on pedantry

Some of my reading on the flight from London led me to reflect that there are several different kinds of pedantry.

1. Heidegger = Pedantry of Attitude. Heidegger is Master; you, reader, are Apprentice. You will now be guided very slowly through a series of steps, learning the lessons you must learn, and we will discover at the end if you are a sufficiently serious student. Some people detest the tone so much that they just can’t read him. Others let it slide. I’m one of those who let it slide– he’s a genius, surely one of the 10 greatest philosophers in the Western (i.e., Greek) intellectual tradition, and his content is anything but pedantic. It is deep, and simple.

However, a peripheral reason that I let it slide is simply because he’s dead. If Heidegger had still been alive, and I had been expected to apply for a Fulbright and “go work with Heidegger in Freiburg,” I don’t think I would have had the stomach to be treated like that in person.

2. Husserl = Pedantry of Terminology. Husserl’s subject matter is actually about as sexy as it gets, but the sexiness has been completely obscured beneath the layers of margerine and lard that his terminology shellacks on top of his gorgeous insights. In better stylistic hands, phenomenology would have become the philosophy of the aesthetes rather than of the plodding terminologists. Merleau-Ponty couldn’t quite save the movement– as brilliant a writer as he is on a metaphor-by-metaphor basis, he too structures his chapters and books in surprisingly pedantic fashion. His books actually do not flow very well, even though his best sentences are even better than the best sentences of Bergson in literary terms. Some of us let Husserl get away with it because we can see the riches that lie there beneath the encrustations of margerine and lard. Others can’t see it, and hence can’t stand to read him.

3. Gadamer = Pedantry of (for lack of a better term) Indigestion. Since this might sound like a Nietzschean affectation, let me explain. Last night I was thinking that Gadamer was much better than I remembered. But now I’m reminded why he is nowhere near my list of heroes, even though I think his judgment is often uncannily accurate about many things. Basically, Gadamer is a well-read German university professor who writes in a manner that only well-read German university professors would be likely to want to read. All of these long-winded reflections on von Humboldt and Goethe’s century and Droysen, acting as though of course the reader is fascinated by all these things from the outset and need not be lured into it. It’s not going to play very well across the decades, as even German university professors start to build up a different set of baseline cultural references. Truth and Method contains nuggets of real wisdom, but I’m afraid it’s destined for “period piece” status relatively quickly. Gadamer has read a lot, and learned a lot, but can’t fully assimilate it in his own voice in the way that the really great philosophers can.

There may be other sorts of pedantry as well. These are the three that came to mind on the Dublin-London flight.