This
struck me. I immediately applied this to every thinker I dislike.
Typing it out, I realised he was talking about me.
“Much
greater is the evil which lies in the pompous retinue of technical
terms – scientific expressions and metaphors, which these systems
carry in their train, and which like a rabble – like the baggage of
an army broken away from it's chief – hang about in all directions.
Any critic who has not adopted a system, either because he has not
found one to please him, or because he has not yet been able to make
himself master of one, will at least occasionally make use of one, as
one would use a ruler, to show the blunders committed by a general.
The
most of them are incapable of reasoning without using as a help here
and there some shreds of scientific military theory. The smallest of
these fragments, consisting in mere scientific words and metaphors,
are often nothing more than ornamental flourishes of critical
narration.
Now
it is the nature of things that all technical and scientific
expressions which belong to a system lose their property, if they
ever had any, as soon as they are distorted, and used as general
axioms, or as small crystalline talismans, which have more power of
demonstration than simple speech.
Thus
it has come to pass that our theoretical and critical books, instead
of being straightforward, intelligible dissertations, in which the
author always knows at leas what he says and the reader what he
reads, are brimful of these technical terms, which form dark points
of interference where author and reader part company.
But
frequently they are something worse, being nothing but hollow shells
without any kernel. The author himself has no clear perception of
what he means, contents himself with vague ideas, which if expressed
in plain language would be unsatisfactory even to himself.”
Carl
von Clausewitz
On
War, book two
(paragraph
gaps added by me, dude was German, he liked density)
