I think there are two levels of inaccessibility.
The first is the lofty, ultra-technical language used by certain philosophers (looking at you, Marty). I think it’s probably justifiable to think that such language was used precisely because it would act as a gatekeeper and ensure that philosophy could be established and remain as a high-brow artform and occupation. Camus (probably my favorite philosopher) and others were especially critical of this.
By Marty, do you mean Martin Heidegger? What's interesting about this is that although Heidegger has the reputation of using a lot of technical jargon, he actually doesn't really. Numerous philosophers in the analytic tradition use a great deal more jargon than Heidegger does. I think the difficulty with Heidegger is that he comes up with a lot of his
own terminology, and has an idiosyncratic way of developing it. But from my experience reading him (and I have read a great deal of his material) the principal difficulty with him is not so much what words he uses, but really just
how he thinks. He has a very unusual cast of mind and a very peculiar way of understanding concepts like
world,
being,
temporality, etc. Then the second difficulty is that arguably he just isn't a very good writer, unlike Camus. On the other hand, once you get used to the way he thinks (which may take a while), things get easier I have found.
A lifelong conviction of Heidegger is that ordinary language use obfuscates thought about fundamental ontology, and so that as long as one relies on the ordinary use of words, one will remain in the dark about fundamental ontology. One may object to his obscurity at times but he does give a reason for his approach which I do find ultimately compelling — despite, once again, not being a fan at all of the way he writes. His style is very clunky and repetitious.
The second issue is that when you look at philosophy as a field of study, it’s essentially one giant conversation with countless participants beginning with, (in the case of Western thought anyway) the Classic Greeks. A person would be able to jump into the conversation at any time, sure, but in order to parse the full subtlety and nuance of the entire conversation, one would need to start at the beginning of the conversation. I don’t mean to say that in order to understand a particular thought point one would have to be well-versed in ALL philosophy, but that it would be better to be familiar with the preceding thought point. Of course, this can get messy really quickly.
So I think in order for philosophy to really be easy to understand, both of these problems would have to be reconciled.
I think you're absolutely right about that. A solid grounding in Presocratic philosophy and especially Plato/Aristotle can help massively in getting a sense of the debates that having been going on in the discipline since. Conversely,
not having this grounding would be a disadvantage I think, and would increase the likelihood of getting confused about the nature of these debates. Almost everything has its origin in Plato and Aristotle.
Puts into words a feeling that I've been having for years. International Art English is bullshit!
