Obscurantism
In the fields of philosophy, the terms obscurantism and obscurationism identify and describe the anti-intellectual practices of deliberately presenting information in an abstruse and imprecise manner that limits further inquiry and understanding of a subject.[1] The two historical and intellectual denotations of obscurantism are: (1) the deliberate restriction of knowledge — opposition to the dissemination of knowledge; and (2) deliberate obscurity — a recondite style of writing characterized by deliberate vagueness.[2][3]
In the 18th century, Enlightenment philosophers applied the term obscurantist to any enemy of intellectual enlightenment and the liberal diffusion of knowledge.[4] 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."[5][a]
Restricting knowledge
In restricting education and knowledge to a ruling class, obscurantism is
In 18th century monarchic France, the political scientist
In the 19th century, the mathematician
Leo Strauss
Political philosophy
In the 20th century, the American conservative
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 (1953), she said that "Strauss thinks that the superiority of the ruling philosophers is an intellectual superiority and not a moral one ... [he] is the only interpreter who gives a sinister reading to Plato, and then celebrates him."[9]
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 (1952), he proposes that some philosophers write esoterically to avert persecution by the political or religious authorities, and, per his knowledge of
For Leo Strauss, philosophers' texts offered the reader lucid "exoteric" (salutary) and obscure "esoteric" (true) 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 (re-)reading of the text. In observing and maintaining the "
Bill Joy
In the article "
The experiences of the atomic scientists clearly show the need to take personal responsibility, the danger that things will move too fast, and the way in which a process can take on a life of its own. We can, as they did, create insurmountable problems in almost no time flat. We must do more thinking up front if we are not to be similarly surprised and shocked by the consequences of our inventions.[10]
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.[11]
Appeal to emotion
In the essay "Why I Am Not a Conservative" (1960), the economist
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
Aristotle
Aristotle divided his own works into two classifications: "
In contemporary discussions of virtue ethics, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (The 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.[16]
Kant
Immanuel 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.[17]
Hegel
Nevertheless, biographer Terry Pinkard notes: "Hegel has refused to go away, even in analytic philosophy, itself."[19] Hegel was aware of his perceived obscurantism and perceived it as part of philosophical thinking: to accept and transcend the limitations of quotidian (everyday) 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.
Marx
In his early works,
Heidegger
Derrida
In their obituaries "Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74" (10 October 2004) and "Obituary of Jacques Derrida, French intellectual" (21 October 2004), The New York Times newspaper[26] and The Economist magazine[27] described Derrida as a deliberately obscure philosopher.
In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), Richard Rorty proposed that in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1978), Jacques Derrida purposefully used undefinable words (e.g. différance) and used defined words in contexts so diverse that they render the words unintelligible, hence, the reader is unable to establish a context for his literary self. In that way, the philosopher Derrida escapes metaphysical accounts of his work. Since the work ostensibly contains no metaphysics, Derrida has, consequently, escaped metaphysics.[12]
Derrida's philosophic work is especially controversial among American and British academics, as when the
In the New York Review of Books article "An Exchange on Deconstruction" (February 1984), John Searle comments on Deconstruction: "anyone who reads deconstructive texts with an open mind is likely to be struck by the same phenomena that initially surprised me: the low level of philosophical argumentation, the deliberate obscurantism of the prose, the wildly exaggerated claims, and the constant striving to give the appearance of profundity, by making claims that seem paradoxical, but under analysis often turn out to be silly or trivial".[29]
Lacan
Jacques Lacan was an intellectual who defended obscurantism to a degree. To his students' complaint about the deliberate obscurity of his lectures, he replied: "The less you understand, the better you listen."[30] In the 1973 seminar Encore, he said that his Écrits (Writings) were not to be understood, but would effect a meaning in the reader, like that induced by mystical texts. The obscurity is not in his writing style, but in the repeated allusions to Hegel, derived from Alexandre Kojève's lectures on Hegel, and similar theoretic divergences.
Sokal affair
The
Sokal's reason for publication of a false article was that postmodernist critics questioned the objectivity of science, by criticising the
Concerning the lack of editorial integrity shown by the publication of his fake article in Social Text magazine, Sokal addressed the matter in the May 1996 edition of the
Moreover, as a
In short, my concern over the spread of subjectivist thinking is both intellectual and political. Intellectually, the problem with such doctrines is that they are false (when not simply meaningless). There is a real world; its properties are not merely social constructions; facts and evidence do matter. What sane person would contend otherwise? And yet, much contemporary academic theorizing consists precisely of attempts to blur these obvious truths—the utter absurdity of it all being concealed through obscure and pretentious language.
Moreover, independent of the hoax, as a pseudoscientific
See also
- Anti-intellectualism
- Cover-up
- Cult
- Disinformation
- Doublespeak
- Dumbing down
- Fundamentalism
- Greenspeak
- Paternalism
- Paywall
- Perception management
- Philosopher king
- Politicization of science
- Pseudophilosophy
- Pseudointellectual
- Psychological manipulation
- Positivism
- Scientism
- Whataboutism
Notes
- ^ Thus, an obscurantist is someone who actively opposes enlightenment and consequent social reform.
References
- ^ Oxford English Dictionary (OED Online, 3rd ed.). Oxford University Press. 2004.
Opposition to inquiry, enlightenment, or reform ...
- ^ Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. Merriam-Webster, Inc. 2018.
- ^ Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary (1996) p. 1,337.
- hdl:1854/LU-4374622.
The charge of obscurantism suggests a deliberate move on behalf of the speaker, who is accused of setting up a game of verbal smoke and mirrors to suggest depth and insight where none exists. The suspicion is, furthermore, that the obscurantist does not have anything meaningful to say and does not grasp the real intricacies of his subject matter, but nevertheless wants to keep up appearances, hoping that his reader will mistake it for profundity. (p. 126)
- ISBN 978-0-521-56704-6.
- ^ a b Hersh, Seymour, "Selective Intelligence", The New Yorker, 12 May 2003, accessed 29 April 2016.
- ^ a b Brian Doherty, "Origin of the Specious: Why Do Neoconservatives Doubt Darwin?" Archived 2008-07-25 at the Wayback Machine , Reason Online July 1997, accessed 16 February 2007.
- ^ Syed, I. (2002) "Obscurantism". From: Intellectual Achievements of Muslims. New Delhi: Star Publications. Excerpt available online. Retrieved on: 4 August 2007.
- ^ "Noble lies and perpetual war: Leo Strauss, the neocons, and Iraq". Retrieved 11 February 2017.
- ISBN 0-309-09271-X.
- ^ "A Response to Bill Joy and the Doom-and- Gloom Technofuturists" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2003-12-31.
- ^ ISBN 0-521-36781-6.
- ^ House, Humphry (1956). Aristotles Poetics. Rupert Hart-Davis. p. 35.
- ISBN 978-0-521-42294-9.
- ISBN 0-8014-2688-X.
- ^ Lisa van Alstyne, "Aristotle's Alleged Ethical Obscurantism". Philosophy. Vol. 73, No. 285 (July, 1998), pp. 429–452.
- ^ Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains, Vol. 4, "Cogitata I", § 107.
- ^ Schopenhauer, Arthur (1965). On the Basis of Morality, trans. E. F. J. Payne. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, pp. 15–16.
- ^ Hegel: A Biography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, xii.
- ^ See his The German Ideology (1844), The Poverty of Philosophy (1845), and The Holy Family (1847).
- ^ See, Dallmayr, Fred R., "The Discourse of Modernity: Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger (and Habermas)", PRAXIS International (4/1988), pp. 377–404.
- ^ György Lukács's The Destruction of Reason; Jürgen Habermas's The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.
- ^ Wright, E. O., Levine, A., Sober, E. (1992). Reconstructing Marxism: essays on explanation and the theory of history. London: Verso, 107.
- ISBN 978-0-517-69041-3.
- ISBN 978-0801485640.
- ^ "Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies in Paris at 74". The New York Times. 10 October 2004. Retrieved 11 February 2017.
- ^ "Jacques Derrida". The Economist. 21 October 2004. Retrieved 11 February 2017.
- ^ Barry Smith et al., "Open letter against Derrida receiving an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University", The Times [London], 9 May 1992.
- ^ Mackey, Louis H. (February 2, 1984). "An Exchange on Deconstruction (Reply by John R. Searle)". New York Review of Books. 31 (1). Retrieved 2007-08-17.
- ISBN 978-0-521-31801-3.
- ^ a b c Sokal, Alan D. (May 1996). "A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies". Lingua Franca. Retrieved April 3, 2007.
- ^ Sokal, Alan D. (Spring–Summer 1996) [1994 (original version published 1994-11-28, revised 1995-05-13)]. "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity". Social Text. Duke University Press. pp. 217–252. Archived from the original on 26 March 2007. Retrieved 3 April 2007.
- ^ Sokal, Alan (May–June 1996). "A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies" (PDF). Lingua Franca. p. 2. Retrieved 27 January 2010.
- ^ Harrell, Evans (October 1996). "A Report from the Front of the "Science Wars": The controversy over the book Higher Superstition, by Gross and Levitt and the recent articles by Sokal" (PDF). Notices of the American Mathematical Society. 43 (10): 1132–1136. Retrieved 2007-09-16.
External links
- Media related to Obscurantism at Wikimedia Commons
- Obscurantism in religion – Islamic Research Foundation International