Philosophy is supposed to be difficult
We complain about its thorny prose and technical intricacy but should philosophy really be accessible to all?
A piece by Cambridge philosopher Simon Blackburn in the current issue of the Society of Authors journal addresses the intractable question of whether philosophy ought to be accessible to the general reader. "The great philosophical writers of the past wrote for humanity," Blackburn begins, enumerating Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Mill and even Wittgenstein. The rot set in, according to him, during the 20th century, with the academicising of the discipline, although the origins of the corruption can be traced back to Hegel and probably Kant, who had "already taught it to speak German". As opposed to common-sense utilitarian English, perhaps (assuming we overlook the classical Greek of Blackburn's first two heroes).
It seems a reckless wager at best to portray Plato as "writing for humanity", when the philosophers in his ideal state are to be kings that is, not just good at what they do, but rulers over the rest in a hierarchically ordered, rigidly unified polity. If ever a thinker wrote for his own kind, it was him. And, for that matter, do the Philosophical Investigations of Wittgenstein really speak to everybody?
There is nothing new in the phenomenon of theorists in any technical branch of knowledge wondering aloud about whom they are talking to, apart from each other. In the early part of the last century, something of the same conversation was happening in theoretical physics. Ernest Rutherford declared though the quote is often misattributed to Einstein that "it should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid", and Einstein himself claimed that all! physica l theories ought to be capable of so straightforward a description that "even a child could understand them".
But is this such an obviously helpful ideal? Most people don't expect to be able to understand other kinds of specialist discourse. The lay person would understand little or nothing of micro-electronic engineering, has no interest in doing so, and is content to leave it to the initiated. But philosophy is about the world we live in, and our lives in it, Blackburn objects, waving the flag for the enriching humanities against the sterilities of technology. Therefore everybody should be able to understand it. On this view, what differentiates philosophy from science is the fact that it poses questions about the world we live in and our perceptions of it, and even makes suggestions as to what we ought to do in our lives. Neither of those approaches is absent from theoretical science, though. What would be the point of researches into the causes of obesity or the effects of climate change if they didn't tell us, or at least strive to tell us, what we ought to do about such matters?
The point is that philosophy is as much a technical discipline as these other sciences are, and as little capable of being diluted down to words of one syllable. One of the reasons for this is that philosophy isn't necessarily just a set of conclusions. To many of the most recent western thinkers, it is first and foremost a methodology, rather than an attempt to arrive at a fixed theory. The Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor Adorno declared, "The crux is what happens in it, not a thesis or a position Essentially, therefore, philosophy is not expoundable. If it were, it would be superfluous; the fact that most of it can be expounded speaks against it."
Popularising philosophy became a lucrative publishing trend in the 1990s, with the likes of Alain de Botton, AC Grayling and Jostein Gaarder offering homogenised summarie! s of the principal thinkers, often presented chronologically as though they represented a gradual progress towards enlightenment, and mined for what they could tell us, in the era of self-help literature, about how to be content with our lives. In their bland readability, these books defeated their own avowed project of getting everybody interested in the great philosophers, by confessing how unreadable the texts of Kant and Hegel themselves must be.
In a final somersault, Blackburn states that making philosophy accessible should not be a question of simplifying it but of bringing people up to its level. So the problem turns out to lie after all not with the attempt to interpret the world, but with the faculties of those who want to hear it interpreted. Always supposing the point isn't, rather, to change it.
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