Difficulty: What the heck
My undergraduate adviser once told me about a silly but revealing game. Take a passage from a philosopher known for difficult or opaque writing, insert or remove a negation, and see whether a careful reader can detect the change. If nobody can, that is at least a warning sign. It suggests that the passage may not have been doing much determinate philosophical work in the first place.
Call this the negation game.
Now, this is not a decisive test for bullshit. Not every difficult passage is empty, and not every reader who misses a negation is stupid. Sometimes the problem is unfamiliar terminology, lack of context, or simple inattention. Still, the game gets at something real. Negation is logically significant. If adding or subtracting a negation makes no noticeable difference to a passage’s apparent meaning, that is a symptom of obscurity, semantic slack, or pseudo-profundity.
Take, for instance, these sentences adapted from the writing of Jacques Derrida, a philosopher often accused of obscurity:
(A) “What can be said above all must not be silenced but written.”
(B) “What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.”
(C) “What cannot be said above all must be silenced but written.”
Which of these is Derrida’s original wording?
If you are already familiar with Derrida’s philosophy, this might not be too difficult. But the negation game is not really aimed at specialists who are already steeped in a philosopher’s vocabulary and framework. It is aimed at a careful and intelligent reader who is not already fluent in the author’s special idiom.
And Derrida is hardly the only philosopher people have in mind here. Similar accusations of obscurity are often directed at figures like Martin Heidegger, Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Jean-François Lyotard, Paul de Man, and Félix Guattari.
Now, to be fair, this does not show that all of continental philosophy is bullshit. Nor does it show that obscurity is unique to continental philosophy. Some analytic philosophy is bullshit too—empty, jargon-soaked, pseudo-rigorous bullshit. It is just that certain continental philosophers have acquired a special reputation for writing that seems profound while resisting clear paraphrase, making them easier targets for this sort of game.
Take, for example, these gems adapted from Jacques Lacan:
(A) “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. I am not whenever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think.”
(B) “I think where I am, therefore I am where I think. I am whenever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think.”
(C) “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. I am whenever I am not the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think.”
Again, which one is the original?
The point of the negation game is not that every difficult philosopher is a fraud. Nor is it that any reader who struggles with a passage has thereby exposed its emptiness. The point is narrower: if a passage can survive logically important alterations without a noticeable change in apparent meaning, that is some evidence that the original passage may not have been saying much of anything determinate.
And that matters because a negation is not some decorative flourish. It is not like changing “very” to “extremely.” Negation can reverse the content of a claim. So if you can add or remove a negation and the passage still sounds equally deep, impressive, or incomprehensible, then the depth may be only skin-deep.
To be clear, this is only a symptom of bullshit, not proof. Some writing is difficult because the ideas are genuinely difficult. Some passages need context. Some technical vocabularies take time to learn. But bullshit often thrives precisely where prose becomes so inert, vague, or semantically slack that major logical changes seem to leave it untouched.
That is why the negation game is useful. It forces us to ask whether a passage has enough determinate content that changing something logically important actually changes what is being said. If the answer seems to be no, then perhaps the passage’s aura of profundity is doing more work than its meaning.
And that, I think, is a fairly good bullshit detector.
Philosophy without Bullshit 