>>The incomprehensible jargon of many continental writers is an old trick of looking profound to those who are too insecure to ask "what the f___ does that mean?" >>
And then there was, in reply, this:
>>Wittgenstein never used incomprehensible jargon, of course. The Tractatus is a marvel of clear intelligibility.>>
To which I reply:
1. I think there is a long-running Anglo-American prejudice against the continental thinkers that we really have to get past. Is it simply something in the water that makes British, American, and Nordic philosophers better philosophers? Or the bad food? I highly doubt it. Rather, there would seem to be fewer linguistic and culturally patterned thought differences amongst the Anglo and Nordic philosophy worlds getting in the way of mutual understanding and empathy--well, PERHAPS anyway.
2. I'm not sure Wittgenstin qualifies as a good example of a continental philosopher, since he is largely recognized as one who worked in the Anglo-American-analytic tradition (and this Anglo-analytic tradition, if you are interested in the history of philosophy, also owes a lot to the Vienna Circle and other thinkers out of Austria and Europe).
3. I'm not sure either about W's lack of obscurity or his accessibility in his Tractatus period. Some of the influences would appear to be late Tolstoy and Tagore. Also, consider, the Tractatus goes in very quick, jumpy prose spurts like this:
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus http://www.kfs.org/%7Ejonathan/witt/tlph.html
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 The world is everything that is the case. *
2 What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.
3 The logical picture of the facts is the thought.
4 The thought is the significant proposition.
5 Propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions.
(An elementary proposition is a truth-function of itself.)
6 The general form of truth-function is: [a string of symbols from formal logic which does not make it into plain text].
This is the general form of proposition.
7 Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
--------------------------and it just gets better and better from there on
The steps display good cohesion for something that briefly stated, but coherence is flying out the window for most readers by the second step, I should think, unless you've studied the reasoning that lead to the concept 'atomic facts'.
The arguments about symbolic logic and predicate calculus would make sense to Peano, Frege, Russell, Goedel, Tarski and other philosophers of logic or, in this period, buffs of history of the philosophy of logics, but I highly doubt that most non-philosophy people would find it very clear at all.
4. Which brings me to my final points. I really do think that a lot of the post-structuralists suffered at the hands of that first generation of translators who were not knowledgeable enough about the philosophical traditions that people like Derrida worked in. I think there are better translations out now than in the 60s and 70s since there are a lot of people in academia who devote much of their careers to translating such thinkers now. To translate Derrida, it would help to have worked in the phenomenological tradition, be steeped in Husserl and Heidegger (as well as Derrida), be fluent in academic French, and have access to the philosopher himself to check the translations.
Oh, and Wittgenstein was translated to quite an extent by the people who studied with him and knew him, and the writings that came out of the Philosophical Investigations period are certainly more accessible than the earlier Tractatus. However, if you read the P.I. closely for study purposes, you still have to deal with the struggle for coherence and forward and backward reference and allusion, as well as intertextuality with people you might never have read but Wittgenstein would have had personal conversations and letter exchanges with.
Coherence is to quite an extent in the mind of the reader, so if a text seems incoherent to you but coherent to many others, it might be that you simply aren't ready to read that text and have to do some more background work. That's philosophy, and it's time-consuming. Derrida might not be everyone's cup of tea, but I doubt if most philosophy is. Or any work of prose from an academic discipline written for people in full flow in that academic discipline.
BTW, there is a Derrida for Dummies book out there, isn't there?
F
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