Why Does Philosophy Use Such Strange Words?
On the importance of understanding concepts—not charlatans
Philosophy has a diction problem. At first glance, it sounds like a code designed by 17th-century French aristocrats and later hacked by German forest dwellers who believed that grammar was violence and that paragraphs were for cowards. You open Being and Time or Difference and Repetition and instantly feel you’re being punished for asking big questions. The words are long. The syntax is cruel. Everything seems harder than it needs to be. Which is, in part, the point.
There’s an adolescent thrill in saying something strange and watching someone nod as if they understood. It’s the oldest academic magic trick: say “reification,” watch a room full of seminar students pretend they didn’t Google it two hours ago. But behind this trick there is a real problem: much of philosophy does use unusual language—not to be obscure, but to be precise. The catch is that precision in philosophy often means conceptual invention. And invention is a messy, violent process.
Concepts aren’t just fancy words for simple things. They’re engineered tools to grasp complex structures of thought. “Dasein,” “assemblage,” “biopolitics”: these aren’t luxury items for intellectual peacocking. They’re devices. Miniature machines. You don’t need to worship them, but you do need to understand what they’re doing. And that takes work. The problem isn’t that philosophical language is too strange. The problem is that we expect understanding to be instant. That’s not philosophy. That’s tech support.
On the flip side, there's the anti-philosopher: the populist thinker who promises to make it all simple. Ethics as if it were oatmeal. Ontology as mindfulness. This has its own seduction: “Don’t worry, I’ll explain Spinoza using a dating app.” But if you simplify everything, you also flatten it. You collapse the distance between you and the idea, which feels good, but makes thinking harder, not easier. Complexity isn’t elitist. It’s honest.
Of course, there are real charlatans. Writers who bloat every sentence with Latinate gibberish because they fear clarity will expose them. And yes, certain corners of French theory do feel like performance art for sadists. But the solution isn’t to demand “plain language” like a disgruntled HR memo. The solution is to treat philosophy like the serious, difficult, playful, painful labor that it is. And to stop thinking that any discipline that doesn’t come pre-chewed is a scam.
Learning a new philosophical term shouldn’t feel like submitting to a cult. It should feel like acquiring a tool that makes the world more legible—or more strange. Not every word will be a hammer. Some are scalpels. Others are tuning forks. The important thing is that you learn how to use them before you start throwing them at your enemies on Twitter.
So what to do? Don’t reject complexity, but don’t fetishize it either. Learn the words. Ask what they’re doing. Find out where they came from. If someone says “haecceity,” don’t roll your eyes. Ask them if they mean it. Then ask why. If they don’t know, you’ve found a poser. If they do, congratulations: you’re now in a conversation that’s going somewhere.
Philosophy isn’t here to comfort you. It isn’t here to sound like a TED Talk. It’s here to press against the limits of language and meaning. Sometimes that hurts. Sometimes it’s boring. Often it’s awkward. But occasionally, it reorganizes your brain in ways that nothing else can.
And that’s worth a few weird words.