Revere the greats, sure. But read them?

One of my college philosophy professors told the story about how his thesis adviser had a conversation with Michel Foucault, telling him: “Michel, in our conversation, your ideas are clear, but I cannot fathom your writing.” To which Foucault supposedly replied “Yes, but if I did not write that way, nobody would take me seriously.”

The last few weeks I’ve been slogging through some particularly difficult texts (e.g. by Niklas Luhmann and Jacques Derrida). I’ve long been persuaded that many writers, especially in academia, and especially in Germany and France, write intentionally obscurely to create the impression of profundity.

But of course, by attributing intentional obscurity to writers I am violating my cardinal rule of communication: Don’t attribute motives to others you would not want them to attribute to you. Searching for a more charitable interpretation of obscurity I realized again how much we take word processing for granted. No text older than 30 years – essentially everything that has weathered enough controversy to be considered a classic – benefited from this magical ability to cut and paste at no cost. Going even farther back in time, paper and ink become significant expenses and the kinds of revisions we now do reflexively – move a paragraph, strike a clause or a whole tangent – become prohibitively costly.

Curiously, thinking about classic texts this way has had two effects. On the one hand, I am in greater awe of the luminaries and their ability to think profoundly and put down their thoughts in grammatically sound, intricately structured texts. At the same time, I feel much less guilty about avoiding original sources. They were not writing for a world inundated with information, and they did not have the tools to hone their ideas to needle-sharp arguments.

The explosion of content and the new tools we have for creating it should – and will – change our approach to preserving and transmitting our intellectual heritage. It’s fine if some people delight in becoming experts on Hegel. But the reason we should be willing, as a society, to provision them – and don’t get me wrong, we should – is that they deliver to us Hegel’s central ideas, polished to perfection, in a way that stands out against the morass of unintelligible gibberish produced daily.

One of this blog’s preoccupations has been the right and wrong of how we communicate with each other. I would go so far as to say that, given the firehose of content and the tools we have at our disposal, we have a moral obligation to prune our own arguments as well as those of the giants on whose shoulders we stand.

All of us need classic ideas and arguments as we wrestle with the eternal questions, like what we owe each other and how to live a good life. I am grateful to those who first developed those ideas. And I’m equally grateful to those who curate and condense them for everyday use. We could use more of the latter.