Obscurantism
In philosophy, obscurantism or obscurationism is the anti-intellectual practice of deliberately presenting information in an abstruse and imprecise manner that limits further inquiry and understanding of a subject. Obscurantism has been defined as opposition to the dissemination of knowledge and as writing characterized by deliberate vagueness.
In the 18th century, Enlightenment philosophers applied the term obscurantist to any enemy of intellectual enlightenment and the liberal diffusion of knowledge. In the 19th century, in distinguishing the varieties of obscurantism found in metaphysics and theology, from the "more subtle" obscurantism of the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant and of modern philosophical skepticism, Friedrich Nietzsche said that: "The essential element in the black art of obscurantism is not that it wants to darken individual understanding, but that it wants to blacken our picture of the world, and darken our idea of existence."
Restricting knowledge
In restricting education and knowledge to a ruling class, obscurantism is anti-democratic in its components of anti-intellectualism and social elitism, which exclude the majority of the people, deemed unworthy of knowing the facts about their government and the political and economic affairs of their city-state.In 18th century monarchic France, the political scientist Marquis de Condorcet documented the obscurantism of the aristocracy and their indifference to the social problems that provoked the French Revolution, which violently overthrew the aristocracy and deposed the monarch, King Louis XVI.
In the 19th century, the mathematician William Kingdon Clifford, who was an early proponent of Darwinism, worked to eliminate obscurantism in England after hearing clerics—who privately agreed with him about evolution—publicly denounce evolution as un-Christian heresy.
Leo Strauss
Political philosophy
In the 20th century, the American conservative political philosopher Leo Strauss and his neo-conservative adherents adopted the notion of government by the enlightened few as political strategy. He noted that intellectuals, dating from Plato, confronted the dilemma of either an informed populace "interfering" with government, or whether it were possible for good politicians to be truthful and still govern to maintain a stable society—hence the noble lie necessary in securing public acquiescence. In The City and Man, he discusses the myths in The Republic that Plato proposes effective governing requires, among them, the belief that the country ruled by the state belongs to it, and that citizenship derives from more than the accident of birth in the city-state. Thus, in the New Yorker magazine article "Selective Intelligence", Seymour Hersh observes that Strauss endorsed the "noble lie" concept: the myths politicians use in maintaining a cohesive society.Shadia Drury criticized Strauss's acceptance of dissembling and deception of the populace as "the peculiar justice of the wise", whereas Plato proposed the noble lie as based upon moral good. In criticizing Natural Right and History, she said that "Strauss thinks that the superiority of the ruling philosophers is an intellectual superiority and not a moral one... is the only interpreter who gives a sinister reading to Plato, and then celebrates him."
Esoteric texts
Leo Strauss also was criticized for proposing the notion of "esoteric" meanings to ancient texts, obscure knowledge inaccessible to the "ordinary" intellect. In Persecution and the Art of Writing, he proposes that some philosophers write esoterically to avert persecution by the political or religious authorities, and, per his knowledge of Maimonides, Al Farabi, and Plato, proposed that an esoteric writing style is proper for the philosophic text. Rather than explicitly presenting his thoughts, the philosopher's esoteric writing compels the reader to think independently of the text, and so learn. In the Phaedrus, Socrates notes that writing does not reply to questions, but invites dialogue with the reader, thereby minimizing the problems of grasping the written word. Strauss noted that one of writing's political dangers is students' too-readily accepting dangerous ideas—as in the trial of Socrates, wherein the relationship with Alcibiades was used to prosecute him.For Leo Strauss, philosophers' texts offered the reader lucid "exoteric" and obscure "esoteric" teachings, which are concealed to the reader of ordinary intellect; emphasizing that writers often left contradictions and other errors to encourage the reader's more scrupulous reading of the text. In observing and maintaining the "exoteric—esoteric" dichotomy, Strauss was accused of obscurantism, and for writing esoterically.
Bill Joy
In the article "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us", the computer scientist Bill Joy, then chief scientist at Sun Microsystems, in the sub-title of the article proposed that: "Our most powerful twenty-first-century technologies—robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech—are threatening to make humans an endangered species", and said that:Critics readily noted the obscurantism in Joy's elitist proposal for limiting the dissemination of "certain knowledge" in order to preserve society. A year later, in the Science and Technology Policy Yearbook 2001, the American Association for the Advancement of Science answered Joy's propositions with the article "A Response to Bill Joy and the Doom-and-Gloom Technofuturists", wherein the computer scientists John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid said that Joy's proposal was a form of technological tunnel vision, and that the technologically derived problems are infeasible, for disregarding the influence of non-scientists upon such societal problems.
Appeal to emotion
In the essay "Why I Am Not a Conservative", the economist Friedrich von Hayek said that political conservatism is ideologically unrealistic, because of the conservative person's inability to adapt to changing human realities and refusal to offer a positive political program that benefits everyone in a society. In that context, Hayek used the term obscurantism differently, to denote and describe the denial of the empirical truth of scientific theory, because of the disagreeable moral consequences that might arise from acceptance of fact.Deliberate obscurity
The second sense of obscurantism denotes making knowledge abstruse, that is, difficult to grasp. In the 19th and 20th centuries obscurantism became a polemical term for accusing an author of deliberately writing obscurely, in order to hide his or her intellectual vacuousness. From that perspective, obscure writing does not necessarily indicate that the writer has a poor grasp of the subject, because unintelligible writing sometimes is purposeful.Aristotle
Aristotle divided his own works into two classifications: "exoteric" and "esoteric". Most scholars have understood this as a distinction of intended audience, where exoteric works were written for the public, and the esoteric works were more technical works intended for use within the Lyceum. Modern scholars commonly assume these latter to be Aristotle's own lecture notes or, in some cases, possible notes by his students. However, the 5th-century neoplatonist Ammonius Hermiae writes that Aristotle's writing style is deliberately obscurantist so that "good people may for that reason stretch their mind even more, whereas empty minds that are lost through carelessness will be put to flight by the obscurity when they encounter sentences like these".In contemporary discussions of virtue ethics, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics stands accused of ethical obscurantism, because of the technical, philosophic language and writing style, and their purpose being the education of a cultured governing elite.
Kant
employed technical terms that were not commonly understood by the layman. Arthur Schopenhauer contended that post-Kantian philosophers such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel deliberately imitated the abstruse style of writing practiced by Kant.Hegel
's philosophy, and the philosophies of those he influenced, especially Karl Marx, have been accused of obscurantism. Analytic and positivistic philosophers, such as A. J. Ayer, Bertrand Russell, and the critical-rationalist Karl Popper, accused Hegel and Hegelianism of being obscure. About Hegel's philosophy, Schopenhauer wrote that it is "a colossal piece of mystification, which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage".Nevertheless, biographer Terry Pinkard notes: "Hegel has refused to go away, even in analytic philosophy, itself." Hegel was aware of his perceived obscurantism and perceived it as part of philosophical thinking: to accept and transcend the limitations of quotidian thought and its concepts. In the essay "Who Thinks Abstractly?", he said that it is not the philosopher who thinks abstractly, but the layman, who uses concepts as givens that are immutable, without context. It is the philosopher who thinks concretely, because he transcends the limits of quotidian concepts, in order to understand their broader context. This makes philosophical thought and language appear obscure, esoteric, and mysterious to the layman.