{"id":1152,"date":"2010-02-13T19:24:52","date_gmt":"2010-02-14T00:24:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/?p=1152"},"modified":"2010-02-13T19:24:52","modified_gmt":"2010-02-14T00:24:52","slug":"kant-bernard-henri-levy-and-the-obscurity-of-philosophers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2010\/02\/13\/germany\/kant-bernard-henri-levy-and-the-obscurity-of-philosophers\/","title":{"rendered":"Kant, Bernard-Henri Levy and the Obscurity of Philosophers"},"content":{"rendered":"

It appears that French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy has committed a serious faux pas by attempting to debunk Kant based on the authority of a rather obscure 20th century thinker by the name of Jean-Baptiste Botul.\u00a0 Unfortunately, as we are informed by the London Times Online<\/a> (hattip Nick Gillespie<\/a> at Hit & Run<\/a>), “Botul was invented by a journalist in 1999 as an elaborate joke, and BHL has become the laughing stock of the Left Bank…”<\/p>\n

I will refrain from kicking Mr. Levy while he’s down, but I point out in passing that it’s unlikely he would have made his attack to begin with\u00a0if Kant had been capable of making himself comprehensible to more than a handful of people.\u00a0 Had Kant been\u00a0as lucid as, say,\u00a0Voltaire, or Stendhal, or John Stuart Mill, enough people might actually have had\u00a0enough of an inkling what he was talking about to make it risky for his detractors to launch such transparently flimsy assaults on his work.\u00a0 While it’s not out of the question that the man was actually such a deep thinker that it was actually absolutely necessary for him to begin his books with sentences of turgid German a page and a half long, I suspect it is rather more likely that he lacked the ability to express himself simply and clearly, or perhaps thought it necessary to be obscure in order to be taken seriously in those days of extreme philosophical one-upmanship.\u00a0 As this case illustrates, there are liabilities to being obscure.\u00a0 People have trouble understanding what you’re talking about.<\/p>\n

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It appears that French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy has committed a serious faux pas by attempting to debunk Kant based on the authority of a rather obscure 20th century thinker by the name of Jean-Baptiste Botul.\u00a0 Unfortunately, as we are informed by the London Times Online (hattip Nick Gillespie at Hit & Run), “Botul was invented … Continue reading “Kant, Bernard-Henri Levy and the Obscurity of Philosophers”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[20,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-germany","category-philosophy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwEq0-iA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1152"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1152\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1153,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1152\/revisions\/1153"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}