines of reasoning, it's possible to achieve a level of comprehension that is based on reducible and explainable models of thinking.

2) There are no stepping stones and it's complex word gibberish without particular meaning. To get "in" to the field, you must master the phrases, secret handshakes and passcodes, to learn the common language of the field, so that you can appear for all purposes as one of the group. It'd be similar to learning a particular dialect of street slang and customs so that you can fit in to a particular neighborhood and not be identified as an immediate outsider. Of course even in that case, words, phrases, actions, customs are all reducible and explainable in simple, general, layman terms ("you wear big clothes and stand and walk like this to thwart the ability of an observer, say the police, in determining if you are carrying a weapon", "you say 'jigga-g' when talking about the leader of the gang", "you spray tags as markings to indicate territory to other gangs").

If 1 is true, then Chomsky should be able to find somebody, anybody, who could do a passable job at explaining this topic in general layman terms such as is possible in every other field. Perhaps he's not really trying very hard, or perhaps the people who inhabit this discipline are particularly intransigent to formulating an articulation of their field for layman without using the domain vocabulary specific to it?

There's a growing consensus external to the field, however, that 2 is true. It would actually be rather simple for the practitioners of this field to counter this sentiment, simply provide a layman's explanation of the topic. But since that seems to be something that nobody can do, and statements like "And the pressure for greater clarity and simpler exposition is admirable, so far as it goes-- but (as many mathematics texts demonstrate) notation matters. Things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler-- and this latter part is often difficult." do nothing to assuage this.

The original article of course, highlights one of a number of embarrassing public episodes where a complete outsider strings together a pastiche of phrases into a paper or a presentation or some such, and it passes the muster of the group as being legitimate and meaningful to that group even though it is, by way of purpose, complete gibberish. Again, this further supports the notion that 2 is correct, that the field is composed mostly of nonsense and claims of "no it's not" without supporting evidence or a rough, layman's exposition does nothing to counter that.

It seems much more likely that outsiders looking in on an obscure field resent the work it would take to understand the field, so they bash it. Unlike other complex fields, including any of the sciences (except astrobiology, which clearly is bogus. And maybe evolutionary psychology, which is borderline), lit crit doesn't do much work in the world and most people wouldn't miss it if it were gone. So, that compounds our resentment of having to work to understand it. In other words, it's tough to understand, there's not an obvious payoff for understanding it, so it's easier just to write it off.

This doesn't follow. There are many other ways it could be nonsense, as demonstrated by countless erudite groups from Nebuchadnezzar's astrologers to the Inquisition. None wants to be the one who "doesn't get it".

Moreover, the participants you list--practitioners, students, admirers--are hardly impartial.

Their interests in the emperor's clothes are well vested.

Genius in one field doesn't translate to another.

And, the real strawman is Chomsky's claim that he can't understand Continental Philosophy. I guarantee that if he put in, say, 10-15 hours a week of study for, say, 2 years, he'd have a decent competence without any problem.

Masters of continental philosophy have no problem rendering their fields comprehensible to, say, graduate students in the field. Some (easier) texts are comprehensible to undergrads.

Any "lack of an internal structure, consistency, truth" is imagined by Chomsky.

Really.

With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he’s so obscure. Every time you say, “He says so and so,” he always says, “You misunderstood me.” But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that’s not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, “What the hell do you mean by that?” And he said, “He writes so obscurely you can’t tell what he’s saying, that’s the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, ‘You didn’t understand me; you’re an idiot.’ That’s the terrorism part.” And I like that. So I wrote an article about Derrida. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quoted that passage, and he said yes.

Ha! Searle is worse than an outsider--he's an outsider by choice.

Searle's misreadings of Derrida are laughable-- and then he has the balls to blame his sloppy reading on JD being obscure.

But don't take my word for it: read the essays in questions.

Derrida's "Signature Event Context" is a brief text, and not terribly difficult to read (if you have read Austin, as Searle has.)

Searle's reply, "Reiterating the Differences", is a disaster. Searle somehow got it in his head that Derrida was attacking Austin (which he was not), and wrote a "defense" of Austin that misreads Derrida atrociously. (Searle has since refused to allow his piece to be anthologized, so you have to hunt it down in the original publication. I have.)

Derrida rebutted with a piece called "Limited Inc a b c", which responds, patiently and at great length, to each of Searle's points. In fact, Derrida manages to quote every single sentence of Searle's piece within his own (which is not an accident, since the dispute is in large part about quotation and citationality in Austin.)

The two Derrida works, along with a precis of Searle's piece, and an interview on the subject, has been published as "Limited Inc", and is a great introduction to Derrida for those coming from the Anglo-American philosophical tradition.

Searle comes out of the debate looking foolish beyond belief, in my opinion.

So other than providing a private game preserve for a peculiar flavor of intellectuals that aren't interested in a day job and can't be bothered to gravitate to fields with demonstrable intrinsic value what, exactly, is the point to all of this?

And so long as these people are teaching 300-level classes to undergrads they're definitely doing something of value, even if it's only creating individuals as jaded as yourself (which who knows, may have some value.)

A `Bad Writer' Bites Back

BERKELEY, Calif. -- In the last few years, a small, culturally conservative academic journal has gained public attention by showcasing difficult sentences written by intellectuals in the academy. The journal, Philosophy and Literature, has offered itself as the arbiter of good prose and accused some of us of bad writing by awarding us "prizes." (I'm still waiting for my check!) The targets, however, have been restricted to scholars on the left whose work focuses on topics like sexuality, race, nationalism and the workings of capitalism -- a point the news media ignored. Still, the whole exercise hints at a serious question about the relation of language and politics: why are some of the most trenchant social criticisms often expressed through difficult and demanding language?

No doubt, scholars in the humanities should be able to clarify how their work informs and illuminates everyday life. Equally, however, such scholars are obliged to question common sense, interrogate its tacit presumptions and provoke new ways of looking at a familiar world.

Many quite nefarious ideologies pass for common sense. For decades of American history, it was "common sense" in some quarters for white people to own slaves and for women not to vote. Common sense, moreover, is not always "common" -- the idea that lesbians and gay men should be protected against discrimination and violence strikes some people as common-sensical, but for others it threatens the foundations of ordinary life.

If common sense sometimes preserves the social status quo, and that status quo sometimes treats unjust social hierarchies as natural, it makes good sense on such occasions to find ways of challenging common sense. Language that takes up this challenge can help point the way to a more socially just world. The contemporary tradition of critical theory in the academy, derived in part from the Frankfurt School of German anti-fascist philosophers and social critics, has shown how language plays an important role in shaping and altering our common or "natural" understanding of social and political realities.

The philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, who maintained that nothing radical could come of common sense, wrote sentences that made his readers pause and reflect on the power of language to shape the world. A sentence of his such as "Man is the ideology of dehumanization" is hardly transparent in its meaning. Adorno maintained that the way the word "man" was used by some of his contemporaries was dehumanizing.

Taken out of context, the sentence may seem vainly paradoxical. But it becomes clear when we recognize that in Adorno's time the word "man" was used by humanists to regard the individual in isolation from his or her social context. For Adorno, to be deprived of one's social context was precisely to suffer dehumanization. Thus, "man" is the ideology of dehumanization.

Herbert Marcuse once described the way philosophers who champion common sense scold those who propagate a more radical perspective: "The intellectual is called on the carpet. . . . Don't you conceal something? You talk a language which is suspect. You don't talk like the rest of us, like the man in the street, but rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your tricks, purge you."

The accused then responds that "if what he says could be said in terms of ordinary language he would probably have done so in the first place." Understanding what the critical intellectual has to say, Marcuse goes on, "presupposes the collapse and invalidation of precisely that universe of discourse and behavior into which you want to translate it."

Of course, translations are sometimes crucial, especially when scholars teach. A student for whom a word such as "hegemony" appears strange might find that it denotes a dominance so entrenched that we take it for granted, and even appear to consent to it -- a power that's strengthened by its invisibility.

One may have doubts that "hegemony" is needed to describe how power haunts the common-sense world, or one may believe that students have nothing to learn from European social theory in the present academy. But then we are no longer debating the question of good and bad writing, or of whether "hegemony" is an unlovely word. Rather, we have an intellectual disagreement about what kind of world we want to live in, and what intellectual resources we must preserve as we make our way toward the politically new.

I don't understand a lot of high-level physics, but that doesn't lead me to imagine that physicists just sit around bullshitting each other all day.

I don't understand a lot of high-level physics or Continental Philosophy, but the same process that leads me to believe that the physicists aren't sitting around BSing all day leads me to believe that the philosophers are.

(Which is to say, I read enough intro surface level articles that are supposed to give a hint of what you get into once you do begin to understand and talk to people about the same, and form an outsider's opinion. Same process, different results with the two fields.)

I'm guessing you aren't familiar with string theory then. :-P

/duck

PS: Guess which side won?

Sokal punked a minor journal that was not particularly well known in the field. His book with Bricmont, attacking "postmodernism", on the other hand, was published by a major publisher, even though large swaths of it had been thoroughly debunked.

Whereas you aren't likely to find people who're able to so explain deconstruction of something or the like in a manner that's clean and simple and easy to understand. This either suggest that a) the person doesn't understand it, fully, himself; or b) deconstruction/humanities is so difficult no human mind can fully understand it.

If the interested party is already well read in the philosophical works of Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud and Levinas, I could probably do it in a weekend.

(Or as Chomsky argues - why is deconstruction necessary when the conclusions it reaches can be simply divined by ordinary laypersons, without all the verbosity and the pretentiousness of language?)

Let's start with you reading (and demonstrating to me a core competence of) the basic texts of philosophy leading up to deconstruction-- in this case, that would be Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud and Levinas.

When you have those six down, I'd be happy to explain deconstruction to you.

What you should be saying is "Deconstruction is an approach, introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, which rigorously pursues the meaning of a text to the point of exposing the contradictions and internal oppositions upon which it is apparently founded and showing that those foundations are irreducibly complex, unstable or impossible" (courtesy wikipedia).

And then the layman asks "how does this approach expose contradictions?"

And you say "Deconstructions work entirely within the studied text to expose and undermine the frame of reference, assumptions, and ideological underpinnings of the text. Although deconstructions can be developed using different methods and techniques, the process typically involves demonstrating the multiple possible readings of a text and their resulting internal conflicts, and undermining binary oppositions (e.g. masculine/feminine, old/new)."

and there we have it, good enough for the layman to realize it's a line of thinking he's probably not interested in pursuing anymore. And then...if they keep on that, you say, "this is getting a bit into the deep end for me to make it simple and explainable, if you are really interested, start by reading these books first."

Chomsky claims to have found "Of Grammatology" full of "pathetic misreadings." Unfortunately, he doesn't take the time to outline what these might be-- and oddly enough, neither does anybody else, to my knowledge. I know of only one publication claiming that Derrida misreads his sources in "OG", and that was in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement many years ago; several responses were published, and personally, I don't think Derrida misread Curtius as claimed.

Now, although the subject matter of "Of Grammatology" is nominally linguistics, we have to remember that Derrida is not a linguist (nor pretending to be) and is interested, rather, in the philosophical implications of several arguments concerning linguistics made by Saussure, Levi-Strauss and Rousseau. And, to the best of my knowledge, Chomsky shows no interest in his published writings in the latter two, and isn't much enamored with the former.

So, "Of Grammatology" is only tangentially related to Chomsky's field of interest. Which is fine, of course. But I suspect that this lead him to be more dismissive than necessary: I think he mistakes his lack of interest with Derrida's lack of a point.

Derrida does make an important argument in OG, but it is largely aimed at a certain group of Structuralists, who were active in the French academy at the time it was published. In other words, Derrida's in the middle of a fight that Chomsky has nothing at all to do with, and I think his lack of skin in the game got in the way of an open-minded reading.