I’m a fan of clarity in philosophy. Philosophy progresses through discussion. In a conversation, it’s important to understand one another.
John Searle once declared: “If you can’t say it clearly, you don’t understand it yourself.” My instinct is to cheer this sentiment, because obscurity is often a smokescreen for ignorance and an indicator of pretentiousness, but, on reflection, there are exceptions to Searle’s claim. Some great philosophers have seemed incapable of expressing themselves clearly; others, perhaps more interestingly, have chosen not to express themselves clearly even though they could have done so.
Immanuel Kant is an example of a genius who often lapsed into obscurity. When the historian Macaulay (who had no trouble understanding Locke, Berkeley, and Hume) was sent an English translation of the Critique of Pure Reason, he found it as unintelligible as if it had been written in Sanskrit.
Being clear doesn’t guarantee depth of thought. There have been clear writers – Ayn Rand springs to mind here – who communicate well but are nevertheless terrible philosophers. At least Rand’s shallow ethics and pathological egoism are on display and not concealed by a web of jargon, but her clarity helped her attract slavish and uncritical followers, particularly in the US, where her creed of selfishness appealed to a certain type of libertarian capitalist.
There have also been a few more literary philosophers who have invented their own more oblique ways of writing philosophy. Their books defy easy paraphrase. The point is to read and grapple with them and not to extract a straightforward meaning. Their authors seek to be interpreted, to provoke thought, and, in the case of Friedrich Nietzsche at least, to be learned by heart.
Such philosophers use novelistic techniques to show rather than to tell. They invent characters and write in voices that are not theirs in order to explore viewpoints on the world from within. Søren Kierkegaard, the quirky Danish philosopher who was born on May 5, 1813, stands out among these.
Deeply religious, he spent much of his adult life attacking the hypocrisy of the church and of the complacent Christians of Copenhagen, whom he accused of not taking their beliefs seriously enough. For Kierkegaard, the question “How should we live?” was paramount, and it was a question that had to be taken very seriously.
From his father, he inherited the means to live as an independent scholar, but also a gloomy fatalism. He (rightly as it turned out) believed that he was destined to die young (he only lived to the age of 42). This may have been behind his most momentous decision.
He’d fallen in love with Regine Olsen, who was 10 years younger than him, the only love of his life. They got engaged. But then without warning, he suddenly broke off the engagement by letter, returning his engagement ring. In deep distress, Regine wrote telling him that she would happily live in a cupboard and thank him for it if he would only take her back.
Kierkegaard refused, but being Kierkegaard, he later had a tall cupboard made without shelves in which he kept manuscripts of his books and his private letters. She later married; he never did. He left everything he owned to her in his will – including that cupboard.
After breaking the engagement, he wrote numerous books, many of which explore the theme of existential choice. That’s central to Fear and Trembling, which focuses on Abraham’s agonising choice when told by God to sacrifice his son Isaac. It’s also at the heart of the huge, sprawling, and occasionally brilliant Either/Or.
This flawed, fascinating and apparently unedited book explores two different approaches to life, the aesthetic and the ethical, and hints at a third, a religious option of faith – Kierkegaard’s own preference. Kierkegaard published it under the pseudonym Victor Eremita.
Eremita, we are told, bought a second-hand desk and found a secret compartment containing two manuscripts, one by a compulsive seducer, an aesthete who writes poetry and loves music whose life is directed towards sensual pleasures and the avoidance of boredom, and the other by a sober and somewhat tedious judge, whose every action is motivated by moral rectitude, and who praises the moral value of marriage. No prizes for guessing which half of the book is a better read.
The seducer’s writing is far more seductive than the moralistic didacticism of the judge, but at the same time it reveals the shallowness of an immoral life spent avoiding boredom. Perhaps a better title would have been Neither/Nor.
