My Problem with Clear Writing

Or why clarity is overrated

When philosophers debate, few people pay attention.

Their eyes blur over when someone asks if the nothing noths. They don’t really care about the pros and cons of immanentizing the eschaton. And they start nodding off when some old codger declares that the world is the totality of facts, not things.

Can you blame them?

But a recent philosophical debate on Substack stirred up a hornet’s nest of buzzing and stinging. It started with the assertion that many of the most famous philosophers are unintelligible.

They just don’t write clearly. It’s like a Christopher Nolan film—you simply can’t figure out what people are saying.

I hate bad writing as much as any professional pen pusher. Even so, this controversy roused me from my dogmatic slumber. That’s because some of my favorite books were dismissed as a “hideous admixture of literary analysis, gibberish, and argument.”

Is this fair?

Let me present a contrary view. Buckle your seatbelts, because this will leave many of you shaken and stirred.

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That’s because I’ll try to convince you that clarity is overrated.

I know this from painful firsthand experience. I fought the clarity battle on the front lines—and lived to tell the tale. Now I’ll share what I learned with you.

In my early twenties, I was forced to develop a crystal clear style of writing. I didn’t want to do this—it was forced upon me.

Up until that moment, I’d been a dreamer with my head full of poetry and music. And then I woke up in the most painful way imaginable.

I had to learn new words, new sentences, a whole new way of writing and talking. I eventually recovered—but it took me years to regain what I’d lost.

Let me tell you what happened.