Anyone who thinks technicak writing is clear has never attempted to, for example, program a garage door opener. I am have a philosophy PhD from a good school, am or was reasonably numerate, and I cannot figure out these garage door opener instructors. And they are not especially bad, they're about average.
Now look, I've said this before, but evidently not clearly enough. As in fact befits the point I am making, or trying to make. Whether writing is clear and accessible depends on context. Clear and accessible to whom? Despite Feynman's joke, clear and accessible to freshman at Caltech is not per se clear and accessible. Clarity and accessibility are relative to the audience.
This is a point that associates in law firms have hammered in to them over and over and over. You write a brief in law review style. The senior or associate or partner cuts it to shreds, saying, you can only make one simple point in this brief. That's all the state court judge in Plano, Texas can or will understand. Can this yap about the Daubert test. Your point is just: Plaintiff's expert must be excluded because his testimony is obviously unreliable. Of course if you are writing for law review editors, or federal judges, or law professors, what's clear and accessible i something else. And as I am brhing painfully reminded as I grade my first set of law school exams, what I thought was reasonably clear and accessible and what my students found to me clear and accessible (despite the test being open book) are two different things.
Orwell and Carrol have also made the point, with the paraphrase of Ecclesiastes, that there are other virtues as well. Although the King James version of the passage is much more clear than the bureaucratese version.
Difficulty and even obscurity is not a fatal flaw. Doug mentioned Marx (or part of his work); Hegel, Kant, Aristotle, to name a few often opaque writers, are infamously hard. Often that is because they are struggling with expressing new ideas that require new language and lots of hard thinking to grasp. All of these writers were capable of writing beautifully and (taking an audience of really smart people who have thought a lot about thre sort of things that they wrote about and read the important things written about those topics) clearly and accessibly. Marx is one of the great German prose stylists when he wants to be -- see the Manifesto or the chapterin Capital on the struggle over the length of the working day. Hegel alternates between putting his ideas in impenetrable dialectese and then translating them into unfogettable aphorisms or dynamic passages of striking power -- see Master & Slave or Absolure Freedom & Terror in the Phenomenology. Kant, despite having perpetrated the prose in the three Critiques, wrotes lectures in Ethics that are crystalline and lovely. What we have of Aristotle's are his student's notes, and they're pretty ugly, but his lost dialogues caused Cicero to refer to him has "golden tongued."
But even the icky parts of these writers are worth struggling with. And some of the pretty parts aren't that clear or accessible. (Rousseau and Nietzsche are two writers who are literary masters top to bottom but very very difficult. Not at all clear and accessible.)
Other thinkers -- Locke comes to mind -- just can't write worth a damn.
None of which constitutes an excuse for wilful obscurity. Who's wilfuly obscure people will disagree about. I find Butler just hard without rewarding insights, Doug gets things from her. I gave up on Derrida, but people I really respect swear to me that there's a lot there. I think that Heidegger's really important, lots of people find him hopeless.
In the end, I guess, maybe Feynman's right -- not whether you can explain your ideas to Caltech frosh in particular, but whether you can explain the ideas that interest you to the audiences that matter to you in ways that they can feel moderately comfortable in saying they understand. I'm not sure there's really anything more to be said about the subject -- but I could be wrong.
--- Tayssir John Gabbour <tayssir.john at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On 12/10/06, Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
> > For instance, earlier in the thread, bitch
> mentioned someone who
> > considered Chomsky an elite academic who is
> difficult to read. You
> > don't agree. Why should your assessment of
> Chomsky carry more weight?
>
> Shouldn't you cite evidence for his
> "incomprehensibility"? (Rather
> than rely on a flamewarrior's family anecdote?)
>
> Amazon reviewers praise his _Understanding Power_
> for clarity, despite
> his views ranging from anarchism to Zapatistas:
>
<http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Power-Indispensable-Chomsky-Noam/dp/1565847032>
>
> I don't recall anyone in this discussion citing a
> specific paragraph
> which was intellectually incomprehensible. (As
> opposed to just
> boringness.) Please try.
>
>
> > If we did a survey of adults in the U. S., had
> them read some Chomsky,
> > and the majority claimed that he was an obscure
> intellectual elitist,
> > would you denounce his work?
>
> Well, do you know any such surveys? I've heard of
> informal ones where
> he's voted highly. Even other academics in the
> social sciences cite
> him heavily, regardless of his criticisms regarding
> the social
> sciences:
> <http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/mc/mc-supp-017.html>
>
>
> > Let's face it, only a small
> > number of people in our society need to understand
> how op-amps work or
> > how cpus are manufactured or how to design a safe
> bridge. In an
> > industrial society, it's impossible for all
> specialized forms of
> > knowledge to be understood by everyone.
>
> Maybe, but those hardware guys are usually happy to
> explain how it
> works, in simple terms. Children can go to Radio
> Shack and build
> electronic devices. Schools have contests where they
> build bridges
> from straws. Managers at hardware firms demand easy
> explanations.
>
>
> Here's a refreshing anecdote from the physicist I
> mentioned earlier:
>
> "Richard Feynman, the late Nobel Laureate in
> physics, was once asked
> by a Caltech faculty member to explain why spin
> one-half particles
> obey Fermi Dirac statistics. Rising to the
> challenge, he said, 'I'll
> prepare a freshman lecture on it.' But a few days
> later he told the
> faculty member, 'You know, I couldn't do it. I
> couldn't reduce it to
> the freshman level. That means we really don't
> understand it.'"
>
>
> Tayssir
> ___________________________________
>
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>
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