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by beepbooptheory
1678 days ago
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> It's hard to believe that if I studied this stuff deeply enough and with an open mind, it would no longer seem obscure. Not sure you could satisfy the "open minded" part of that if you are coming from this close minded starting place! Whenever I come across something I don't understand, I will try to figure it out. If it seems utterly weird, that's even more motivation to figure it out! I really can't imagine this mode of thought where you read something, do not immediately grasp it, and then feel that somehow it's wrong/bad/obscurantist. Like, how do you learn anything at all? Side note but its funny people throw around "sophistic" in contexts like this. In Plato's time, sophists were precisely the ones to appeal to common intuitions, for money. It was Socrates who came along and said philosophy began with wonder, and demonstrated this by intentionally confusing people in order to break them out of modes of thought that were deeply embedded. |
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It's a matter of the tone, and also the fact that when I do read carefully and figure out what they're saying, I often think "wow, I could have put that in much simpler terms with no loss of information."
I don't feel this way about literally any other topic besides modern literary criticism (and stuff in that family like modern continental philosophy). Even analytic philosophy looking at similar topics doesn't normally feel willfully opaque in the same way, and I'm happy to dig in and learn the more difficult aspects of what they're saying.
Do you think this is due to being prejudiced about this exact area and nothing else?