Philosophy and The English Language

As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.

Orwell wrote the above in Politics and the English Language, one of my favorite essays ever, which is primarily about why you should write clearly and concretely. I’ve spent a lot of time criticizing continental philosophy recently, primarily for its unclarity and muddled thinking. In continental writing, the concrete is almost universally replaced by the amorphous and abstract. But the problem is considerably broader than continental philosophy. In its nebulousness, continental philosophy differs from other writing in degree, not in kind.

Nebulous writing and speaking is very often used to defend the status quo. If some practice is enshrined and widespread, we will likely have respectable phrases to describe it. Those phrases maintain a level of lofty abstraction that does not require one to grapple with the specific wrongs of the practice. For instance, when a person takes a casual drive-by shot at animal welfare, they will typically use euphemistic phrases to discuss what is happening. They are aided in doing so by the fact that we have all sorts of terms to whitewash what occurs in the meat industry.

We use the word “cull” instead of the word kill. We say “pork,” instead of pig flesh, and “leather,” instead of cow skin. It is very easy to defend pork. It is a lot harder to defend gassing pigs to death. It is especially difficult to defend the pig killing industry when one takes note of the conditions of the pigs prior to their death. Instead of defending animals having their body parts sliced off with a knife, their babies stolen from them, and being forced to live in feces, they can stick to loftier questions like whether man has, in some broad sense, the sort of dominion that permits us to eat other animals.

People very often take casual swipes at shrimp welfare. A recent piece by Jobling was fairly standard in the way it discussed the issue in saying:

A typical example of EA thinking is Bentham’s Bulldog’s article about why the Shrimp Welfare Project, which prevents shrimp suffering,

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