The Promise vs. The Reality

You pick up a philosophy book. Maybe someone recommended it. Maybe you saw a quote on Instagram that blew your mind. Maybe you're taking a class and you have no choice.

The book promises profound insights into existence, consciousness, ethics, or the meaning of life. You're ready. You're excited. You're going to understand everything.

Three pages in, you have no idea what's happening. The philosopher is talking about... something? There are words you recognize individually but the sentences make no sense. You read the same paragraph four times. You start to wonder if you're stupid.

Then you start to wonder: is this deep, or is this just badly written? And finally, the real question emerges: are they doing this on purpose? Are philosophers just screwing with us?

Welcome to the fundamental problem of reading philosophy. Let's talk about it.

The Author Problem (Or: Who Even Wrote This?)

Here's where it gets interesting. When you're struggling with a difficult text, you naturally start thinking about the person who wrote it. Why did they write it this way? What were they trying to say? What was going on in their life that made them think this was a good idea?

This seems reasonable. If you want to understand a text, understand the author, right?

But then in 1967, a French literary theorist named Roland Barthes dropped an essay called "The Death of the Author" and basically said: wrong. The author doesn't matter. At all.

Barthes argued that once a text exists, the author's intentions are irrelevant. The text means whatever the reader makes it mean. The author is dead. Long live the reader.

This was huge for literary theory, especially in post-structuralist circles. It meant you could interpret texts in ways the author never intended. You could find meanings the author didn't know were there. You could basically ignore everything about who wrote it and just focus on what the words say.

For philosophy, this creates an interesting situation. If we take Barthes seriously, we should read Nietzsche without caring that Nietzsche was a sickly guy with terrible migraines who took a lot of drugs and eventually went insane. We should read Heidegger without caring that Heidegger was a literal Nazi. We should read any text purely on its own terms.

Sounds liberating, right? Just you and the text. No biographical baggage. No need to know the historical context or what the philosopher ate for breakfast.

But here's the problem: this approach has its own issues.

When Ignoring The Author Makes Things Worse

Let's say you're reading a dense, confusing passage from a continental philosopher. You decide to apply the Death of the Author. You're going to interpret this text entirely on its own terms, without any reference to who wrote it or why.

Great! Except now you have no way to tell if:

A) This text is genuinely profound and you're just not getting it yet

B) This text is deliberately obscure for artistic/philosophical reasons

C) This text is poorly written

D) This text is actively trying to mess with you

Without knowing anything about the author, their philosophical project, their historical context, or their other work, you're flying blind. You might spend hours trying to extract meaning from something that was intentionally meaningless. Or you might dismiss as nonsense something that's actually brilliant once you understand the context.

This is especially tricky with movements like Postmodernism and Deconstructivism, where part of the point is to undermine stable meanings and destabilize your assumptions. Is Derrida being deliberately difficult because he's showing you how language resists fixed meanings? Or is he just bad at writing clearly? Without some knowledge of what Derrida was trying to do, how would you know?

The Obscurantism Problem (Or: When Confusion Is The Point)

Here's where we need to talk about obscurantism.

Obscurantism is the practice of deliberately making something harder to understand than it needs to be. Sometimes this is done to seem more profound. Sometimes it's done to hide that you don't actually have much to say. Sometimes it's done because your ideas are controversial and you want plausible deniability.

And sometimes, obscurantism is actually a philosophical method.

Take Heidegger. Heidegger invented whole new words and used common words in completely non-standard ways. "Dasein." "Being-in-the-world." "Thrownness." Reading Heidegger feels like learning a new language.

Is this obscurantism? Kind of! But Heidegger argued that ordinary language is so loaded with philosophical assumptions that you can't use it to think new thoughts. You need new words to break free from old ways of thinking.

Or take the Postmodernists. Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze. These guys wrote in ways that seem designed to prevent understanding. Sentences that loop back on themselves. Arguments that undermine their own premises. Terms that shift meaning mid-paragraph.

But that's kind of the point. Postmodernism questions the whole idea of clear, stable meaning. If meaning is always fluid and texts always contain their own contradictions, then maybe difficult, unstable prose is the most honest way to write.

Or maybe that's just a really good excuse for bad writing. Hard to say!

Foucault and Strategic Obscurity

Here's where it gets really cynical. Michel Foucault, one of the giants of French postmodernism, is often credited with articulating something that many suspected: to be taken seriously as a profound thinker in 20th-century French intellectual culture, a portion of your work had to be incomprehensible to the general public.

Let that sink in. Not "difficult but worth the effort." Not "challenging conventional thinking." Literally incomprehensible. On purpose. As a career strategy.

Now, whether Foucault actually said this or it's just attributed to him is debatable. But the fact that it's believable tells you something about French postmodernist culture. There was (and arguably still is) a tradition where obscurity signals profundity. If everyone can understand you, you must not be saying anything deep.

This creates a perverse incentive structure. Clear writing gets dismissed as simplistic. Obscure writing gets treated as sophisticated, whether or not there's actual substance beneath the difficulty. The emperor might be naked, but if you say so, people assume you're just not smart enough to see his magnificent clothes.

Foucault himself wrote incredibly difficult books. "Discipline and Punish" starts with a graphic description of a public execution, then launches into dense analysis of how power operates through institutions. "The Order of Things" is a genealogy of knowledge systems that's fascinating and almost impenetrable. His work on sexuality, madness, and power changed how we think about these topics, but reading him is genuinely hard.

Was the difficulty necessary? Sometimes, probably yes. Foucault was trying to show how power operates in ways we don't consciously recognize. That requires disrupting normal patterns of thought, which might require disrupting normal patterns of prose.

But was all of it necessary? Or was some portion deliberate obscurity, the insurance policy that signals "this is serious philosophy, not popular writing"?

We'll never know for sure. But this idea, whether Foucault actually endorsed it or not, captures something real about how obscurity functions in academic philosophy. It's not just about expressing difficult ideas. It's also about signaling membership in an intellectual elite.

And that's worth knowing when you're struggling with a difficult text. Sometimes you're struggling because the ideas are genuinely hard. And sometimes you're struggling because the author wanted to make sure not everyone could follow along.

The Structuralist Detour

Before we had Postmodernism actively trying to destabilize meaning, we had Structuralism trying to find the deep structures that generate meaning.

Structuralists like Claude Lévi-Strauss and early Roland Barthes (yes, the same Barthes who later killed the author) argued that texts and cultural practices could be analyzed like language. There are underlying structures, grammars, systems that shape what can be said and thought.

This seems helpful! If you can identify the structure, you can understand the text. You don't need to know about the author, you just need to find the deep pattern.

But then Structuralism ran into problems. What if the structures are so deep and unconscious that even the most careful analysis can't definitively identify them? What if different readers find different structures? What if the whole project of finding stable structures is itself based on questionable assumptions?

Enter Post-Structuralism and Deconstructivism, which basically took Structuralism's tools and used them to dismantle Structuralism's conclusions. Derrida showed that texts always contain contradictions and instabilities that prevent any final, stable interpretation. Every structure deconstructs itself if you look closely enough.

This is intellectually interesting but practically frustrating. You're trying to understand a philosophy text and the dominant theories of interpretation tell you that stable understanding is impossible.

Thanks, guys. Very helpful.

The Return Of The Author (Plot Twist!)

So we killed the author. We tried to read texts purely on their own terms. We discovered that texts are unstable and full of contradictions. We got lost in post-structuralist labyrinths where nothing means anything for sure.

And then, in a move that would make Hegel proud, literary theory had a dialectical reversal: the Return of the Author.

Turns out, completely ignoring the author doesn't work very well. Context matters. Intentions matter, even if they don't determine meaning. Knowing something about who wrote a text and why helps you read it more productively.

But you can't just go back to the naive "the text means what the author intended" approach either. That's been thoroughly problematized.

So we end up with a synthesis: You need to maintain an optimal distance from both text and author. Too close to the author and you can't see what the text actually says. Too far from the author and you lose crucial context. The goal is to move between distances, using biographical and historical context when helpful but not being bound by authorial intention.

This is basically the intellectual version of "it's complicated."

So Are They Screwing With Us Or Not?

After all this theory, let's return to the original question: Are philosophers deliberately making things difficult?

The answer: Sometimes yes, sometimes no, and it's often hard to tell which is which.

Sometimes obscurity is justified:

Heidegger needed new language to express new thoughts. The Postmodernists were enacting their philosophy through their prose style. Some ideas genuinely are difficult and require difficult expression.

Sometimes obscurity is a feature, not a bug:

Deconstructivism destabilizes meaning on purpose. Reading Derrida is supposed to be disorienting. That's the point. You're meant to experience the instability of language, not just read about it.

Sometimes obscurity is pretentious nonsense:

Some philosophers write badly and hide behind claims of profundity. Some use jargon to exclude outsiders and maintain academic prestige. Some genuinely don't know how to write clearly.

And sometimes, yes, they're messing with you:

Some philosophers enjoy being difficult. Some build in contradictions deliberately. Some want you to struggle because they think easy answers are dangerous.

The tricky part? All of these can look identical on the page.

How To Actually Read Philosophy (A Practical Guide)

Given all this complexity, here's my advice for reading difficult philosophy:

Start with context, not the text.

Before diving into a difficult work, learn a bit about the author, their project, and what they were responding to. This isn't "letting the author dictate meaning." It's equipping yourself with tools for interpretation.

Assume good faith, but verify.

Start by assuming the philosopher has something valuable to say and the difficulty is justified. But if you're really struggling, check what scholars and other readers say. If everyone finds it confusing and no one can clearly explain what it means, that's data.

Look for the through-line.

Even in the most obscure philosophical writing, there's usually a core argument or insight. Try to identify it. If you can't find it, that might mean it's not there.

Don't confuse difficulty with profundity.

Some of the most important philosophical ideas can be stated clearly. "I think therefore I am" is simple. "The unexamined life is not worth living" is simple. If a text is difficult, that doesn't automatically make it deep.

Use secondary sources.

There's no shame in reading commentaries and guides. Philosophy has been accumulating for thousands of years. Nobody figures it all out alone.

Trust your bullshit detector.

If something seems like pretentious nonsense, it might be. But check with people who know the field before deciding. Sometimes what seems like nonsense is actually genius you're not equipped to recognize yet. But sometimes it really is just nonsense.

The Optimal Distance

Here's what I've learned from years of reading philosophy: understanding requires movement.

You can't stay at one distance from the text. You need to zoom in and zoom out. Read closely, examining every word. Then step back and ask what the larger point is. Learn about the author's life and context. Then try to read the text as if you knew nothing about the author. See what meanings emerge at different distances.

This isn't relativism. It's not saying all interpretations are equally valid. It's recognizing that understanding is a dynamic process, not a static achievement.

The Death of the Author was valuable. It freed us from thinking the author's intention is all that matters. But the Return of the Author was necessary too. It reminded us that context and intention do matter, even if they don't determine meaning.

The best reading happens in the space between these positions. Close enough to the text to see what it actually says. Far enough from the author to see meanings they didn't intend. Close enough to the author to understand their project. Far enough from them to think critically about whether they succeeded.

It's dialectical. It's complicated. It's philosophy.

When Philosophers Really Are Just Messing With You

Let me end with some good news: sometimes you can tell when philosophers are deliberately being difficult in ways that aren't productive.

Warning signs:

• Jargon that's never clearly defined
• Arguments that could be stated simply but aren't
• Claims that are unfalsifiable (can't be proven wrong)
• Prose that's more concerned with sounding smart than communicating
• Contradictions that aren't acknowledged or explored
• Vagueness that prevents any clear interpretation

If you're seeing these consistently, you might be dealing with bad philosophy hiding behind obscurity. Or you might be dealing with philosophy that's so radical it breaks all conventional rules. Again, hard to tell!

The only way to know is to do the work. Read carefully. Read contextually. Read critically. And if after all that work you still think it's nonsense? It might be. Or you might not be ready for it yet. Or it might be brilliant in ways you can't see. Philosophy is uncertain like that.

The Real Answer

So are philosophers screwing with us? Sometimes, yes. But usually they're doing something more interesting and complicated.

They're trying to express difficult ideas. They're creating new ways of thinking that don't fit into ordinary language. They're challenging your assumptions about meaning, truth, and understanding. They're participating in centuries-long conversations that have their own vocabulary and concerns.

And sometimes, they're genuinely bad writers who've gotten away with it because philosophy rewards obscurity.

The only way to tell which is which: read carefully, think critically, and don't be afraid to call bullshit when you see it. But also don't be too quick to dismiss what you don't immediately understand.

Philosophy is hard. That's kind of the point. If it were easy, we'd have figured everything out by now.

And honestly? That would be way less interesting.

Further Reading:

On The Death of the Author:

• "The Death of the Author" by Roland Barthes (the original essay)
• "What Is an Author?" by Michel Foucault (response to Barthes)

On Reading Philosophy:

• "How to Read a Book" by Mortimer Adler (classic guide)
• Any introduction to the philosopher you're struggling with

On Obscurity and Clarity:

• "Politics and the English Language" by George Orwell (on clear writing)
• "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" by Richard Rorty (on philosophical method)