Last updated: November 3, 2026

Some philosophers really are hard to read on purpose, a few are simply bad writers, and most are difficult for honest reasons: the ideas are new, the vocabulary is technical, the books were written for a different audience in a different century, and often you are reading a translation. Philosophy is not pretentious by nature, but it has a pretentious wing, and telling the two apart is a skill. Knowing who wrote a text and why helps more than the famous slogan about the “death of the author” suggests, though Roland Barthes had a point too.

This post is a guide to that skill. It looks at why philosophy reads so hard, makes the case for and against the obscure writers, explains what Barthes meant and why the author refused to stay dead, and ends with some practical ways to tell depth from bluff.

The Galaxy Brain Guide to Reading Philosophy

The meme uses the expanding brain format, in which each panel shows a more radiant brain beside a supposedly more enlightened idea. First: “Reading philosophers to find answers.” A plain blue brain. Second: “Realizing that philosophers do not provide answers.” The brain begins to sparkle. Third: “Figuring out why they want to mess with their readers.” The brain now glows like a small sun.

Every philosophy student has passed through all three stages, often in the same evening. The first stage is the reason most people open a philosophy book. The second is the most common disappointment: Plato’s dialogues end without a definition, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason asks what we can know and answers with some eight hundred pages of conditions, and Wittgenstein ends one book by declaring its own sentences nonsense. The third stage is where suspicion sets in. If they could have said it plainly, why didn’t they? That question deserves a serious answer, and it is the subject of the rest of this post. We have also looked at the wider question in Why Do Philosophers Answer Questions with Questions?.

Why Philosophy Reads So Hard

Start with the innocent explanations, because they cover most cases. The first is that some ideas really are hard. You cannot explain transcendental idealism or the incompleteness theorems in the vocabulary of a weather report, any more than you can explain surgery without naming organs. The second is technical vocabulary. Every discipline coins terms to save time, and a term like “a priori” is jargon only until you know it, after which it is a shortcut.

The third is historical distance. Aristotle’s works mostly survive as lecture notes, never polished for publication. Descartes wrote for seventeenth-century readers steeped in scholastic Latin; Hegel lectured to students who had heard the previous week’s lecture. Reading them cold is like walking into the third season of a television series. The fourth is translation. Most English readers meet Kant, Hegel, Heidegger and Derrida through translators who must choose between faithfulness to the German or French and readability in English, and rarely get both.

A fifth reason is easy to overlook: form. Philosophers have written in dialogues, treatises, meditations, letters, aphorisms and numbered propositions, and each form asks to be read differently. Plato’s dialogues stage arguments between characters, so you cannot simply quote Socrates as Plato’s opinion. Nietzsche wrote in aphorisms on purpose, boasting that his ambition was to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book, and what everyone else does not say in a book. Reading an aphorism like a paragraph of a textbook, looking for the thesis and the supporting evidence, is a reliable way to misunderstand it. Much of what feels like obscurity is a mismatch between the form of the text and the habits of the reader.

Even the great writers admitted the problem. Kant conceded in the preface to his Prolegomena that his Critique was dry and obscure, and wrote the shorter book partly to repair the damage. And Hegel, as the shirts in the slider below put it, has inspired the oldest joke in philosophy: nobody understands him. Our attempt to help with that is A Beginner’s Guide to Hegel.

The Case for the Prosecution

Now the less innocent explanations. Arthur Schopenhauer, who hated Hegel with a dedication that bordered on hobby, accused him of producing senseless mazes of words that impressed students precisely because nobody could follow them. Schopenhauer’s own rule of style was the opposite: use ordinary words to say extraordinary things, not extraordinary words to say ordinary ones. It is hard to improve on as a test.

The twentieth century produced the most quoted confession. According to the American philosopher John Searle, in a 2000 interview with the magazine Reason, Michel Foucault once told him that in France you have to be about ten percent incomprehensible, otherwise people will not think you are a deep thinker. Searle also reported that Foucault described Derrida’s prose style to him as “obscurantisme terroriste”, terrorist obscurantism. These are secondhand anecdotes from a hostile witness, and should be treated as such. But they are revealing because they were believable: there was an intellectual culture in which difficulty signalled depth.

Two public embarrassments seemed to confirm the suspicion. In 1996 the physicist Alan Sokal submitted a deliberately nonsensical article about quantum gravity, stuffed with fashionable jargon, to the cultural studies journal Social Text, which published it. And from 1995 to 1998 the journal Philosophy and Literature ran a Bad Writing Contest; its final winner was a single sentence of ninety-four words by the philosopher Judith Butler. Neither episode proves that difficult theory is empty. Both show that it is possible to dress emptiness in difficult clothes and get away with it for a while.

The Case for the Defence

The defence has better arguments than its critics usually allow. Martin Heidegger coined words like Dasein, being-in-the-world and thrownness because he believed ordinary philosophical vocabulary, subject, object, consciousness, smuggled in the very assumptions he wanted to question. Whether he succeeded is debatable, but the motive was philosophical, not decorative. His central ideas are unpacked in Death as the Basis of an Existential Philosophy.

Judith Butler replied to the Bad Writing Contest in the New York Times in 1999 by arguing that language which challenges common sense may need to be difficult, because ordinary language carries ordinary assumptions. Theodor Adorno had made a similar claim decades earlier: easy communicability, he argued, can be a symptom that thought has already accepted the categories of the world it is supposed to criticise. And Jacques Derrida’s style was meant to enact his point that meaning never fully settles. You may find the argument unconvincing, but you cannot fairly call it a trick until you have understood it, which is what Communication in Derrida’s Deconstruction tries to help with.

The difficulty with this defence is that it proves too much. If any obscurity can be justified as resistance to common sense, then no obscurity can ever be criticised. Wittgenstein, no friend of easy philosophy, put the counterweight in the preface to the Tractatus: what can be said at all can be said clearly. The fair verdict is that difficulty is sometimes necessary, never sufficient, and always something the writer owes the reader an account of.

Writing Between the Lines

There is a third possibility that the meme hints at, and it is older than any French seminar: philosophers who hid what they meant because saying it openly was dangerous. The political philosopher Leo Strauss argued in Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952) that many thinkers, living under censorship or the threat of execution, wrote one doctrine for the general reader and conveyed another, between the lines, to careful ones. Strauss’s method has been heavily criticised, because it lets an interpreter find almost any secret teaching he likes. But the phenomenon he pointed to is real.

René Descartes noted in an early notebook that, like actors who put on masks, he would step onto the stage of the world masked. Spinoza used a signet ring with the motto Caute, “be careful”, and published his most dangerous book anonymously. Socrates was executed for what he said in public. Under such conditions, writing obliquely is not pretension but prudence, and reading such writers well means asking what they could not afford to say.

Søren Kierkegaard went further and turned indirection into a method. He published many of his books under pseudonyms, Johannes de silentio, Johannes Climacus, Victor Eremita, each with a different outlook, and insisted that the views of the pseudonyms were not simply his own. His reason was that some truths, especially about faith and how to live, cannot be handed over like information; the reader has to be provoked into appropriating them. A reader who skips the pseudonyms and quotes “Kierkegaard said” is often quoting a character. We look at his method in Kierkegaard on Faith and Truth. Even Plato, if the Seventh Letter attributed to him is genuine, claimed that he had never written down his views on the matters he took most seriously, because such things cannot be put into words like other subjects.

The Death of the Author

In 1967 the French critic Roland Barthes published a short essay with a title that became a slogan: “The Death of the Author”. His target was a habit of criticism that explained works by the lives of their creators, as if the key to a poem were the poet’s biography, his illnesses, his marriage, his intentions. A text, Barthes argued, is a tissue of quotations drawn from countless centres of culture. It is not the expression of a single mind but a space where many writings meet, and that space is held together not by its origin but by its destination, the reader. He ended with a line built for posters: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

Two years later Michel Foucault, in a lecture called “What Is an Author?”, added that the author is not a natural fact but a function: a way of grouping texts, assigning responsibility and limiting how they may be read. Together the two essays shaped a generation of literary theory. For readers of philosophy they carried a liberating message. You do not need a biography to read Nietzsche. You need to read Nietzsche. More on Barthes and the science of signs can be found in Roland Barthes and Semiotics.

There is an irony here that Barthes would have enjoyed. We still cite “The Death of the Author” by its author, and the essay owes part of its fame to its first appearance in English, in 1967, in an avant-garde multimedia magazine called Aspen, a year before it was published in French. Its title has also been widely misread as a claim that the author’s intentions never matter. Barthes’ real target was narrower: the idea that the author is the final authority over what a text can mean, the god behind the curtain whose biography closes every question. You can reject that idea and still think that knowing who wrote a text, when and against whom helps you read it.

The Author Strikes Back

The author proved hard to kill. Long before Barthes, the critics W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley had warned in 1946 against the “intentional fallacy”, treating the author’s plan as the standard of a work’s meaning. In 1967, the same year as Barthes’ essay, E. D. Hirsch replied in Validity in Interpretation that without authorial meaning as a standard there is no way to call any interpretation wrong. Hans-Georg Gadamer offered a middle way in Truth and Method (1960): understanding happens as a fusion of horizons, the reader’s and the text’s, so that neither the author’s intention nor the reader’s preference has the last word.

Philosophy has also supplied some brutal reminders that authors matter. Nietzsche’s supposed main work, The Will to Power, was compiled after his collapse by his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, an antisemite who later welcomed the Nazis, from notes he had partly abandoned. Reading it without knowing that is a mistake. Heidegger joined the Nazi party in 1933, and his private notebooks published since 2014 contain antisemitic passages that have changed how scholars read some of his public work. Whether such facts should change our verdict on the ideas is a separate question, which we discuss in Cancel This!. But they certainly change how we read.

Death of the Author Examples: Tolkien, Bradbury and Rowling

The debate becomes clearer with cases where living authors tried to settle what their books mean. J. R. R. Tolkien faced readers who were sure that The Lord of the Rings was an allegory of the Second World War, with the Ring as the atomic bomb. In the foreword to the second edition (1966) he rejected the idea firmly, saying that he cordially disliked allegory in all its manifestations. But he drew a distinction that any theorist of interpretation could use. Allegory, he wrote, resides in the purposed domination of the author; applicability resides in the freedom of the reader. Tolkien accepted that readers would apply his story to their own world. He only refused to have them tell him what he had meant.

Ray Bradbury went further. In a 2007 interview with LA Weekly he insisted that Fahrenheit 451, read for half a century as a novel about state censorship and book burning, was really about television destroying interest in literature, and he reportedly walked out of a university class when students would not accept his reading. Here the death of the author has a comic side: the readers’ interpretation was well supported by the text, and the author’s own account, given decades later, sounded like one more reading among others, not a verdict.

J. K. Rowling provides the most argued-over modern case. After the Harry Potter books were finished, she began announcing facts that appear nowhere in them, beginning in 2007 with the statement that Dumbledore was gay. Fans coined a term for such pronouncements, “Word of God”, and divided over them. One camp treated the author’s statements as authoritative additions to the story. The other, sounding very much like Barthes, held that the books are what is on the page, and that what an author says afterwards is commentary rather than canon. The intentional fallacy of Wimsatt and Beardsley, written for poems in 1946, turned out to describe a fight on internet forums sixty years later.

Philosophy has its own versions of these quarrels. Wittgenstein complained that readers misunderstood the Tractatus; Heidegger reinterpreted his own earlier work so thoroughly that scholars still argue about a turn in his thinking. The question is always the same: does the author have the last word, or only the first? Most working interpreters settle somewhere in between: the author’s intentions are evidence, often very good evidence, but they are not a veto.

How to Tell Depth from Bluff

So how do you read a difficult philosopher without either worshipping or dismissing them? There is no foolproof test, but some signals are reliable enough to be worth keeping in mind.

Add to this the principle of charity, which philosophers use as a rule of interpretation: before deciding that an author is confused, try the reading that makes their claims as reasonable as possible. Charity is not credulity. If even the most charitable reading leaves nothing that could be true or false, you are entitled to stop. Secondary literature helps, and so does context: knowing what an author was arguing against often makes a baffling passage obvious. A good reading list is in Philosophy for Beginners: It’s Dangerous to Go Alone, and the reasons academic prose became so dense are explored in Why Philosophy Sounds Like Speaking in Code.

So, Are They Screwing With Us?

Occasionally, yes. Some philosophers enjoyed being obscure, some used jargon to guard their status, and some, by their own colleagues’ testimony, believed a little incomprehensibility was good for their careers. But the third panel of the meme is mostly wrong about motive. Far more philosophers are difficult because they are trying to say something new with old words, because they wrote for readers who no longer exist, because they were translated, or because saying it openly could have cost them their freedom.

The galaxy brain is not the one that has figured out why philosophers mess with their readers. It is the one that has learned to tell when they are doing it, when they are not, and when the difficulty was the price of the thought. Barthes was right that the reader matters; his critics were right that the author does too. And Schopenhauer’s rule remains the best defence against both pretension and lazy reading: ordinary words for extraordinary things. If a philosopher fails that test, the burden of proof is on them, not on you.