It is it logical that philosophy has always to be expressed strictly analytically?
Can all that analytical rigorousness not lead to getting the bath water out of the tub with the baby when faced with the hermeneutic problem and when putting this rigorousness to a rather one-dimensional extreme?
That is my question to this thread
I think I should be clear as to what the 'rigour' to which analytic philosophy aspires actually is. There are a number of facets to this. I'll talk about clarity, precision, and rigour itself.
Firstly, being clear means making it as easy as possible for one's readers to identify one's conclusions and follow one's argument. That is often helped by putting one's points with as little extraneous detail as necessary. Compare:
[In the context of a discussion about 9/11]… this act of naming: a date and nothing more. … [T]he index pointing toward this date, the bare act, the minimal deictic, the minimalist aim of this dating, also marks something else. Namely, the fact that we perhaps have no concept and no meaning available to us to name in any other way this ‘thing’ that has just happened … But this very thing … remains ineffable, like an intuition without concept, like a unicity with no generality on the horizon or with no horizon at all, out of range for a language that admits its powerlessness and so is reduced to pronouncing mechanically a date, repeating it endlessly, as a kind of ritual incantation, a conjuring poem, a journalistic litany or rhetorical refrain that admits to not knowing what it’s talking about.
With:
We often repeat the name ‘9/11’ without thinking much about it. But the words we use can be very revealing. Why do we try to reduce this complex event to such a simple term? Because the event is so complex we cannot capture it properly. Precisely by talking about it in such a simple way, we admit that we don’t really understand it.
The first quote is quite hard to understand. Not only is it hard to find what the author's reasons are for the conclusion he wishes to press upon us, it is hard to see what that conclusion even is. Now, that makes the author seem very clever in certain circles true enough and it's a nice piece of writing. But it is unclear. Imagine reading an entire book written in that style: it becomes quite difficult to have any sort of constructive scholarly debate with the author because one can never be sure what is meant by any particular passage. That is not good for philosophy, or any academic discipline which aims at knowledge. And that is why clarity is a virtue. The second quote is much easier to understand and is intended as a clarification of the first (it is still, probably, false).
What about precision? Precision, in philosophical writing, is part-and-parcel with clarity. If one is imprecise it is very hard to be clear. That is because precision means the absence of vague, hand-wavy conclusions, premises or definitions whenever possible. The antithesis of precision is ambiguity. Imprecise writing can be interpreted in many ways. So, here's an example of an imprecise definition:
By [governmentality] I mean three things:
1. The ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security.
2. The tendency which, over a long period and throughout the West, has steadily led towards the pre-eminence over all other forms (sovereignty, discipline, etc.) of this type of power which may be termed government, resulting, on the one hand, in the formation of a whole series of specific governmental apparatuses, and, on the other, in the development of a whole complex of savoirs.
3. The process, or rather the result of the process, through which the state of justice of the Middle Ages, transformed into the administrative state during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, gradually becomes ‘governmentalized’.
This is imprecise because it allows 'governmentality' to be interpreted in many ways. 'Governmentality' is ambiguous - different readers could easily, from the same words, come to understand different things by 'governmentality.' For instance, is governmentality three distinct things, or just one thing? If the former, why use the same word for all three? Just what is this 'very specific form of power' essential to governmentality? Is governmentality a process or is it a result of a process (they're obviously different)? Is governmentality the same as governmentalization? And so on and so forth. The point in this case is not that these questions are unanswerable, but that sympathetic readers can easily answer them in different ways. And this is because of the imprecision - the ambiguity- of the definition. This is pretty obviously problematic: if we mean different things by the terms we use its going to be impossible to have a fruitful debate, no matter how well-spirited we are.
So the heart of precision is unambiguity. This does not only apply to definitions, it also applies to conclusions. Good writing in the analytic style comes out with conclusions which are precise as possible. That is because vague conclusions are impossible to debate fruitfully. Make one's conclusions vague enough and nobody can ever prove them wrong: if there is a problem with some precise formulation of them one can just wave one's hands and say one didn't mean that anyway. When asked what one
did mean, one is advised to avoid the question. This seems to me a pretty obviously bad way of doing philosophy: not only does it vitiate debate it also typically distances us from the truth. What we want, ultimately, is something precise - unless we have good reason to think all we can get is vagueness. So, here's an example of that kind of conclusion:
Being and time determine each other reciprocally, but in such a manner that neither can the former - Being - be addressed as something temporal nor can the latter - time - be addressed as a being.
You see the problem? I really don't have the foggiest idea what the author is getting at with this conclusion. I suspect that is not solely a matter of personal ignorance. That makes it pretty much impossible to discuss what has just been said. Even if I was inclined to try, any particular criticism of this conclusion can be dodged by the simple expedient above: "That's not what I meant anyway." Hmm.
So that's clarity and precision. Rigour is the easiest to explain. Rigour means simply not making mistakes - at least not making simple mistakes. There are lists of logical fallacies people don't often dispute. Being rigorous means making sure one's work is not benighted by any of these logical fallacies. Here's an offending example:
Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.
Here, the author infers from the premise that everyone aims at some good, that there is some good at which all things aim. Well, that's obviously fallacious. Precisely, the problem is 'some good' in the premise is de dicto and 'some good' in the conclusion is de re. Here's an analogy: Everyone in a stadium might clap their hands, but that doesn't mean there is some particular pair of hands everyone claps. It seems to me pretty obvious why we would want to be rigorous in this way. If we aren't rigorous our work is the worse for it. Our arguments don't work, our conclusions don't follow and so on and so forth.
So, I hope by now it is pretty clear what I mean by 'clarity, precision and rigour.' It doesn't mean all philosophy has to be done in the formal notation of a logical calculus. Such a formal notation can be immensely helpful -especially as regards precision and rigour- but it is not necessary. One can be clear, precise and rigorous without it. And hopefully the answer to your question will by now be equally clear. Philosophy does not always have to meet the highest standards of clarity, precision and rigour to be worthwhile. Sometimes, unclear and imprecise philosophy can be immensely worthwhile (Kant's
Groundwork springs to mind here). But simultaneously, aspiring to these standards is very important. That is because it makes it much easier -indeed possible- to have constructive debates on the issue in question. It makes it easier to understand, easier to discuss, easier to disprove or support and so on and so forth. If we want to make progress on philosophical problems, that is precisely the sort of outcome we want to engender. I won't go as far to say as we don't lose anything of value when we set such exacting standards (see below), but we progress the core purpose of the discipline: the finding out of answers.
The authors quoted are, in order: Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Martin Heiddeger and Aristotle.
But one point I will stand to - is it progress dismissing the old style? Sure. From an analytical standpoint.
'To reduce absurdly': Plenty of styles and things should be dropped for progress. I mean, art in general is obviously a waste of time. Why even study philosophy? What's the point? Communications or engineering make way more progress. Screw the human condition and actually doing stuff that matters on the way.
See above for a general discussion of your worries. I'm no expert on Kierkegaard, so I can't pronounce on him in particular. I don't really think high standards make it impossible to write excitingly or in an aesthetically pleasing way. But perhaps they do make it harder. So it is possible that we lose something of aesthetic value by insisting on these standards. That's a loss, sure enough. But it is one I gladly bear.
That's not because I think art is a waste of time, not at all. It is because I think there are plenty of place we can find sublime writing: in a book, on the stage, in verse, on film and so on. If philosophy is no longer somewhere we find the highest reaches of aesthetic success (if it ever was...) then that does not mean the death of beauty in writing. I'm inclined to suppose it makes nary a dent in it. Concurrently, high standards make philosophy
much better. This means it makes it quickens our understanding of philosophical problems and pushes us towards better solutions. If you think the problems are important (Kierkegaard certainly did) you should think this is important. In fact, I think it is pretty obviously the raison d'etre for philosophy. So I gladly lose a little aesthetic value in philosophy in order to make progress. And progress here is not a hand-wavy buzzword. I mean progress on philosophical problems. The coming to better positions on said problems. And 'better' is also not a hand-wavy buzzword: it means more defensible and more plausible.
I suppose I think this analogy works: it would be nice if engineering papers were written in soaring verse. Engineering is -in one respect- worse off because it is not written in such a style. But what it loses in aesthetics it makes up for in utility. Engineering papers written in dry prose make the discipline of engineering better at coming to engineering discoveries. This hardly drives beauty from other fields, and after all engineering questions are very important. So although engineering is in one respect worse because it is not written in exquisitely crafter verse, it is a cost an engineer should gladly bear. Similarly, the aesthetic cost is one philosophers should gladly bear.
He's still studied intensely in literature, theology and philosophy. Less so in the latter of course, but that's because of changed tendencies in the field, as you finely outline. Or is it only in Denmark? It would make sense as such, I admit.
