The usefulness of Continental Philosophy could consist in insight into moral, political, and social problems, but providing insight to a few specialists is not much use in those fields, especially not in democratic societies. Looking back on the history of moral and social change in the United States, I don't see such philosophies playing a major role. The thinkers who have made a difference have written for a general audience and in a much more accessible style. (Karl Marx and Das Kapital would seem to be an exception, but he and his evangelists wrote plenty of accessible interpretations of his ideas. The Communist Manifesto, for example, is a brief, readable, and rousing document.) If Continental Philosophers want to justify their existence, they should point to some benefit that their work enables, instead of just complaining that nobody understands it.

I agree with you that greater clarity is good, so long as it doesn't sacrifice truth, or accuracy. But the context here is that Continental Philosophy/Deconstruction/the Humanities do not seem to even consider the pursuit of clarity to be worth its while. It seems, in fact, to value verboseness and unclarity above all else.

I can do it with jargon you already understand, for example,

The totality of the colour blue is the sum of all of the integrals from one meta-point to another meta-point, formed in to spherical husk that can be opened by neither being within or without.

Even though those words are all well-established with their meaning, they are nonsense when strung together.

That's true. And if you can find me a sentence from Derrida that is similarly nonsense, I'll tip my cap to you.

Honestly: it's not "designed to be unintelligible in order to conceal an absence of honest thought."

"And even if one wished to keep sonority on the side of the sensible and contingent signifier which would be strictly speaking impossible, since formal identities isolated within a sensible mass are already idealities that are not purely sensible, it would have to be admitted that the immediate and privileged unity which founds significance and the acts of language is the articulated unity of sound and sense within the phonic."

Taken from here: http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/f...

While reading it, I was honestly asking myself if there were major transcription errors from the original translation, because it's completely impenetrable.

The paragraph also presumes that you are familiar with the opposition (familiar since Kant, at least) between the sensible and the intelligible, and Saussure's division of the sign into a signifier (which is supposed to be sensible) and a signified (which is the intelligible portion of the sign, not the thing referred to.)

Now, if you have that context, and understand the background, the paragraph is perfectly understandable.

-"In physics, a particle can have different properties at once!"

-"Some people think that the language you speak defines what you can think! There's even languages without numbers, and those people have trouble counting!"

-"There are political philosophies that say everybody should share in everything equally, and others where only the people who work the hardest should get the most stuff!"

-"If you eat more calories than you spend, you'll get fat!"

-"If too many people try to use the same wireless signal at once, it'll get jammed up and won't work right."

And this type of thing seems to hold true for most disciplines. It's possible to get similar layman explanations for just about anything except for, as he's pointing out certain brands of philosophy.

Since we know that a person cannot learn a complex topic at its most complex, they must take simpler stepping stones in a subject till they can achieve comprehension at a high level this implies a couple possibilities:

1) People in this field have worked up through these stepping stones, and by building on various axioms and following certain lines of reasoning, it's possible to achieve a level of comprehension that is based on reducible and explainable models of thinking.

2) There are no stepping stones and it's complex word gibberish without particular meaning. To get "in" to the field, you must master the phrases, secret handshakes and passcodes, to learn the common language of the field, so that you can appear for all purposes as one of the group. It'd be similar to learning a particular dialect of street slang and customs so that you can fit in to a particular neighborhood and not be identified as an immediate outsider. Of course even in that case, words, phrases, actions, customs are all reducible and explainable in simple, general, layman terms ("you wear big clothes and stand and walk like this to thwart the ability of an observer, say the police, in determining if you are carrying a weapon", "you say 'jigga-g' when talking about the leader of the gang", "you spray tags as markings to indicate territory to other gangs").

If 1 is true, then Chomsky should be able to find somebody, anybody, who could do a passable job at explaining this topic in general layman terms such as is possible in every other field. Perhaps he's not really trying very hard, or perhaps the people who inhabit this discipline are particularly intransigent to formulating an articulation of their field for layman without using the domain vocabulary specific to it?

There's a growing consensus external to the field, however, that 2 is true. It would actually be rather simple for the practitioners of this field to counter this sentiment, simply provide a layman's explanation of the topic. But since that seems to be something that nobody can do, and statements like "And the pressure for greater clarity and simpler exposition is admirable, so far as it goes-- but (as many mathematics texts demonstrate) notation matters. Things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler-- and this latter part is often difficult." do nothing to assuage this.

The original article of course, highlights one of a number of embarrassing public episodes where a complete outsider strings together a pastiche of phrases into a paper or a presentation or some such, and it passes the muster of the group as being legitimate and meaningful to that group even though it is, by way of purpose, complete gibberish. Again, this further supports the notion that 2 is correct, that the field is composed mostly of nonsense and claims of "no it's not" without supporting evidence or a rough, layman's exposition does nothing to counter that.

It seems much more likely that outsiders looking in on an obscure field resent the work it would take to understand the field, so they bash it. Unlike other complex fields, including any of the sciences (except astrobiology, which clearly is bogus. And maybe evolutionary psychology, which is borderline), lit crit doesn't do much work in the world and most people wouldn't miss it if it were gone. So, that compounds our resentment of having to work to understand it. In other words, it's tough to understand, there's not an obvious payoff for understanding it, so it's easier just to write it off.

This doesn't follow. There are many other ways it could be nonsense, as demonstrated by countless erudite groups from Nebuchadnezzar's astrologers to the Inquisition. None wants to be the one who "doesn't get it".

Moreover, the participants you list--practitioners, students, admirers--are hardly impartial.

Their interests in the emperor's clothes are well vested.