Oct 20, 2019, 8:35 PM
—“most philosophers are terrible writers”—
Yep.
Well, there are a number of good reasons, the first of which is the attempt to construct a new paradigm using existing language – some of which, like aristotle’s is clarifying, some of which like Heidegger is obscurant, and some of which like derrida is intentionally for the purpose of furthering deception.
So between paradigmatic problems, novelty problems, and truth, analogy, poetic (nietzsche), fictionalization (Shopenhauer), and deceit (derrida, freud, adorno), and the academic failure to create a science out of formal logic (it’s all tautology so it doesn’t matter), then there is a lot of room for bad writing. lol 😉
I think writing well is very hard. I’ve been writing profusely most of my life and I don’t think I was really worth reading until I was in my thirties (although my subject matter was part of the problem). My subject matter is still a problem… lol
But writing characters, scenes and dialog using the various points of view, in various order, with various plots, with various characters … I mean, I think it’s really hard to write fiction well. I can’t bear reading much of it. I’ve nearly lost my ability to read fiction. (which apparently is more common than I thought)