i dont get why philosophers are allowed to have legacies of being too difficult to understand and entire careers of trying to understand the guy and tell other people they don't really understand them. they should just throw these people out and allow you in the canon only if you are making an effort to be understood
@iitalics ah well, the problem here is that some philosophers are critiquing the concept of “understanding”, which is not apolitical or given (understanding is made possible only through recourse to a system of signs and symbols which is very political in composition, and to an ontology of concepts likewise)
and if the thing you are critiquing is how knowledge is produced (to be clear: how CERTAIN knowledges are produced at the expense of OTHER knowledges; these certain knowledges typically having the hallmarks of white christian roman thought), you have to take special care to ensure that the knowledges you are critiquing are NOT being produced by your argument; to wit, you have to make your argument “difficult to understand” (to a white christian roman worldview and frame of mind, which is the default frame of mind in which most philosophers encounter texts)
@Lady hegel is the epitome of white christian worldview yet he is the type of philosopher who is admired by the philosophical tradition for being too difficult to properly understand
@iitalics i think, charitably, hegel is admired because he cracked open the door for doing this, which marx (who was originally a hegelian and later a hegelian critic) pushed open further (alongside nietzsche and freud), which paved the way for the likes of foucalt, deleuze, and derrida, which then enabled the likes of judith butler and jasbir puar…
UNcharitably, hegel is liked because he is seen as the last philosopher BEFORE continental philosophy went off the deep end with all this other stuff, which makes him the culmination of western philosophy to a certain mindset, unless you want to count american “philosophies” like effective altruism or whatever
@iitalics there are two responses to this; the first that we simply should not interrogate knowledge production and accept white christian roman thought as given so we can make sensible arguments that people can understand (American philosophy), the second that we can’t get anywhere without FIRST critiquing knowledge production, and having sensible arguments that people understand is an acceptable loss (continental philosophy)