Last updated: November 3, 2026

Philosophy is hard to read for four main reasons. It examines the very concepts we normally use without thinking, such as knowledge, time, cause or self, so ordinary words keep failing it. Many classic texts are old, translated and written for readers who shared assumptions we no longer have. Philosophers coin technical terms to be precise, and those terms work like a private shorthand. And academic institutions often reward writing for specialists rather than for the public, so complexity can become a habit or a status signal. Only the last reason involves bad faith, and even there it is usually less a conspiracy than a set of incentives.

That answer will not fully satisfy anyone who has thrown a book across the room after the third reading of the same paragraph. So this post looks at each reason in turn, names the philosophers who are hardest to read, suggests where to start with them instead, and ends with some practical ways to read difficult philosophy without either giving up or pretending.

You Are Leaking Secrets, Bro

The meme is a screenshot of a chat. Someone asks: “Guys, does it sometimes feel like that philosophers uses overtly complicated language just to obscure the fact that they know nothing??” The reply, decorated with a heart and a row of reactions: “You are leaking secrets bro.”

It is funny because it plays on a suspicion almost every reader of philosophy has had, and because the reply pretends to confirm it from the inside, as if there were a guild of philosophers protecting a trade secret. The truth is less dramatic and more interesting. There is no secret, but there are reasons, and some of them are good. Philosophers do sometimes know nothing in the sense that matters to them, since Socrates made a career out of admitting it. What they usually have is a precise sense of why a question is hard, and that precision is exactly what makes the prose dense.

The question also comes in a second form that this blog has answered separately: are philosophers deliberately obscure, and is philosophy pretentious? That post, Are Philosophers Just Screwing With Us?, deals with the famous cases of obscurity and bluff. This one is about the ordinary, everyday difficulty of philosophy books, and what you can do about it.

Philosophy Questions the Words Themselves

Most disciplines use ordinary words as tools. Philosophy turns them into objects. A historian can write “the king knew about the plot” without worrying what knowing is; an epistemologist has to. And as soon as you examine an everyday concept closely, it starts to behave strangely. Augustine’s confession about time is the classic case: he knows what time is as long as nobody asks him, and as soon as someone asks, he does not. In 1963 Edmund Gettier needed only three pages to show that the standard definition of knowledge as justified true belief fails, and philosophers have written thousands of pages trying to repair it, as explained in The Gettier Problem and the Filter Bubble.

This creates a peculiar writing problem. To discuss a concept carefully, you have to use other concepts, which are also in question. Every sentence threatens to smuggle in an assumption the argument has not earned. So philosophers qualify, distinguish and define, and the prose fills up with “in one sense”, “strictly speaking” and “on a certain reading”. Each qualification is there for a reason. Together they can make a paragraph feel like walking through a minefield, which, conceptually, it often is.

Take a question as simple as “are we free?”. Before anyone can answer, they have to say whether “free” means uncaused, or acting on one’s own desires without coercion, or able to have done otherwise in exactly the same circumstances. Each meaning produces a different debate, with its own technical names, libertarianism, compatibilism, hard determinism, and its own literature. A careful paragraph on free will therefore has to say which question it is answering before it can answer anything, and readers who wanted a yes or no feel they have been given a lecture on vocabulary. They have, but the vocabulary is the argument. Schopenhauer’s version of the problem is in Man Can Do What He Wants.

Gilbert Ryle gave the problem a name in The Concept of Mind (1949): the category mistake, treating a concept as if it belonged to a different logical type, like the visitor who is shown all the colleges of Oxford and then asks where the university is. Much philosophical writing is an attempt to avoid such mistakes, and much philosophical confusion comes from making them. Wittgenstein went further and suggested that philosophical problems arise precisely when language goes on holiday, a theme we follow in Wittgenstein’s Concept of Linguistic Confusion.

Old Books, Strange Habits

The second reason is historical. The philosophy books people most often try to read are also among the oldest, and they were not written for us. Aristotle’s works survive largely as lecture notes, compressed and repetitive, never polished for publication. Medieval philosophy is written in a scholastic Latin full of distinctions that assume years of training. Spinoza wrote his Ethics in the form of geometrical proofs because he thought that form guaranteed rigour, not because he wanted to be readable; we look at the result in Spinoza’s Philosophy.

German academic prose of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries adds its own difficulties. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason contains sentences that run for half a page, and Kant admitted in the preface to his Prolegomena that readers had found the work dry and obscure. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit was written at speed, partly while Napoleon’s armies approached Jena in 1806, and reads like it. Translations then add a further layer, because translators must choose between the German word order and English sense, between consistency in technical terms and natural style. Two translations of the same paragraph of Hegel can read like two different books.

Some key words simply have no English equivalent. Hegel’s Aufhebung means at once to cancel, to preserve and to lift up, and his whole dialectic depends on all three meanings working together; translators settle for the artificial word “sublation”, which explains nothing. Heidegger’s Dasein, literally “being there”, is usually left untranslated, so English readers meet a German word on every page. When a book’s central terms arrive as foreign objects, it is no wonder the sentences around them feel heavy.

None of this means the authors were trying to be obscure. It means you are reading them out of context, without the lectures, debates and shared vocabulary their first readers had. It is a bit like reading the third season of a television series without the first two, in subtitles, and wondering why the characters keep referring to events you never saw.

Jargon: Shortcut or Fence?

The third reason is technical vocabulary. Words like a priori, supervenience, qualia, intentionality or Dasein exist because ordinary language lacks a short, precise term for something philosophers need to talk about often. Every field does this. Doctors say “myocardial infarction” instead of “the kind of heart attack where blood flow to part of the heart muscle is blocked”, and nobody accuses them of hiding something. Technical terms are compressed arguments: once you know what they stand for, they save hundreds of words.

The problem is that jargon has a second function. It marks who belongs. A sentence full of specialist terms tells specialists that the writer is one of them and tells everyone else that this text is not for them. The psychologist Steven Pinker, in The Sense of Style (2014), argues that the main cause of bad academic writing is not pretension but the curse of knowledge, a term economists coined in 1989 for the difficulty of imagining what it is like not to know something you know. Experts forget which of their terms are terms. George Orwell offered the classic remedy in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language”: never use a long word where a short one will do, and never use a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday equivalent.

How Academia Rewards Difficulty

The fourth reason is institutional, and it explains why the problem got worse in the twentieth century rather than better. Professional philosophers write mainly for journals read by other professional philosophers, under peer review by specialists who expect engagement with the existing literature. Careers depend on publications, not on readers outside the field. A paper that anticipates every objection from a handful of experts will be dense; a paper that a curious teenager could follow may look, to a referee, insufficiently rigorous. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, in Homo Academicus (1984), described how academic fields reward forms of capital that are visible only to insiders, and difficult prose can be one of them.

There is evidence that the strategy backfires with readers. In a 2006 study with the self-mocking title “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity”, the psychologist Daniel Oppenheimer found that texts using needlessly complex words made their authors seem less intelligent, not more. The study won an Ig Nobel Prize, which is the academic way of saying that everyone found it funny and true. Readers, it seems, are better at detecting unnecessary difficulty than writers assume.

The counterexamples prove that clarity is possible inside academia too. Bertrand Russell, one of the founders of analytic philosophy, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950, partly for writing philosophy that ordinary readers could follow. In recent decades public philosophy has grown into a genre of its own, with philosophers writing essays for general magazines and newspaper columns, and many departments now value it. Difficult writing is a habit of the profession, not a law of the subject.

So the meme is half right. Philosophers do not usually use complicated language to hide that they know nothing. But institutions can reward complicated language whether or not there is much behind it, and over time some writers learn that difficulty is safer than clarity. Clarity exposes your argument to refutation; obscurity protects it. That is a structural temptation, not a secret.

French Theory, Analytic Logic and the Reputation Problem

In popular imagination, the worst offenders are French. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1980) introduces the rhizome, a root system without centre or hierarchy, as a model for thought, and is itself written as a network of “plateaus” that can be read in any order. Jacques Derrida’s prose is designed to show that meaning never fully settles, so it rarely does. These books are hard partly on purpose: their form is meant to enact their argument. Whether that works is debated, and the debate is summarised in Are Philosophers Just Screwing With Us?.

But analytic philosophy, the tradition that prides itself on clarity, can be just as forbidding in its own way. A paper in metaphysics or philosophy of language may be crystal clear to a logician and impenetrable to everyone else, full of symbols, numbered premises and qualifications that respond to objections from papers you have not read. The obscurity is different, technical rather than literary, but the effect on a newcomer is the same. The rivalry between the two traditions, and their very different ideas of what good writing is, is the subject of Continental vs Analytic Philosophy.

The Hardest Philosophers to Read, and Where to Start Instead

People often search for the hardest philosophers to read, usually after an encounter with one of them. There is no official ranking, but a few names come up again and again, and almost all of them wrote something more approachable that makes a better entry point.

The pattern is reassuring. Many of these authors explained themselves more simply elsewhere, in lectures, interviews or summaries, often because they knew their main works were hard going. Deleuze’s postscript, for example, is only a few pages long and is the basis of our post Society of Control. For Hegel and Wittgenstein we also have beginner guides: Hegel for Beginners and Wittgenstein on Language.

Imposter Syndrome in the Seminar Room

Difficulty has a social side that the meme captures well. In a seminar or a reading group, people who do not understand a text often assume that everyone else does, and stay silent. The psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes described a related pattern in 1978 as the impostor phenomenon: high-achieving people who believe their competence is a fraud that will soon be exposed. Philosophy, where confident talk about obscure texts is part of the culture, is a fertile ground for it.

The good news is that philosophy also contains the cure. Its founding figure built his reputation on asking embarrassingly basic questions in public. “What do you mean by that?” is not an admission of failure in philosophy; it is the discipline’s central move. A reading group in which someone asks it usually discovers that half the room had the same question, and that the answer is more interesting than the pretence. If you need permission, Socrates gave it twenty-four centuries ago, as explained in The Socratic Method Explained.

How to Read Philosophy Without Giving Up

Some practical advice, from people who have read a lot of difficult philosophy and survived. First, read with a question. Before you start a chapter, decide what you want to know from it: what is the main claim, what is the argument for it, what is it arguing against? A text read as an answer to a question is far easier to follow than a text read as a stream of sentences.

Second, read slowly and reconstruct. Philosophy is closer to mathematics than to a novel in this respect: a single paragraph can contain an argument that deserves to be written out in your own words as premises and a conclusion. If you cannot do that, you have found the place to slow down. Third, use good secondary sources without guilt. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy are written by specialists, free, and usually clearer than the originals. Reading a summary first does not spoil the book; it gives you a map.

It also helps to read with other people. Philosophy began as conversation, and many texts become clearer when you try to explain a paragraph aloud to someone else or hear how they understood it. The American educator Mortimer Adler, whose How to Read a Book (1940) is still in print, distinguished between reading for information and reading for understanding, and argued that the second requires active questioning of the author: what is being said, is it true, and what of it? That last question, why it matters, is often the one that makes a hard book worth finishing.

Fourth, apply the principle of charity: before deciding that a philosopher is confused, look for the reading that makes the argument strongest. Fifth, give yourself permission to skip. Nobody reads Hegel the way they read a thriller, and most experts have read the hardest books several times, in pieces, over years. And finally, if a book still makes no sense after all that, consider the possibility that it is not you. Difficulty can be a sign of depth, but it is not proof of it. A guide to where to begin is in Philosophy for Beginners: It’s Dangerous to Go Alone.

Leaking the Secret

So here is the secret the meme jokes about, in plain words. Philosophers are not hiding that they know nothing. Many of them are trying to say something precise about questions where ordinary language trips over itself, some are writing for colleagues rather than for you, and a few have learned that difficulty is safer than clarity. The best of them manage to be both precise and readable, and they are worth seeking out: Plato’s early dialogues, Descartes’ Meditations, Hume’s Enquiry, Mill’s On Liberty, Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy and much of Simone de Beauvoir are hard in the right way, because the ideas are hard, not the sentences.

The rest can be read too, with patience, a map and the courage to ask what a word means. And if you want something to wear while doing it, the slider below has shirts for people who are introverted but willing to discuss philosophy, and for those who prefer to have all their answers questioned.