the canon, part two

part one
also relevant

Earlier, I mentioned that I tend not to read authors that I find unintelligible. But there can be more than merely pragmatic considerations that go into such decisions, especially when it comes to deciding what (who) is worth talking about, and what not. The mess surrounding Alan Sokal's conflicts with postmodernism is a good place to start.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Nonsense

Basically, Alan Sokal saw a lot of academics we can vaguely term "postmodernists" abusing science in various ways, whether that meant attacking its legitimacy or co-opting its legitimacy through nearly indecipherable and probably incorrect / meaningless references to scientific and mathematical concepts (e.g. Lacan likening a variety of insanity to a torus). Here's an example:

"It is clear that, as far as meaning is concerned, this `takes hold of it' of the sub-sentence -- pseudo-modal -- reverberates from the object itself which it wraps, as verb, in its grammatical subject, and that there is a false effect of meaning, a resonance of the imaginary induced by the topology, according to whether the effect of the subject makes a whirlwind of asphere (sic) or the subjective of this effect `reflects' itself from it." [I hereby refuse to attribute this citation!]

Now, I find this fragment pretty much unintelligible at the sentence level. I just have no idea what the man is saying.

Now -- what does all this have to do with the canon? The question is: how ought one to write philosophy (or other academic material)? One thought is that one ought to strive for clarity and ease of understanding. The point of publishing is communication, and I want to make myself as easily understood as possible. This is partly because I ought to be appropriately humble; I ought to expose myself to criticism. It is also because I have respect for my colleagues - I see them as fellow-investigators.

There might, however, be reasons for avoiding straightforward clarity. Maybe the point of the academic activity isn't to accumulate (or spread) knowledge, but to effect a change in my readers. Kierkegaard offers the following metaphor: suppose a man is such a glutton that his mouth is so stuffed with food he can no longer swallow or eat. In this case, feeding the man involves taking food out of his mouth. The (inexact) analogy is that when a person is so convinced they already know the answers, telling them the answers involves not just telling them, but convincing them that they know much less than they think they do.*

On this second view, it might be very important that a work be difficult to interpret. It is the process of interpreting it that is the point of the work, not any substantial doctrines contained therein (see also the resolute reaidng of the Tractatus). On this view, it is the activity that we are engaged in, rather than its products (i.e. bodies of knowledge) that is the point (although we may very well produce bodies of knowledge).

Unfortunately, things are not as clear as all this. That is, I might think that the point of philosophy is activity, and still think that it is in the nature of that activity that I should write clearly (perhaps because of respect my co-investigators enough to let them judge for themselves, as it were). Alternatively, I might think that real knowledge is really hard to communicate clearly - it takes a lot of working-through messy interpretation to arrive at it.

To get back to the canon: what we allow into the canon, what is worth talking about, depends a lot about where we come down as far as clarity vs. difficulty goes, and also whether we think we are accumulating knowledge, or something else Let's discuss:

If we're accumulating knowledge, then we want to encourage people to write as clearly as possible (maybe). It is one of the norms of the activity we're engaging in that one writes clearly, and we don't want people getting the wrong idea by declaring that dudes like Lacan are really worth reading. But on the other hand -- if it's knowledge we're after, such knowledge may very well be buried in Lacan. And it's worth finding it - since it's the end result, not the process, that is of moral worth.

If we're engaged in an activity, then maybe we also want to encourage people to do it a certain way - and thus we want to exclude certain people from the canon (just who depends on our view of the activity), and we shouldn't worry too much about losing whatever knowledge may be buried in there. On the other hand, maybe doing the activity well (or learning to do it well) involves wading through layers of interpretation. And so obscurity is in fact necessitated by the moral point of the activity.

These are complicated issues.

* http://philosophy.uchicago.edu/faculty/files/conant/Conant+Putting+Two+and+Two+Together+Pt+1.pdf
http://philosophy.uchicago.edu/faculty/files/conant/Conant+Putting+Two+and+Two+Together+Pt+2.pdf
"Putting Two and Two Together"
by James Conant
in The Grammar of Religious Belief
ed. D.Z. Phillips
St. Martin's Press, NY: 1996