Return to Saussure

Introduction: When Difficulty Becomes Familiar Why would a philosophy concerned with society and its transformation make itself so difficult to read? Bryan Magee put a version of this question to Herbert Marcuse in an interview on the Frankfurt School. Magee acknowledged the intellectual stature of its members but objected to the extraordinary difficulty of some of their writing, singling out Theodor W. Adorno as a particularly striking case. Marcuse did not simply dismiss the complaint. He acknowledged that there were things in Adorno he himself did not understand, while suggesting that the problem could not be separated from the condition of ordinary language itself. Noam Chomsky voiced a remarkably similar objection when asked about the language of postmodernism. His verdict was blunt: “nobody can understand a word they’re saying.” For Chomsky, such writing could function as a kind of private language, allowing intellectuals to adopt a radical posture while remaining detached fr...

1. The Problem of the Leaf We recognize different leaves as leaves because we overlook what distinguishes one from another. An oak leaf, a maple leaf, and a palm leaf differ in shape, texture, size, colour, and structure, yet the word leaf allows us to treat them as instances of a common kind. Conceptual thought makes this recognition possible by setting aside differences that would otherwise prevent us from grouping individual things together. The operation is so familiar that its selective character easily disappears from view. What happens to the differences that the concept leaves aside? Friedrich Nietzsche addresses this question in “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense” by examining how words and concepts come into being. A word, he argues, does not provide a transparent expression of the thing to which it refers. Its origin already involves a series of transformations: a nerve stimulus is transferred into an image, and the image is then reproduced in a sound. At each...

1. The Problem of Difficult Philosophy Why would a philosophy concerned with society and its transformation make itself so difficult to read? Bryan Magee put this question to Herbert Marcuse in an interview about the Frankfurt School. Magee acknowledged the intellectual stature of its members, but objected that much of their writing was extraordinarily difficult, sometimes to the point of seeming unintelligible. He singled out Theodor W. Adorno, whom Marcuse had described as a genius, and observed that some of Adorno's work was literally unreadable. The difficulty seemed particularly striking when compared with traditions such as analytic philosophy and existentialism, whose major writers could be witty, forceful, and accessible to a broad audience. Marcuse partly accepted the criticism. He admitted that there were many things in Adorno that he did not understand. Yet he also offered a justification. Ordinary language, he argued, had become deeply permeated by the established s...

1. Sartre and the Classic Intellectual What makes someone an intellectual? In A Plea for Intellectuals , Sartre approaches this question by examining the social position from which intellectual intervention becomes possible. The intellectual does not begin as a distinct profession. He emerges from among what Sartre calls the “technicians of practical knowledge”: scientists, teachers, engineers, doctors, lawyers, and others whose work depends on specialized knowledge. Their expertise is directed toward particular tasks, yet it is grounded in methods and forms of knowledge that claim universal validity. The intellectual appears when this relationship between the universal and the particular becomes a problem for the technician himself. Sartre’s example of the scientist working on atomic warfare makes the distinction clear. A scientist who contributes to the development of nuclear weapons remains, in Sartre’s terms, a technician as long as he confines himself to the technical task. Wh...