Sorry for blogging late today guys. I spent my morning trying to read Truth and Method, by Hans Georg (not George, Georg) Gadamer, which you may have guessed inspired this post.
I'm cool with Germans, and this is really nothing against Germans as a people, so no one get offended. I just have one teeny tiny little complaint to register: Germans are without a doubt the worst philosophical writers.
Before someone goes and freaks out, I don't for a second deny the brilliance of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Gadamer, etcetera, etcetera. However, they should not be allowed to write, and anyone who has ever tried to read German philosophical works is likely to agree with me. Even in English, translated works of German philosophy are impossible (and I promise reading them in German doesn't make it any easier).
Perhaps my problem is that I'm not on the same smart-level as these big name Germans (this is definitely a strong possibility). However, I'm not on the same smart level as any number of American, English, and French scholars, but I somehow manage to understand them. There is something particular to Germans that makes them such a challenge. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that's its something to do with their writing style. Germans really, really like to make sentences with 3,826,517 clauses that take up entire paragraphs- and sometimes even multiple pages! I can't be the only one to see a problem with this. I don't know about you, but I like short, simple sentences with some sort of straightforward point. Reading various German philosophers, I often get to the end of a sentence and wonder what on earth I just read. (I go "Huh? Wait...what does that mean? Does it mean anything at all?")
Another essential problem with their writing style is the words themselves. German philosophers like to use really long, complicated words I've never heard of (so even if I could follow their clauses, they're basically speaking an unintelligible genius-language anyways). On the other hand, sometimes German philosophers will use nice, normal, easy words in entirely new ways, which is a pretty fast way to feel dumb. For instance, Gadamer writes about life-being. Alright, "life", I know what that means, and "being", I'm pretty solid on that, too. But "life-being"? Where is he going with that? Not a clue (and I promise the text of the book doesn't clear it up at all).
So future German philosophers: please, I beg you, please consider your readers before you write. Or produce your philosophical work on audio book. Just a suggestion.
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