Academic Philosophers and “Writing Clearly”

What does it mean to “write clearly”?

“The cat is on the mat” is a clear way of writing that the cat is on the mat. “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my green age” is a clear way of writing that, if it is the particular thing you want to express.

Hegel’s Phenomenology is clear, if those sentences directly convey the thoughts Hegel wanted to express. And we have nothing but the sentences to tell us what thoughts he did want to express. We could claim that all he really meant was that the cat is on the mat, and that he wrote this in a very unclear and long-winded way. But we would have no evidence for that claim. Our only guide to what he meant is what he wrote. If he wrote “the cat is in the mat”, we could charitably assume he meant “on the mat”. But if what he wrote is too different from anything else to plausibly mean anything else—and it is—then the only charitable thing to do is to assume that he wrote difficult things clearly.

I can’t understand them, but I don’t blame Hegel entirely. To understand the thoughts, you need to do more than just read and think them. You need to feel them and live in them. We should remember that language isn’t just an abstract map of a structure in reality. That is a clever model of language for theorists to have come up with, but it is only a model, not the thing. The thing—language as we speak, hear, write, see, touch, and taste it—stirs up feelings, evokes longings, frustrates us, delights us, lulls us into dreams. These are part of the thought. The frustration of reading Hegel is part of his meaning. What we call a “thought” is always a complex of the cognitive, emotional, and conative. They swarm together. We can look away from some of the swarm, but we cannot actually separate it. To express a thought—your thought, as it actually occurs in you—is at the very least to get somebody to think, feel, and want certain things. For that, language has to do a lot more than map a structure. So “writing clearly” can’t mean stripping away all ornamentation and ambiguity where these are playing a crucial role in working on the feelings and desires of the reader. Doing that would mean failing to convey the whole thought.

Academic philosophy is, in my mind, often unclear in precisely this way, although some of it—the “analytic” variety—prizes clarity, which is taken to mean the prose equivalent of the most functionalist, unadorned, and homogenous modernist architecture. What analytic philosophy forgets is what one of its founders, Susan Stebbing, pointed out: we think with the whole self, not just with the intellect. As she put it: “I think, not something in me thinks”. To convey a thought to a person, you have to work on the whole person: on their feelings, on their subconscious responses to the imagined sonority of the words, on their sense of imagery, of tragedy, of fun, of irony, of surprise and delight—also of fear and anger and, yes, impatience and frustration.

The prose of analytic philosophy often reminds one of F.H. Bradley’s aphorisms: “My heart’s blood, as I write with it, turns to mere dull ink”. Bradley intended this as a lament; for analytic philosophers it is a method. But the general bloodlessness of academic philosophical prose applies equally to the “analytic” and “Continental” varieties (or “anal” and “incontinent”, as I have heard them unkindly called). Maybe they think they are economising on emotional colour and decorative imagery to focus on clarity of meaning. But in fact they are ignoring a crucial bit of the meaning. They still evoke feelings—language always does. But the feelings are cold and alienating. The imagery evoked is that of a vast computer terminal drifting unattended in the icy void of outer space. Is that the meaning intended?

What misleads academic philosophers, I think, is a myth about thought: that there is some cognitive content of thought that can live outside of its lush environment of feelings, images, desires, hopes, dreams, jokes, confusions, tangles, obscurities, glimmers of insight, stories, bodily sensations. There is cognitive content to thought, and it can be transferred in captivity into another mind through the miraculous vehicle of language. But it will not survive the transplantation if its lush environment is not rebuilt for it upon arrival. As Kuang-Ming Wu liked to write: language in its core is metaphor, and metaphor literally means a ferrying-over. Ferry over too little, and the thought dies. To write clearly, remember that.