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I love Bertrand Russell's writing style. His piece on writing is a must read:http://personal.kent.edu/~rmuhamma/Philosophy/RBwritings/howWrite.htm http://perso
by llaolleh 6y ago
I love Bertrand Russell's writing style.
His piece on writing is a must read:http://personal.kent.edu/~rmuhamma/Philosophy/RBwritings/howWrite.htm http://personal.kent.edu/~rmuhamma/Philosophy/RBwritings/how...
He translates this:
"Human beings are completely exempt from undesirable behaviour-patterns only when certain prerequisites, not satisfied except in a small percentage of actual cases, have, through some fortuitous concourse of favourable circumstances, whether congenital or environmental, chanced to combine in producing an individual in whom many factors deviate from the norm in a socially advantageous manner"
Into this:
"All men are scoundrels, or at any rate almost all. The men who are not must have had unusual luck, both in their birth and in their upbringing."
- raffraffraff 6y agoI think that philosophers like Judith Butler write impenetrable prose to sound intelligent and to make it almost impossible to argue against their positions. Anything worth saying can be said simply.
- gameswithgo 6y agoand jordan peterson. I wish I knew if it was intentional and for what reasons or if they just think that way.
- salmo 6y agoI blame Heidegger for this. I'm sure someone can cite someone previous, but that was it for me as an undergrad. It was so alluring at first. It sounds so smart, complex, and nuanced. But then it started to really kick in and I realized it was just opaque, vague, and unapproachable. My CS/Math side kicked in. Complex statements should be able to be broken down into compositions of simpler ones. You have the Descartes and Rawls of the world, that were able to distill a topic to the point any college student could understand without knowing anything about Philsophy. Kant and, even more, Spinoza weren't exactly approachable, but were able to construct their work by deeply composing simple structures. I came to agree that this artistic writing with overly complex sentence (or in Heidegger's case, compound word) structures, overuse of haughty philosophic jargon, etc. is mostly a large scale defense against argument. It becomes the gnosticism of philosophy: you think it's wrong because you just don't get it.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoOne could argue that anything worth seeing can be said simply, but it might require vocabulary that has a large corpus of knowledge behind it. For example, scientist couldn’t make quick progress if they couldn’t speak succinctly about Fourier transforms, but that concept is quite difficult for a large portion of the population to grok.
- Digory 6y agoIt feels like we are falling away from the ideal of speaking plainly. That was a product of idealistic journalism, Strunk & White, and mid-century writers like Hemingway. You will frequently see Tyler Cowen call out “Straussian” prose. Strauss suggested that original ideas could rarely be said simply. Wiki: > In 1952 he [Strauss] published Persecution and the Art of Writing, arguing that serious writers write esoterically, that is, with multiple or layered meanings, often disguised within irony or paradox, obscure references, even deliberate self-contradiction.
- nabla9 6y ago"I am allowed to use plain English because everybody knows that I could use mathematical logic if I chose."
- rwnspace 6y ago> He gave me various simple rules, of which 1 remember only two: "Put a comma every four words", and "never use 'and' except at the beginning of a sentence". And some wit to boot!