My mum started a maths and philosophy degree back in the day. Like me she's interested in many philosophical questions. Who isn't? But she gave up on the philosophy because the reading was incomprehensible. It's a little bit like R.G. Collingwood's experience as a boy of (if I remember rightly) eight, as quoted by Fred Inglis in The History Man, when he recalls picking up Hegel (I think, presumably in English!). He understood each word, but he couldn't understand the whole. He felt as though it was talking about something important, that was for him, but he could not access it.
That is the frustrating experience of reading philosophy. It's written in a kind of code. Now every academic discourse (and just every discourse) is in code. But that of philosophy does have its special character, its special feeling. There tend to be a lot of capitalised words. Maybe that's German influence. It also signifies that the words being used don't mean exactly what we think they mean. That is most of the trouble, I think (and it doesn't necessarily apply just to the capitalised words).
Apparently "philosophers are the smartest humanists." I think that's based on test scores at the point when decide on their undergraduate specialism: so, clever people choose to be philosophers. I can believe that, I think I can accept it. But I wonder if that means philosophy's code-language is harder to crack. It's easy to dismis discourse written in codes we can't understand. But like the boy Collingwood, I want to understand. I'm reading a philosophy book now. I like it very much at the points I can access it, which is certainly not everywhere. I have to persevere. It's humbling.
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