Re: OT: Helen Keller & Whorf-Sapir

--- Samuel Rivier <samuelriv@...> wrote:

> On that note, am I alone when I say that reading
> some
> "Great Masters" of philosophy gets me incredibly
> pissed off at what seems to me to be an incredibly
> superfluous use of language to describe relatively
> simple and, to an extent, reasonable concepts? I
> mean,
> I loved what I read of Merleau-Ponty (Phenomenology
> of
> Perception)--he had great ideas, once I could get
> through the horrific wall of words in the
> translation.
> I have an idea that the French version may be more
> condensed, but I don't think my French skills are
> such
> that I could read a philosophy book to any good
> effect.
>
No no, you're not alone, we are 2 (I am the other
one). I made many times exactly the same reflexion to
myself, and this, among others, disgusted me from
philosophy. Some rules for writing philosophy seem to
be, for ex:

- never use a simple word if a more abstract and
complicated is at hand.

- never use a complicated word one can find in a
dictionary if you can find one that won't be in.

- never use the same word that a colleague of yours
already used to name the same concept if you can
invent one of your own that nobody ever used yet.

- never write a non-ambiguous sentence. A sentence can
can be understood the same way by at least two
different people cannot be philosophy.

- never use a cold, dry, factual, language : always
mix it up with heavy literary coquetry. Remember
you're not a scientist, you're a philosoph.

- in any case, make your sentences so twisted and
inflated that any normal reader, coming to the end of
one, will be absolutely unable to remember how it
began and what it was about. Remember you're not a
pedagog, you're a philosoph.

- use plenty of personal apartes and references
without mentioning the sources and the context. The
ones who won't understand them by themselves cannot
understand any philosophy anyway.

- do not use a plan, or even better, feign to use one,
but do it in a way that nobody can see any relation
between the content of a paragraph and its title, or
can imagine what is the general idea and what is the
main direction of your philosophic thought.

- always remember that your goal is that 99% of your
readers won't understand anything of your work (this
is the vulgum pecus, and you don't need to care about
them), and that the remaining 1% will understand it 37
different ways (those are your fellow philosophs, but
they're all wrong, each one in his own way: thus they
should be mocked and contempted). Only really
incomprehensible philosophs will get to posterity.

French philosophs are not bad from that standpoint,
but the champions remain of course the German ones,
even if they lack that literary coquetry that makes
the charm of the French. Let's say it flatly: they're
a bit heavy, while ours are more spiritual.

(By the way, the above could also apply to some
linguists from different countries).





=====
Philippe Caquant

"High thoughts must have high language." (Aristophanes, Frogs)

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