A Helpful Preface

So - I have conceptualized my time here (in Martinique) as a sort of luxury mini version of the Chateau D'If from the Count of Monte Cristo. Only with regards to the tutelage the protagonist receives from the elderly priest - transforming him in to an educated gentlemen, of course, not in regards to the sadistic prison warden.

What i mean is - I am taking the time to go back and get 'educated' by reading some classic texts I never actually ploughed through in college, but whose ideas i have supposedly been debating for a couple years now. Beginning with Plato, i have been working my way present-ward on the question of Metaphysics. Having taken a couple large leaps through history, I am now hacking my way through Heidegger.

Anyways, the reason for the post is this:
About half-way through a liberal-arts education these days, one inevitably comes up face to face with 20th century continental philosophy. Like most people, I have spent several years swinging back and forth between awe and disgust at the obtuse and bizarre nature of the texts that have emerged from this tradition. Is it the most genius ideas ever written? or, like the Emperor in his new clothes, does everyone praise them when in reality there is nothing there to be taken seriously? I have gone back and forth.
But regardless of however i may or may not weight the importance of the ideas throughout the seasons, one opinion has never changed, and that is the horror at the degree of obfuscation present in them.
Sometimes, like Chomsky, I am prone to dismiss such writings out of hand on this fact alone, but, I came across this passage in Heidegger (taken from Being and Time) the other day, that I think should be a prefatory note printed before any and all texts written in this continental tradition:

"With regard to the awkwardness and 'inelegance' of expression in the following analyses we may remark that it is one thing to report narratively about beings and another to grasp beings in their Being. For the latter task not only most of the words are lacking but above all the 'grammar'. If we may allude to earlier and in their own right altogether incomparable researches on the analysis of Being, then we should compare the ontological sections of Plato's Parmenides...with a narrative passage from Thucydides. Then we would see the stunning character of the formulations by which their philosophers challenged the Greeks. Since our powers are essentially inferior, and also since the area of Being to be disclosed ontologically is far more difficult than that presented to the Greeks, the complexity of our concept-formation and the severity of our expression will increase."

now, this does not entirely vindicate or ground this sort of writing, taken from the Introduction to 'Being and Time':

"Thus it is constitutive of this Being of Dasein [being-there] to have, in its very Being, a relation of Being to this Being."

But it does offer a valid reason for a possible necessity of such difficult language.

Now, that said, I also think there is a difference between a man like Heidegger muscling through the most fundamentally challenging questions of existence using language he fought to be able to wield for decades, and who possessed a rare brilliance of mind that was able to contain such magnitudes (I would also put Derrida, [Rorty is with me on this - 3rd paragraph. also, an awesome wiki article] and a very small handful of others in this category of greatness), and some Univeristy of Colorado professor who just slings bullshit po-mo terms around to make his thesis sound "cool". The latter I have no space for - if simple language can be used: Use it. If the topic is SO complex and nuanced, that massively difficult language is absolutlely necessary - well then, you better be brilliant. Which, I am finding out, Heidegger was.

So,Textbook editors for continental texts: please include this Heidegger quote as a preface in your books in the future.

also - the fact that no one pointed this out to me when i first started questioning such texts, affirms my suspicion that many of the people who throw such names and ideas around willy-nilly don't actually know what they are talking about. Otherwise, when I expressed my confusion, they could have given me this straight forward explanation that would have invariably helped me on my quest to try and understand what all this mess is about.