Introduction
If the history of Western philosophy were bisected so that ancient and medieval philosophy stood on one side while modern and contemporary philosophy stood on the other, one would notice a curious asymmetry in the quantity of authors who are, even to sympathetic readers, obscure, or difficult to understand. And not just obscure, but intentionally so. To be sure, almost all philosophers are obscure in the sense that the lay reader cannot just crack into one of their books or essays at random and hope to make sense of everything they find there. Aquinas, for instance, is so lucid as to be robotic, but his meaning can be difficult to grasp if one isn't familiar with the terminology he inherits from his philosophical and theological forebears, particularly Aristotle, aka "the Philosopher." Philosophers can hardly be blamed for this type of obscurity. Whether done in the garden of Epicurus or the prison cell of Boethius, philosophy is hard work. Philosophical questions have no obvious and universally accepted answers; as time passes, more and more philosophers will have weighed in on these questions, creating their own systems and terminologies which later philosophers then adopt while creating their own, and so on ad infinitum; and oftentimes the philosopher finds themselves working at the ill-defined border that separates the sayable from the unsayable (recall the early Wittgenstein's "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent"), so putting thoughts into words can be quite the challenge. A measure of obscurity is thus expected in substantive philosophical works, though, as Plato and perhaps one or two others (eg, Hume in his Dialogues) have shown, it isn't necessary.
Here, as I've indicated, I'm not interested in this ubiquitous "baseline" obscurity, but in obscurity the author was aware of and could, by all appearances, have done without. In other words, I'm interested in obscurantism, or the practice of deliberate obfuscation, especially when it occurs consistently rather than just sporadically in a philosopher's writings. I'll begin with a historical survey of the phenomenon and end with some thoughts on whether obscurantism in philosophy is justified, as well as what the future of obscurantism might look like.
Obscurantism in Western Philosophy
Ancient & Medieval Philosophy
Returning to our bisected history of Western philosophy, we see, on the ancient and medieval side, hardly any obscurantists. Indeed, I can't find a single obscurantist among the medievals. Not one. To them, clarity in writing seems just as non-negotiable as the existence of God. They (particularly later authors such as Aquinas, Peter Abelard, Anselm, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Maimonides, Averroes, and Al-Ghazali) may be tedious, labyrinthine, and hair-splitting, but one is rarely left to guess their meaning. I even pulled up a list of medieval philosophers to make sure I'm not overlooking a major figure known for obscurantism. The enigmatic Pseudo-Dionysius is regarded as difficult, but not as obscurantist. We don't even have all of the guy's (or girl's?) writings, which fact alone makes him hard to read. Anyone else who might make the cut? Not that I can discern. If there's a medieval obscurantist, it's someone lesser-known.
We turn to face the ancients. Do any obscurantists stand out? There is one, as a matter of fact, who does. No, it's not Aristotle. Certainly, the Stagirite has his hyper-obscure moments. De Anima III.4–5 is quite notorious, for instance, and it's said that the redoubtable Avicenna (980–1037 CE) couldn't make sense of the Metaphysics even after reading it a full 40 times. Aristotle isn't averse to using illustrations but, as everyone from Aristotle scholars to Philosophy 101 students can appreciate, their ability to filter out ambiguity and vagueness is inconsistent. In general the grace and intelligibility of his prose compares rather unfavorably with that of his teacher Plato's.
Or does it? Cicero––one of the finest prose stylists of the ancient world––spoke of the "incredible richness and sweetness of his [Aristotle's] eloquence" (Topica I.3), referring to it elsewhere as a "golden stream" (Academica Posteriora XXXVIII.119). Would a palate as refined as Avicenna's fail to appreciate the luscious taste of a golden stream after sampling it 40 times? Surely not. It is no coincidence, then, that Aristotle's surviving works are thought for the most part to be lecture notes, private research texts, or something equally untempered. Taken together, they don't show him at his best. Even then, they're typically not that indigestible. The Nicomachean Ethics and Politics, for example, don't make for pleasurable reading, but there is an admirable clarity to their spartan prose. And would it not be more than a little strange for a man with an unwavering devotion to rational inquiry and the search for truth to go the way of obscurantism? All in all, it seems unreasonable to label Aristotle an obscurantist.
It turns out that the fellow who stands out within the crowd of cloaked and bearded ancient philosophers would, unlike Aristotle, probably revel in the obscurantist label. This is none other than Heraclitus, he of "can't step in the same river twice" fame. It is fitting that the life of a man known for intentionally obscure teachings should itself be obscure. He hails from Ephesus (at the western border of present-day Turkey) and lived around 500 BCE. Most other details of his life are hazy. It is commonly believed that he wrote a book but some scholars (eg, the late G. S. Kirk) suspect he didn't. All that remains of his verbal teachings and/or writings is a collection of more than 100 aphoristic "fragments," some of which are incomplete, most of which are only a sentence or two in length, and all of which can be read in a few minutes. They're eminently quotable, so rather than reproduce any here, I'll simply refer the reader to the link.
Heraclitus was very much the enfant terrible of the ancient world. In his first volume of A History of Greek Philosophy, classicist W. K. C. Guthrie compiles an entertaining list of reactions to him and his teachings from the who's who of the ancient world. Aristotle complains about his grammar in Book III Part 5 of the Rhetoric; Diogenes of Apollonia (not that Diogenes) said "he sets out nothing clearly;" Timon of Phlius called him "the Riddler" (no, the Riddler of the DC Universe wasn't the first of his kind); Plotinus observes that "he seems to teach by metaphor, not concerning himself about making his doctrine clear to us, probably with the idea that it is for us to seek within ourselves as he sought for himself and found" (The Enneads IV. 8. 1); Lucretius describes him as "a man celebrated for obscure speech" (On the Nature of Things I.639); the character Cotta in Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods remarks that he spoke "with intentional obscurity" (I. 26); and another character––this time Theodorus, in Plato's Theatetus––notes
how Heraclitus' disciples in Ephesus "are downright mad . . . [for], in
accordance with their text-books, they are always in motion," and "[if] you ask any of them a question, he will produce, as from a
quiver, sayings brief and dark, and shoot them at you; and if you inquire
the reason of what he has said, you will be hit by some other new-fangled
word, and will make no way with any of them, nor they with one another" (179D-180A). The nature of Heraclitus' reputation was, in short, not in doubt among the ancients who studied him.
Why did he choose the obscurantist path? It's anyone's guess, but the fragments as well as anecdotes about his comportment leave some clues. Plotinus, quoted above, provides one explanation: Heraclitus wanted the reader to come to the truth themselves rather than simply taking his word for it. Following Guthrie (pp. 413–415 of HGP), we can add three more. First, he was, like Plato, an elitist. More than that, he was something of a misanthrope––see fragments 2, 17, 29, and 70, for example. Thus, he saw no obligation to make his teachings comprehensible to the hoi polloi, and presumably went the extra mile to make sure they weren't. Second, as one of the first to have ventured all the way to the sayable/unsayable border, he found the language of his time inadequate to articulate what he encountered there, so "[symbol] and paradox were sometimes his only resource." Finally, he appears to have viewed himself in a somewhat prophetic light ("I have sought for myself," says fragment 101), and the oracular language of the prophet is often ambiguous, as seen in, for instance, the Oracle of Delphi, or the Book of Isaiah. Such explanations leave something to be desired, but they're some of the best available.
Regardless of his motives, Heraclitus was an obscurantist in the full sense of the term. What's more, he was the first obscurantist in the history of Western philosophy, and perhaps the only one for roughly two millennia. Of course, it would be easier to search for other obscurantists
among the Presocratics and the rest of the ancients if vast portions of
their writings weren't lost, but we can only work with what
we have, and what we have shows Heraclitus to be the only philosopher among the ancients wearing an obscurantist badge. The guy may rub us the wrong way (seen fr. 121 yet?), but behind his misanthropy and iconoclasm there is a fascinating independence of thought.
Modern Philosophy
Let's jump over to the other side of our original divide––the one on which are gathered all modern and contemporary philosophers. We are, let us say, in the year 1500 CE, or thereabouts. The medievals and their arid tomes are a thing of the past; the Renaissance is in full swing; and Descartes with his cogito and ill-fated quest for certainty are on the horizon. Are there any obscurantists in sight? No, not yet. I can't claim familiarity with most of the Renaissance philosophers, but among those I have read––Montaigne, Erasmus, Mirandola, Machiavelli, More, and Bacon––none are remotely obscurantist.
We advance two or three centuries and take another look around. Some thinkers with a reputation for obscurantism are now in view, the first and most illustrious being Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), the "Sage of Königsberg." Kant's central project, as is well-known, was to steer a middle course between the rationalism of Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, and Wolff and the empiricism of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. His ingenious solution––referred to as his "critical philosophy"––is presented in its most abstract, metaphysical form in the Critique of Pure Reason (1st edition in 1781, 2nd in 1787) and then applied to ethics in the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) and, later, to aesthetics and teleology in the Critique of Judgment (1790). All three are infamously difficult texts, particularly the massive and tortuous Critique of Pure Reason. Even with a good commentary in hand, reading it is like chewing one's way through a well-done steak.
There is a convincing case to be made that Kant was a bona fide obscurantist, that he deliberately made his writings inaccessible to the "unworthy" reader. In an undated note, he writes:
If, like Hume, I had the power to embellish my work, I would hesitate to use it. It is true that some readers will be frightened away by its dryness. But is it not necessary to frighten some of them away, with whom the matter would come into bad hands? (Lewis White Beck, A Commentary on Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, University of Chicago Press 1960, p. 3)
Along similar lines, he gently suggests at the end of the Preface to his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics––published in 1783 as a summary of the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, which Kant, unsurprisingly, thought was prone to being "misjudged because it is misunderstood"––that if the reader finds both the daunting Critique and the slimmer Prolegomena too impenetrable, then perhaps the reader is simply not fit for weighty metaphysical investigations, and they are better off "[applying] their talents to other subjects." Basically, if one (and Kant presumably had some of his critics in mind) is too stupid to understand Kant, then one may simply be too stupid for metaphysics. If this is the case, better to, you know, read fairy tales, or join Hume for a game of backgammon.
This has to be one of the finest, most devastatingly genteel "F yous" in the history of philosophy, but Kant should've taken a good long look in the mirror before firing it off. Although some of his obscurity may have been due to the complexity of his subject matter, or even to his smoking habits, much of it was likely the result of Kant's shortcomings as a writer and thinker. Even sages can be sloppy.
It's worthwhile to go in for a closer look. Kant's sloppiness––with or without an admixture of intentional muddling––is on clearest display in the Critique of Pure Reason, which "is the product of nearly twelve years of reflection," but was "completed . . . hastily, in perhaps four or five months, with the greatest attentiveness to its content but less care about its style and ease of comprehension" (Letter to Mendelssohn, August 16, 1783). You can say that again. The first Critique is typically regarded as a "patchwork" of writings from different periods which Kant threw together to create the book, presumably in those four or five months before publication (T. E. Wilkerson, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: A Commentary for Students, Clarendon Press 1976, p. 47). So, although Kant was clearly capable of writing not just with clarity but with artistry (see, for instance, his letters, or his 1784 essay "Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?"), the entire Critique and several of its sections are distressingly disorganized; he will frequently contradict himself or come very close to doing so; his use of terms such as "intuition," "substance," and "representation" will be inconsistent; and he will needlessly repeat himself.
The pungent scent of the ad hoc is also present throughout. The categories Kant derives from his "table of judgments" are so contrived that some scholars (eg, H. J. de Vleeschauwer) posit that he came up with the categories first and then produced his list of judgments, rather than actually deriving the categories from the judgments. Wilkerson, to give another example, suspects that Kant regarded geometry as the mathematics of space and arithmetic as the mathematics of time out of "a misguided passion for a systematic presentation of the Critical philosophy" (p. 68), especially because the latter idea is highly dubious.
To be fair, all of the Critiques––particularly the first, least readable one––would likely have been better written if Kant hadn't started working on them relatively late in life. Kant had a "delicate constitution" and was presumably aware that medicine was something of a crapshoot in his time (a quote attributed to Voltaire [1694–1778] runs, "Doctors are men
who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of
which they know less in human beings of whom they know nothing"), so he must have approached the task of completing the Critiques with a strong sense of urgency. Given better health and/or more time, it's plausible he would have made them not lucid, necessarily, but at least more comprehensible.
When all is said and done, though, Kant wrote like an obscurantist in at least one major work and endorsed obscurantist motives, so he can be reasonably charged with obscurantism.
How does Kant's obscurantism differ from Heraclitus'? Judging from the information available to us, it seems that Heraclitus' obscurantism was more planned, more desired. Sure, Kant suggests that he engaged in deliberate obfuscation, but I wonder whether he did so only after his contemporaries had complained about the impenetrability of his work, as a means of protecting his self-image from such accusations. Indeed, for the most part Kant shows a clear interest in getting his ideas across, even if he frequently stumbles over himself or can't figure out how best to convert the ideas in his head into words on the page. So I also wonder whether it's fair to consider him a full (as opposed to a quasi) obscurantist, particularly if we ask ourselves what the Critiques would have looked like if he didn't see the Grim Reaper peering over his shoulder while writing them. With Heraclitus, at least, we know we're dealing with an obscurantist. As we've seen, he appears to have been more content with letting readers of his or his disciples' writings stumble over themselves, or to let them figure out how to convert words on the page into ideas in their heads. Heraclitus' obscurantism is thus less ambiguous than Kant's, though how much so, and in what other ways the obscurantism of the two might differ, is hard to specify without knowing more about Heraclitus and his mostly missing writings.
The death of Kant drops us off around the year 1800. The rate at which we encounter obscurantists––up to this point, about 1 per 1,000 years of philosophizing (and that's assuming Kant was in fact one)––is about to experience a dramatic increase, and later on I'll speculate as to why. I may not give equal attention to the many candidates who are waiting to be assessed, but I plan to say enough to justify all ascriptions of obscurantism, as the obscurantist label bears negative connotations and so should not be doled out indiscriminately.
There are three significant 19th-century philosophers who might qualify for the obscurantist label: G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900).
We begin with Hegel, a Swabian idealist who wrote several works notorious for their abstruseness, the crown jewel of which (and only one of two principal works he published in his lifetime) is the Phenomenology of Spirit––a monster of a text that was (eg, by Schopenhauer) and still is derided for being unintelligible to what seems like 99.9% of those who have dared to crack into it. Even Hegel's admirers don't deny his obscurity. Utilitarian ethicist Peter Singer, who (heaven save the mark!) authored the OUP Very Short Introduction to Hegel, writes:
That Hegel does present a challenge is undeniable. Commentaries on Hegel are studded with references to the 'Himalayan severity' of his prose, to his 'repulsive terminology', and to the 'extreme obscurity' of his thought. To illustrate the nature of the problem, I have just now picked up my copy of what many consider to be his greatest work, The Phenomenology of Mind, and opened it at random. The first complete sentence on the page on which it opened (p. 596) reads: 'It is merely the restless shifting change of those moments, of which one is indeed being-returned-into-itself, but merely as being-for-itself, i.e. as abstract moment, appearing on one side over against the others.' Admittedly, I have wrenched the sentence from its context; even so, it indicates some of the difficulties one has in making sense of Hegel. Equally formidable sentences can be found on every one of the Phenomenology's 750 pages.
Another example is provided by philosopher and translator Walter Kaufmann, who, in criticizing Karl Popper's scathing treatment of Hegel in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945; see p. 230–231 of the PDF for some choice words on Hegel's prose), admits that an "obscure style" is one of Hegel's "grievous faults," and that it "may have evened the way for later obscurantism."
So Hegel was obscure, but was he an obscurantist? It strains credulity to think that someone could write so unintelligibly and not be one, but there are Hegel scholars who seem to think that his writings really aren't that unintelligible, that if one takes the time to master Hegel's terminology and understand his historical context, his meaning will shine through in even his densest passages. In Reading Hegel's Phenomenology, for instance, John Russon remarks:
The first time I read Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, I did not understand the text; in a way, this now seems to me odd, since it now seems quite clear to me. Indeed, when students come to me with troubles, I sometimes have to fight the urge to say, "But can't you see? The text lays this out very straightforwardly: it is self-explanatory"; this, of course, is not how they experience the text, just as it was not how I first experienced the text. When I first approached this text, it was simply words on paper that did not communicate to me something understandable; it was, to continue my earlier language, an alien set up in front of me. Now it was written so as to be understood––indeed, one might say that it is trying to be understood––and I was trying to understand it, but both my efforts and the text's efforts were not sufficient, singly or in conjunction, to produce immediately the experience of understanding. I approached it, however, with the assumption that it would make sense, and eventually, through study, it did. (Indiana University Press 2004, p. 180)
I don't doubt Russon's sincerity, but the substance of what he conveys here is belied by comments he makes elsewhere. In his endnotes, for example, he'll say that he disagrees with the interpretation of certain sections of the Phenomenology offered by this or that Hegel scholar. But how can there be room for not just a few, but many conflicting interpretations if the Phenomenology were "self-explanatory" and "written so as to be understood?" If it were truly either of these things, it presumably wouldn't lend itself to multiple, sometimes radically divergent interpretations. Nor, more importantly, would we find either Hegel's contemporaries or modern-day Hegel scholars saying that his prose was one of his "grievous faults," or that it had a "Himalayan severity." Kaufmann in particular was not just any old Hegel scholar: he was a native German who would become one of the 20th century's greatest translators of German philosophical literature. If he found Hegel obscure, then Russon's claim that the Phenomenology is "self-explanatory" must be met with a long and incredulous stare. Even if Hegel's obscurity can be alleviated with years of study, an appreciable amount of obscurity will, it seems, forever remain.
I conclude that Hegel has earned the obscurantist label, but I'm open to the idea that he hasn't.
We proceed to Kierkegaard, a fierce critic of Hegel, a champion of subjectivity, an unbelievably prolific author, and one of the quirkiest but most scintillating philosophers of modernity. Often thought of as the father of existentialism, the Danish master of pseudonyms was, in today's lingo, a troll. There is a delightful anecdote in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript (CUP; 1846) that conveys his basic modus operandi. The author of CUP is technically the character "Johannes Climacus," but Kierkegaard is listed as the editor (an unusual occurrence in his pseudonymous works), and the anecdote may very well reflect real-life events.
It is now about four years since I got the notion of wanting to try my hand as an author. I remember it quite clearly. It was on a Sunday, yes, that's right, it was a Sunday afternoon. I was sitting as usual outside at the café in Frederiksberg Garden . . . I sat there and smoked my cigar until I fell into a reverie. Among others I recall these thoughts. You are getting on, I said to myself, and are becoming an old man without being anything, and without really taking on anything. Wherever you look about you on the other hand, in literature or in life, you see the names and figures of the celebrities, the prized and acclaimed making their appearances or being talked about, the many benefactors of the age who know how to do favours to mankind by making life more and more easy . . . I smoked again, and then suddenly this thought flashed through my mind: You must do something, but since with your limited abilities it will be impossible to make anything easier than it has become, you must, with the same humanitarian enthusiasm as the others, take it upon yourself to make something more difficult. This notion pleased me immensely . . . Out of love for humankind, and from despair over my embarrassing situation, having accomplished nothing, and being unable to make anything easier than it had already been made, and out of a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I conceived it as my task everywhere to create difficulties. (pp. 155–157 of CUP)
Kierkegaard's writings––particularly his pseudonymous works––are indeed difficult, but judging from the ones I've either read or read about, they aren't the products of obscurantist impulses. Or, if they are difficult to an obscurantist level, it is only in point of form, not content. Kierkegaard is eminently readable, and indeed is a great pleasure to read. On a paragraph-by-paragraph basis, he is thus––except on rare occasions (eg, the opening pages of The Sickness Unto Death)––no obscurantist. What bears more of an obscurantist aspect in the Dane is his method of "indirect discourse" and the bevy of pseudonymous characters through which he enacts it. Throw in his prodigious wit, his use of irony, humor, and parody, and his playful but sometimes exhausting verbosity, and you may end up with a reader who can't figure out what exactly they're supposed to take away from the pseudonymous writings. And this is how Kierkegaard would have it. His cheekiness is self-aware. He was quite explicit about why he wrote the way he did (see the most recent link), and, in light of his central themes, beliefs, and objectives, his unorthodox methods seem amply justified. Given this, along with the fact that his prose itself generally isn't hard to follow, I can't bring myself to call the father of existentialism a true obscurantist.
Neither do I consider Nietzsche one. The only reason I include the German Dionysus as a candidate is that, although he writes in The Gay Science 173 that "[he] who knows that he is profound strives for clearness; he who would like to appear profound to the multitude strives for obscurity," he will also say things like this:
The Question of Intelligibility.—One not only
wants to be understood when one writes, but also—quite
as certainly—not to be understood. It is by no means an objection to a book when someone
finds it unintelligible: perhaps this might just have
been the intention of its author,—perhaps he did
not want to be understood by "anyone." A
distinguished intellect and taste, when it wants to
communicate its thoughts, always selects its hearers;
by selecting them, it at the same time closes its
barriers against "the others." It is there that all
the more refined laws of style have their origin:
they at the same time keep off, they create distance,
they prevent "access" (intelligibility, as we have
said,)—while they open the ears of those who
are acoustically related to them. (The Gay Science 381)
But this is more bark than bite. I've read most of Nietzsche's oeuvre and don't recall having to regularly struggle through it. Nietzsche unquestionably presents a number of exegetical problems to scholars, but up-close his writing is far from "unintelligible," even if from a bird's-eye view his objectives are sometimes murky. Not even The Antichrist and Ecce Homo, which contain harbingers of the mental breakdown that would soon leave him permanently incapacitated, are particularly tough reads. He's not only an excellent writer: he's extremely blunt. If, for instance, he brings up someone or something he doesn't like (eg, Christianity, basically everyone but Caesar, Napoleon, Goethe, Emerson, and Stendhal), he will make it quite clear that the thing or person in question does not––to borrow the phraseology of Marie Kondo––spark joy for him. The only time I felt I had to repeatedly speculate about his meaning was in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but Zarathustra is a work of fiction––an extended parable, more or less. Whatever it is, it isn't a standard philosophical treatise, so Nietzsche can't be declared an obscurantist on the basis of it alone.
Contemporary Philosophy
Advancing into the 20th century, we are greeted by the next group of candidates, all three of whom also wrote in German. I would get right into them if there were not such a large elephant in the room, namely, German itself. Is there something about the German language that fosters obscurantism? We've examined six philosophers so far, three of whom wrote in German, and we've got three more coming who did the same. The German-speakers are, as it were, the life of our little obscurantist house party. Why the overrepresentation?
I don't speak a lick of German, so I can't answer from personal experience. But Hegel, in a blessedly lucid passage of the Science of Logic, seems to furnish at least a partial explanation:
It is to the advantage of a language when it possesses a wealth of logical expressions, that is, distinctive expressions specifically set aside for thought determinations . . . Much more important is that in a language the categories should be expressed as substantives and verbs, and thus be stamped into objective form. In this respect, the German language has many advantages over other modern languages, for many of its words also have the further peculiarity of carrying not just different meanings, but opposite ones, and in this one cannot fail to recognize the language's speculative spirit. (21.11)
It's no shock that Hegel, with his dialectical propensities, would delight in the inherent ambiguity of his mother tongue. But I don't know how much truth there is to what he says.
Any other possible connections between obscurantism and the German language? Apparently the typical German sentence tends to be relatively long, but as Matthias Brinkmann notes while considering some of Kant's longest sentences (438 words takes the cake!), this need not detract from the clarity of what's being said. Mark Twain lodges a number of complaints against German in his humorous "The Awful German Language," but I don't see why any of them should imply that German is uniquely fertile soil for obscurantist farming. Insights on this matter from those proficient in German would be much appreciated.
Our first 20th-century philosopher is the bespectacled (at least in some photos) Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), fountainhead of contemporary phenomenology and teacher of such illustrious figures as St. Edith Stein, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Martin Heidegger (who's next in line). I remember cracking into Husserl for the first time around 2014 and having distressingly little success in understanding him. Husserl is difficult to read for at least two ostensibly non-obscurantist reasons. First, his prose is, shall we say, less than voluptuous. In keeping with his initial training as a mathematician, he writes with a scholastic austerity that typically allows him to get his point across, but does not conduce to a cozy reading experience. He has his pleasant moments (eg, any time he uses extended illustrations, such as the blossoming apple tree or the Dresden Picture Gallery in Ideas I §88 and §100–101, respectively) as well as his painful ones (eg, Section Three of The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, the lengthy Fifth Meditation of the Cartesian Meditations), but, as a perusal through the texts I've linked to will show, most of his writing is simply bland.
The second reason for Husserl's difficulty is his use of a dizzying number of technical terms and neologisms. I'm no authority on Husserl, but his penchant for neologizing seems to me to border on the pathological, as if Adam had gotten a tad too excited when God let him name the animals. Heidegger suffers from a similar condition, as we'll see, so perhaps it's contagious.
Whatever the case, one can find Husserl dictionaries that are chock-full of such muscular terms as "analogizing apperception," "eidetic intuition," "hyletic data," "noema," "polythetical acts," and "introjection." In all fairness, Husserl was interested in ultimate philosophical matters, such as the nature of the self and the structure of experience, and he was a system-builder to boot with a strong understanding of the Western philosophical tradition. Thus, it's not unreasonable that he employed a new vocabulary, especially one with as many ancient Greek and modern European precedents as his possesses.
Still, one suspects he took things too far. For example, when discussing the process of "bracketing" (epoché), or setting aside various features of our "natural attitude" toward the world to discover the fundamental structure of experience, he will, across the course of his writings, speak of and/or distinguish between the "philosophical reduction," the "eidetic reduction," the "epistemological reduction," the "reduction to the sphere of ownness," the "phenomenological reduction," the "transcendental reduction," the "psychological reduction," the "universal reduction," the "phenomenological-psychological reduction," the "transcendental-phenomenological reduction," the "positivistic reduction," and the "primordial" or "primordinal reduction," as well as related concepts such as "neutrality modification" and different ways of doing the reduction such as the Cartesian, through the natural sciences, through ontology, through psychology, or through the "life-world" (i.e., the world of everyday experience). We are engaging in the below-the-belt tactic of ripping these terms from their native contexts and lining them up elbow-to-elbow just to create a spectacle, but this doesn't free Husserl from the charge of linguistic promiscuity, especially because he has been accused of employing technical terms laxly and, at times, without adequately developing them.
However, I'm not aware of any good evidence that Husserl intentionally bloated his terminology to make his transcendental phenomenology more obscure. If I were to speculate, the mathematician within him wouldn't allow such a thing, even while it was nudging him towards a dull, uninspiring writing style.
Whether or not the speculation holds water, Husserl's obscurity generally doesn't seem to rise to the obscurantist level, and when it does, there are plausible non-obscurantist explanations for why. Ergo, I don't think he's an obscurantist.
The case for Martin Heidegger's (1889–1976) obscurantism is more compelling, but let's put on our detective hats and investigate.
Heidegger's Being and Time (1927)––his chef-d'oeuvre––made a huge splash when it was first published, and would end up being one of the most influential philosophy texts of the 20th century. Its difficulty is legendary. And this even though it was originally planned to have two parts, only the first two-thirds of the first part of which were ever published. To give some idea of the challenges it poses to readers, here's a representative passage:
Anxiety is not only anxiety in the face of something, but as a state-of-mind, it is also anxiety about something. That which anxiety is profoundly anxious about is not a definite kind of Being for Dasein or a definite possibility for it. Indeed the threat itself is indefinite, and therefore cannot penetrate threateningly to this or that factically concrete potentiality-for-Being. That which anxiety is anxious about is Being-in-the-world itself. In anxiety what is environmentally ready-to-hand sinks away, and so, in general, do entities within-the-world . . . Anxiety throws Dasein back upon that which it is anxious about––its authentic potentiality-for-Being-in-the-world. (187)
To those unfamiliar with Heidegger's central project in Being and Time (ie, to uncover the meaning of Being, or that which makes things intelligible, through an analysis of human beings), hyphen-laden passages such as this will be opaque or downright nonsensical. And those who can't make heads or tails of Heidegger––especially if they're taught by professors who consider his writings a vacuous muddle––are not to be blamed. Heidegger commentators such as Hubert Dreyfus will acknowledge that parts of Being and Time are unintelligible even to them (see p. viii of the linked-to text). They will also note the difficulty of translating the behemoth book into English, as Heidegger is zealous to avoid the philosophically loaded terms of his predecessors (eg, "mind," "subject"), and so, as mentioned above, he follows Husserl in creating his own distinct vocabulary. (Yes, there are Heidegger dictionaries as well.) Even worse, he loves to pick philosophical terms apart, showing how their etymology reveals their true meaning. For example, he notes that aletheia, the Greek word for truth, is literally the unhiddenness of things, or things showing themselves (a- = negative prefix; letheia = hidden, forgotten), which is more primitive than the standard definition of truth as "correspondence to reality" (see B&T 219–220). Nor is he afraid to engage in a bit of Kierkegaardian word play, being, as a matter of fact, a diligent student of the great Dane.
But for all these barriers to comprehension, I've come to believe that Being and Time is, with sufficient preparatory labor, generally understandable. And this is something I cannot say of a text like Hegel's Phenomenology or other contemporary works we'll encounter in a bit. If one reads, say, Dreyfus' commentary, with or without a second commentary such as Michael Gelven's, and has a good Heidegger dictionary on hand (I've acquired and benefited from this one), and reads something like William Barrett's What Is Existentialism? to build enthusiasm for reading Heidegger, and takes time to familiarize themselves with some of Heidegger's many philosophical influences (eg, Aristotle, St. Augustine, the Scholastics, Luther, Kierkegaard, Kant, Dilthey, American pragmatism, Husserl), then I dare say they will not just understand much of Being and Time (and perhaps Heidegger's later works as well), but will appreciate and enjoy it. As Dreyfus observes:
Most of those who read Heidegger in German or English are at first put off by his strange new language, but after passing through a stage of trying to put what he says into more familiar terms, they come to feel that Heidegger's vocabulary is rigorous, illuminating, and even indispensable for talking about the phenomenon he wants to reveal. (p. xiii)
So I understand where those who, after trying and failing (as I have) to read Being and Time, label Heidegger an obscurantist are coming from, but I would contest their conclusion, and ask them to give a man whom some consider the greatest contemporary European philosopher a second chance. Heidegger's anti-Semitic remarks and association with Nazism have rightfully tarnished his reputation, particularly since the recent publication of some of his notebooks, but Being and Time cannot but be seen as a magisterial work that is unmatched in its profundity by anything else either Heidegger himself or most of his contemporaries produced. It is no doubt a challenging work, but arguably not an obscurantist one.
Shifting from the continental to the analytic side of things, our next philosopher is the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), whom we briefly encountered at the beginning of this post. Wittgenstein and I happen to go way back. His Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus––which runs less than 100 pages in length, and was the only philosophical text he published in his lifetime––was the first philosophy book I read on my own. One of my high school professors had made an offhand remark in class about how Wittgenstein was quite an intelligent fellow, and my interest in philosophy was beginning to grow around the time. So, in what has to be one of the worst decisions a philosophy neophyte has ever made, I decided to commence my personal studies with the Tractatus, since I had been assured that its author was smart, and I thought the title of the work sounded pretty cool. Bless my poor little teenage heart––I read the book cover to cover and understood none of it. None. I processed the words of the text but they didn't correspond to any ideas. I may as well have been reading Lorem ipsum, or the Voynich manuscript. I think the experience even temporarily squashed my budding attraction to philosophy, as I don't recall picking up another philosophy book for a few months afterwards.
The Tractatus is a poor place to start one's philosophical journey for several reasons, one of the principal ones being that to someone who doesn't know what the early (as opposed to the later) Wittgenstein is all about, the work is bound to be indecipherable. The Wittgenstein of the Tractatus does not beat around the bush. After a one-page preface, he jumps right into his hierarchically ordered theses. There is little argumentation, per se, just logically connected claims with the occasional example or clarification. It is, in my opinion, one of the driest texts in the history of Western philosophy; much more exciting is the later Wittgenstein's posthumously published Philosophical Investigations, which has a stream-of-consciousness feel and––to continue with the theme of record-setting––harbors more rhetorical questions than any other book I know.
Now, is the Tractatus indecipherable not just to the philosophically uninitiated, but to experts as well? Sir Anthony Kenny suggests as much when he writes:
The twenty thousand words of the Tractatus can be read in an afternoon, but few would claim to understand them thoroughly even after years of study . . . [it] is austerely beautiful, but uncommonly difficult to comprehend. (Wittgenstein, Blackwell 2006, p. 3)
Alright then: the Tractatus is obscure. But obscurantist? I suspect that few Wittgenstein scholars would say so, for multiple reasons. First, let's zoom out and consider Wittgenstein's reception among the analytic luminaries of his day. He impressed and befriended Bertrand Russell, who wrote a mostly sympathetic introduction to the first English edition of the Tractatus, published in 1922; the Vienna Circle, in which logical positivism received its most rigorous elaboration, imbibed the teachings of the Tractatus and apparently worked through the text line by line over the course of several months; and Elizabeth Anscombe––known for her revival of virtue ethics, her work on causation, her staunch Catholicism, her criticism of C.S. Lewis' argument against naturalism in Miracles, and her marriage to fellow philosopher Peter Geach––was also his friend, in addition to being a committed student of his, a translator and expositor of his work, and ultimately one of his literary executors. It seems unlikely that such hard-headed thinkers would've been attracted not just to Wittgenstein's work, but to the man himself if they thought he routinely engaged in obscurantism, particularly in the one and only philosophy book he published while alive.
Second, he practiced what he preached. And throughout his adult life, he preached that philosophy was a purely descriptive activity, one whose central purpose was to clarify our thoughts and ordinary language practices. "Philosophy simply puts everything before us," he writes in Philosophical Investigations 126, "and neither explains nor deduces anything.––Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain." In being reminded of the obvious, we realize that what passes for traditional philosophy is either tautologous, in which case it "say[s] nothing" (Tractatus 6.11), or simply nonsensical. Am I free? Is Beauty a form of the Good? Does God exist? Is life worth living? For the early Wittgenstein, there is nothing in the world to which these questions might refer (Tractatus 6.53); for the later Wittgenstein, they utilize words outside of their proper language-games, their "original home[s]" (Philosophical Investigations 116). For both Wittgensteins, the questions are gibberish. The central problems of philosophy are solved by being dissolved. And not even Wittgenstein's own philosophical writings are to be spared from the linguistic acid bath: they too are nonsense. Once the reader has grasped what Wittgenstein wishes to show, they can discard his propositions like one who throws away a ladder after climbing it (Tractatus 6.54).
One of the reasons the Tractatus is so hard to read is that it seems to embody these core beliefs more than any of Wittgenstein's other works. The early Wittgenstein doesn't need frills or furbelows because what he says is self-evident. If the reader doesn't see what is shown, they will continue to busy themselves with illusory topics such as God, the soul, and the Good. No major philosopher these days considers the project of the Tractatus a success, but its form can hardly be accused of failing to match its content. If it's too obscure for us, then perhaps we're just not ready to kick the ladder away.
Third, it's plausible that the Tractatus and everything else Wittgenstein wrote are difficult not because Wittgenstein wanted them to be, but because they are reflections of the man himself. Wittgenstein is one of the most eccentric personalities in the history of philosophy, which––in a world inhabited by Diogenes, Socrates, Bentham, Kant, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, McTaggart, Feyerabend, and Morgenbesser, among many others––is quite an achievement. This is a man who: walked away from academia for 10 years after the publication of the Tractatus because he truly believed that, with a single 20,000-word volume, he had solved all of the problems that had baffled more than two millennia of the world's greatest minds before him; knew he was one of the most impactful and well-respected philosophers of his generation but constantly had doubts about his vocation, drifting in and out of Cambridge and being at different times an engineer, a soldier, a hospital porter, a rural school teacher, and an architect (might he be the most influential "part-time" philosopher of all time?); was reputed to have beaten his students while a school teacher and to have told patients not to take their prescribed drugs while a hospital porter; would give his lectures at Cambridge without notes, and with prolonged silences and lively questioning of his audience, in a Trinity College sitting-room in which he would place about 20 cane-bottomed chairs; and rebuked his friends for such actions as letting a potted plant die, or conveying a dislike of powdered eggs.
So I will be forgiven for maintaining that Wittgenstein was an obscurantist neither in the Tractatus nor elsewhere. Considered in isolation, the above reasons are perhaps insufficient to rebut all accusations of obscurantism, but together, I believe they can get the job done.
We are approaching the present, so only a few philosophers remain to be examined, the majority of whom are French. Actually, "examined" is too strong. There is considerable agreement that the philosophers we're about to discuss are obscurantists to some degree or other. Each has their defenders, to be sure, but there has to be something fishy about a philosopher's prose if their reputation for obscurity is entrenched and widespread.
Before we embark on any fishing expeditions, though, there is one fellow I want to discuss––a man whom I personally have struggled with. This is the Frenchman Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), whose meandering Being and Nothingness presents his own brand of phenomenology in contradistinction to Heidegger's (one can see the influence of Heidegger in the title of the work) and Husserl's. But we need not dwell on Sartre. He's not a bad writer at all. He even won, but declined, the Nobel Prize in Literature. And Being and Nothingness has a number of memorable passages, such as the sections on bad faith in Part 1 and the discussions of love and related topics in Part 3. Where Sartre is obscure or inconsistent in this or other works, it can usually be chalked up to non-obscurantist reasons. One of these is that he wasn't the most careful of thinkers, as commentators (eg, Paul Spade, Christopher Macann) are wont to point out. Another is that, like Kierkegaard, he was basically born with a pen in hand. Philosophical treatises weren't the only thing he wrote: he also produced novels (eg, Nausea), plays (eg, No Exit), biographies, and essays. He even wrote an autobiography with the remarkably apt title of The Words. "One does wish that Sartre would pause for a while and regroup his forces," William Barrett muses in Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy. "The man really writes too much" (p. 252 of the 1962 Anchor Books edition). Spot on. His argumentation in Being and Nothingness probably suffered as a result of him wanting to wrap up the book as soon as possible so that he could move on to his next project. Passages of the text that are deliberately obscure may just reflect Sartre's unwillingness to think through them more circumspectly. Regardless, such passages don't seem to occur frequently enough to earn Sartre the obscurantist label, especially when we consider the lucidity and eloquence of his other writings.
With that, we arrive at the top of the obscurantist mountain. Or is it the bottom of the obscurantist sea? The answer itself is obscure. Good! These are the cream of the obscurantist crop we're about to encounter; best to put ourselves in the proper mindset before standing in their midst.
We begin with Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), chief architect of deconstruction, and one of the most controversial figures in contemporary philosophy. This is a man whose prose was so cryptic that the title of his New York Times obituary refers to him as an "abstruse theorist." A random sampling of his work will show the logic behind the appellation. From Of Grammatology, one of three books published in 1967 that would thrust him into the limelight, we have:
If the trace, arche-phenomenon of "memory," which must be thought before the opposition of nature and culture, animality and humanity, etc., belongs to the very movement of signification, then signification is a priori written, whether inscribed or not, in one form or another, in a "sensible" and "spatial" element that is called "exterior." Arche-writing, at first the possibility of the spoken word, then of the "graphie" in the narrow sense, the birthplace of "usurpation," denounced from Plato to Saussure, this trace is the opening of the first exteriority in general, the enigmatic relationship of the living to its other and of an inside to an outside: spacing. The outside, "spatial" and "objective" exteriority which we believe we know as the most familiar thing in the world, as familiarity itself, would not appear without the grammè, without differance [sic] as temporalization, without the nonpresence of the other inscribed within the sense of the present, without the relationship with death as the concrete structure of the living present. (pp. 70–71)
From an interview on 9/11:
Giovanna Borradori: September 11 [le 11 septembre] gave us the impression of being a major event,
one of the most important historical events we will witness in our
lifetime, especially for those of us who never lived through a world
war. Do you agree?
Jacques Derrida: Le 11 septembre,
as you say, or, since we have agreed to speak two languages, "September
11." We will have to return later to this question of language. As well
as to this act of naming: a date and nothing more. When you say
"September 11" you are already citing, are you not? You are inviting me
to speak here by recalling, as if in quotation marks, a date or a dating
that has taken over our public space and our private lives for five
weeks now. Something fait date, I would say in a French idiom,
something marks a date, a date in history; that is always what's most
striking, the very impact of what is at least felt, in an
apparently immediate way, to be an event that truly marks, that truly
makes its mark, a singular and, as they say here, "unprecedented" event. [emphasis in the original]
From Specters of Marx:
What does not happen in this anachrony! Perhaps "the time," time itself, precisely, always "our time," the epoch and the world shared among us, ours every day, nowadays, the present as our present. Especially when "things are not going well" among us, precisely [justement]: when "things are going badly," when it's not working, when things are bad. But with the other, is not this disjuncture, this dis-adjustment of the "it's going badly" necessary for the good, or at least the just, to be announced? Is not disjuncture the very possibility of the other? How to distinguish between two disadjustments, between the disjuncture of the unjust and the one that opens up the infinite asymmetry of the relation to the other, that is to say, the place for justice? [brackets and emphasis in the original; p. 26]
Reading some of his letters to friends isn't any less of a slog:
Athens, 18–21 December 1997
. . . saw all the friends from "Demeure . . " once again, those you talk about in your chapter on "The Greek Delay." You know them now. Still in the same hotel, on the Lycabette. Didn't sleep last night: the Acropolis, visible from the balcony, illuminated through the mist until sunrise, I loved . . . I also love "through," the word "through" [à travers]. What if one were to perform the shibboleth of this viaticum? Just about untranslatable, like the subtle difference between à travers and au travers de, or de travers [side-ways, crooked], like the nouns le travers [foible] and la traversée [crossing] (by sea rather than by air or land, except for crossing the desert, and the desert within the desert was referred to on an island, Capri, during the first of two trips there). The crossing is the figure for every voyage: between the trance or transport, and overdoing it, the extravagance [outrance] that crosses the frontier. But if one traverses (traveling, crossing, or going through the Latin memory of) this word, one finds in it, besides the idea of a limit being crossed, that of a deviation [détournement], the oblique version of a detour. It says, in a word, everything about my crosstruths. My little truths, if there are any, are neither "in my life" nor "in my texts," but through what traverses them, in the course of a traverse that, right at the last moment, diverts their encrypted references, their sidelong wave, down a counterpath [le salut en contre-allée] . . . [brackets and emphasis in the original; letter to Catherine Malabou, in Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida, tr. David Wills, Stanford University Press 2004, p. 259]
A few observations will help us find our bearings after taking in this vertiginous prose. First, Derrida isn't talking
total gobbledygook. He doesn't read like Lewis Carroll's "
Jabberwocky," graffiti on the wall of an
abandoned warehouse, or a word search puzzle. If we don't pay too much heed to his verbal fireworks, focusing instead on whatever messages he's (presumably) trying to get across, we can often make out at least the beginnings of a thought or two.
Second, one will frequently hear Derrida's defenders saying he didn't actually say [insert patently absurd claim]. Here, for example, Peter Benson tells us that Derrida didn't hold that "sentences can be taken to mean whatever we want." But in an interview with Henri Ronse, Derrida says that "it is necessary in such a space [ie, the conceptual space in which he tries to write] . . . that writing literally mean nothing," which comes dangerously close to the claim that sentences (his sentences, at least) can be taken to mean whatever we want (Positions, tr. Alan Bass, University of Chicago Press 1981, p. 14). Of course, the Derrida apologist might admit that yes, Derrida did say such a thing here or similar things elsewhere, but they will add an emphatic "but" clause such as: "but elsewhere he clarifies that . . . ," or "but if you keep reading you'll find that . . . ," or "but what he really means is . . ." The fact remains, though, that the guy said some truly kooky stuff, "[there] is nothing outside of the text [there is no outside-text . . .]" being another one of his most infamous pronouncements (see p. 158 of Of Grammatology; brackets in the original).
Third, and finally, Derrida was like Wittgenstein in that with his prose, he put his money where his mouth was. In Derrida's deconstructionist world, "the authority of the text is provisional . . . contradicting logic, we must learn to use and erase our language at the same time" (p. xviii of the Translator's Preface to Of Grammatology). Words are semantically open: their "definitive" meaning is always deferred. They have lost their logocentricity and cannot be naively thought to refer to some transcendental realm of Platonic Forms or Augustinian ideas in the mind of God. And yet, we cannot philosophize without them; philosophers are, in a sense, forced to play a broken instrument. But they can do so without "subscribing to [the] premises" of language (ibid.), and all of Derrida's ambiguity, logorrhea, divagation, neologizing, bantering, qualifying, haphazard reading of past philosophers, and perhaps even outright inconsistency can be seen as so many ways of doing just this.
What emerges from these considerations is a picture of a complex thinker who, in my opinion, deserves our attention, but only long enough to see if he has anything of lasting interest to say. Whether or not he does, Derrida is an obscurantist to the core. He knew what he was doing with his writings, and he did it anyway. That he put his theory into practice in his prose is not exculpating, as it was with Wittgenstein, because Wittgenstein's prose seems like something out of Locke or J.S. Mill by comparison. Even his colleague Michel Foucault said that Derrida practiced a "terrorism of obscurantism" which allowed him to gracefully evade all criticism of his work. He could be the greatest philosopher of our time, or one of the worst; I can't make enough sense of his writing to know. But an "abstruse theorist" he is indeed.
I'm starting to feel a bit logorrheic myself in this historical investigation, so I'll switch to a bullet point format for the remaining philosophers.
- Michel Foucault (1926–1984), who admitted (as the above article documents) that he engaged in obscurantism for the simple reason that that's what was expected of 20th-century French intellectuals like him. ("In France, you gotta have ten percent incomprehensible, otherwise people won't think it's deep . . .") However, Foucault is leagues more readable than Derrida.
- Jacques Lacan (1901–1981), a psychoanalyst whose impenetrable Écrits ("writings") is laced with such sublime claims as:
It is thus that the erectile organ––not as itself, or even as an image, but as a part that is missing in the desired image––comes to symbolize the place of jouissance; this is why the erectile organ can be equated with the √–1, the symbol of the signification produced above, or the jouissance it restores––by the coefficient of its statement––to the function of a missing signifier: (–1). (Écrits 822)
Lacanian psychoanalyst Bruce Fink even says of Lacan––whom Noam Chomsky referred to as a "total charlatan"––that his "explicitly announced goal . . . is to put the reader to work . . . [but this] goal does not necessarily excuse all the obscurantism that Lacan indulges in" (Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely, University of Minnesota Press 2004, p. 130).
- Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995), with or without his frequent co-author Félix Guattari (1930–1992), who, echoing Derrida, wrote that "[writing] has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come" (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, pp. 4–5). According to one author (in one of the more conspicuously titled articles I've seen):
Deleuze and Guattari's deliberate obscurantism and typically postmodern suspicion of rhetorical clarity renders their theory resistant to straightforward explanation . . . if [the notion of "becoming-animal"] lacks stable, linear meaning, this lack is precisely one of its defining characteristics and serves to underline Deleuze and Guattari's general distrust of semantic stability and transparency. (p. 6)
- Judith Butler (1956–), who constitutes a number of "firsts" for us: our first living philosopher, our first distaff one, and our first American. Martha Nussbaum describes her prose as a "thick soup" that is "ponderous and obscure," and Kathleen Stock says––presumably with reference to Butler, whom she discusses immediately above this passage in her article––that "[new] academics quickly learn the basic rules of the academic feminist language game and then run with it, taking it further and further into unintelligible technical language . . ."
Two other living philosophers who may pass for obscurantists are Slavoj Žižek (one of few celebrity philosophers of our time) and Gayatri Spivak (author of the Translator's Preface to the edition of Of Grammatology I linked to earlier, and a commanding thinker in her own right).
On that perfunctory note, our history of obscurantism in Western philosophy comes to an end. Summing up: we found one obscurantist (Heraclitus) among the ancients, none among the medievals, a couple (Kant and Hegel) among the moderns, and a handful among the contemporaries.
The aforementioned imbalance between the number of obscurantists in the ancient/medieval camp and in the modern/contemporary camp is obvious. What causes might help explain the imbalance, particularly the spike in obscurantism in the past century? I don't mean: what arguments can be given in defense of obscurantism? That's for the next section. Here I'm inquiring into large-scale causes, not specific reasons, and I can think of three causes for the relatively recent uptick in obscurantism––one trivial, one philosophical, and one sociological. (There may be linguistic causes as well, but I've already touched on German, and I don't see any reason to speculate about French.)
The trivial cause is that some obscurantists may be genuinely awful writers. I call this trivial because it strikes me as simplistic and probably of minimal explanatory value. Kant appears to be the only obscurantist to which it might apply, and even then, Kant––as I briefly mentioned earlier––could write well when he had the time and motivation to do so. Everyone else on the obscurantist list (with the exception of Heraclitus, whose writings are mostly lost) demonstrates somewhere in their corpus that they weren't compelled by a dearth of literary ability to write as they did.
The philosophical cause has to do with a divergence in outlook between the ancients/medievals and the moderns/contemporaries. Without blotting out individual differences between the many philosophers and schools of philosophy of these epochs (the ancient Cynics would feel very ill at ease alongside the Scotists, for example), we can observe that in general, the ancients and medievals operated under the assumption that there was an inherent intelligibility to the world––a Logos, a Truth––that can be grasped by human reason. Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus, says Aquinas (Summa Theologica Question 16, Article 1)––truth (lowercase T) is agreement of thing and intellect. This couldn't be so if the intellect weren't fundamentally oriented to the thing, if the thing were totally alien. We desire not just truths but capital T Truth as well, as Aristotle famously suggests in the opening line of the Metaphysics. And language is one of our primary means of comprehending Truth and sharing it with one another. Thus, in the ancient and medieval frame of mind, we are adequated to grasp Truth; we want to grasp Truth; and language is among the best ways we can obtain and share Truth. No wonder obscurantism is so rare back then: their philosophical climate was utterly hostile to it.
Then along comes Descartes, with his method of doubt; Hume, with his radical skepticism; Kant, with his inaccessible world of noumena; the abandonment of formal and final causation by the founders of modern science, along with the mathematization and mechanization of the cosmos; the individualism of Protestantism; and eventually the death of God and the soul as well as the linguistic turn in philosophy. Since the inception of modernity, then, we have seen the erosion of capital T Truth. No longer are we adequated to grasp it; no longer do we want to grasp it (for how can we desire that which may not even exist?); and no longer can language link us to it. As Derrida collaborator and well-respected American philosopher John Caputo writes in the Introduction to his More Radical Hermeneutics: On Not Knowing Who We Are:
The claim that circulates throughout this book, which is more of a confession than a claim, is that we are not (as far as I know) born into this world hard-wired to Being Itself, or Truth Itself, or the Good Itself, that we are not vessels of a Divine or World-Historical super-force that has chosen us as its earthly instruments, and that, when we open our mouths, it is we who speak, not something Bigger and Better than we. (Indiana University Press 2000, p. 1)
Of course obscurantism is more likely to thrive in an intellectual environment permeated by such ideas. If, after all, Truth is inaccessible, irrelevant, or nonexistent, then what exactly is there to obscure?
The sociological cause is commonsensical: philosophers tend to ape their influences, teachers, and peers. One will see the names of Kant and Hegel (particularly Hegel) dropped quite frequently in the writings of the contemporary obscurantists, even when they aren't among the main topics of a particular book or essay (eg, as Hegel is in Derrida's Glas). This shows their influence on these thinkers, much as the latter might disagree with them. And, presumably, it's not just their ideas that have been influential, but their writing style as well; it was they who seem to have gotten the obscurantist snowball rolling. "If the great Hegel wasn't afraid of muddying the waters, then why should I be?", the contemporary obscurantist might think before cranking out a 400-page treatise that even the Almighty would struggle to understand. Husserl and Heidegger also hold sway in contemporary obscurantist circles, and while I've argued they aren't obscurantists, their writings are no model of clarity. Finally, recall Foucault's claim about French intellectuals needing to have 10% incomprehensibility in their writings, which was, according to Searle, extended to 20% or higher by Pierre Bourdieu in private conversation. Just as one is more likely to smoke if all of one's friends and acquaintances do, so one is more likely to dabble in obscurantism if that's what's in vogue in one's wing of the ivory tower. Obscurantism has never been fashionable in the analytic wing of the tower (unless one takes issue with my claim that Wittgenstein wasn't an obscurantist), which is just one reason why most contemporary obscurantists are associated with the continental tradition.
Is Obscurantism in Philosophy Justified?
I have resisted the temptation to dismiss any of the philosophers I've labeled obscurantist as frauds, sophists, or worse, partly because I have a Leibnizian desire to learn something from every book I pick up, no matter how bad it may at first seem, and partly because whether this or that philosopher is an obscurantist is separate from whether their obscurantism is justified, understanding justification in a partly moral, partly pragmatic sense. I'll now turn to the second question, the question of justification. I'll proceed by stating and then responding to some of the most common arguments offered in defense of obscurantism by either obscurantists themselves or their acolytes.
1. Those authors you consider obscurantist wrote difficult texts largely because much of their work is done at the previously mentioned border between the sayable and the unsayable. Extraordinary ideas require extraordinary language, and extraordinary language is bound to seem perplexing, perhaps even nonsensical, from the ordinary perspective. Indeed, the transcendence of ordinary language, with all of its decrepit metaphysical and epistemological baggage, may be a prime objective of these authors, further augmenting the need for extraordinary language.
There is something to be said for such claims, but it's not much. Set aside Foucault's admission that our French obscurantists added nonsense to their writings for the mere sake of being taken seriously; I don't want to place too much stock in a single confession. Who among the greatest philosophers of the West didn't work at the border of the sayable and the unsayable? The ancients and medievals in particular passed much of their intellectual lives there: the ancients because they were the first to philosophize (let us not forget that Aristotle created logic virtually ex nihilo); the medievals because of their admirable dedication to figuring out what it could possibly mean for something to be Self-Subsistent Being Itself, or That Than Which Nothing Greater Can Be Conceived. Yet we found only one obscurantist among them, and he was rumored to be a quite peculiar fellow. Apart from him, they wrote lucidly, even though much of their prose can be justly described as "extraordinary" by virtue of its intricacy and precision. Thus, they are proof positive that one need not resort to obscurity to do productive work at the sayable/unsayable border.
As for the idea that ordinary language needs to be transcended or somehow abandoned, it isn't clear how to operationalize such a program. If one comes right out and says, "ordinary language is broken and ought to be superseded by something less problematic," either this is an ordinary-language claim, or it is not. If it is, then doesn't it suggest that ordinary language can do its job just fine––that we don't need to resort to some extraordinary language to convey what we want to? If it's not, then its meaning isn't what it appears to be, in which case I don't know what point(s), if any, the speaker is trying to express. Either way, the speaker comes across as confused.
Even worse, probably the vast majority of readers believe that extraordinary language cannot be understood on its own terms, that it depends on ordinary language to have relevance. Unless one reads an obscurantist philosopher exclusively for the performative aspect of their writing (more on this later), one will constantly be thinking, "what does the author mean when s/he says such-and-such?" In other words, what is the ordinary-language translation of the author's extraordinary language? Commentaries on the most difficult works of philosophy, whether obscurantist or not, almost always strive to express the philosopher's central claims in ordinary language. And for good reason: if they themselves were written in extraordinary language, the reader seeking a greater understanding of the original philosopher's work would be disappointed that the commentary was of no assistance in their quest, and may have even sent them on unwanted detours. The best commentaries are written in ordinary language because ordinary language is the language in which almost all of us, I assume, think and reason, and thus to which all uses of extraordinary language in philosophy must eventually return. If a philosopher wishes to do away with ordinary language, they may as well do away with language in general.
But let's suppose these objections are no good, that they're a little too cute for the serious-minded reader. Another problem is: how to distinguish between extraordinary but ultimately intelligible language, and sheer nonsense? As the Sokal affair memorably showed, the gap between profundity and gibberish is dangerously narrow. Both may be unintelligible at first sight; both may be open to various interpretations; both may be inspiring and thought-provoking. But with gibberish, the unintelligibility will be more persistent; there will be greater flexibility in how the text can be interpreted; and whatever beneficial effects the text has on the reader are likely to reflect the sophistication of the reader's mind more than that of the text itself. I see no way of determining whether a certain piece of writing is merely hard rather than gibberish without closely inspecting it, but it suffices to note that there are very many sincere, intelligent readers (among whom I probably shouldn't include myself) who have found the work of those I've called obscurantist closer to gibberish than merely hard language, even after a careful study of it.
Altogether, then, the defense isn't very convincing. It may justify a bit of obscurantism here and there, but not hundreds of pages of it.
2. Particular texts are obscure only to those unwilling to wrestle with them. You have argued that such obscurantist-seeming works as Heidegger's Being and Time and Wittgenstein's Tractatus are not in fact so. What makes you think the same cannot be true of something like Derrida's Dissemination, or Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia? Do you know enough about these works and their authors to comfortably drop them into the obscurantist bin?
I can appreciate the sentiment here. What gives me, a nondescript layman, the right to call this or that philosopher obscurantist? Is this not like a staff sergeant telling their lieutenant general how to command the troops, or an apprentice plumber critiquing the techniques of their master? Wouldn't I need a much greater fund of knowledge before competently handling the works of Derrida, Deleuze, and other demanding authors?
No, not necessarily. Although I've been choosy about whom I label an obscurantist, none of my opinions are original. It's not going out on a limb to find the likes of Derrida and Deleuze guilty of obscurantism; it's channeling mainstream views. And even if it weren't, I just don't see myself ever making sense of something like Dissemination or Anti-Oedipus.
Is it possible that such texts would be significantly more transparent if I passed a few weeks or months with them, if I really dedicated myself to understanding what their authors have to say? Yes, but mere possibilities come cheap. (It's possible I wake up to find a $100 bill under my pillow, but I'm not banking on it.) Again, countless readers have found the texts of the authors I've deemed obscurantist more or less unreadable no matter how much they wrestle with them. To quote a commenter on this article:
Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, and all those guys were one of the main reasons I left grad school. Particularly annoying were the wannabees clinging to this dying trend. I started out taking those readings seriously, wanting to give it my best shot, blaming myself for not understanding. But in the end I didn't get much from my efforts. You can't really say that in class though: you have pretend [sic] to engage with the ideas – whatever they are.
That such a thing could even occur casts serious doubt on the claim that the texts of Derrida and co. aren't really obscurantist material.
3. One can't pick up someone like Derrida and expect to find discrete arguments and propositions in their work. There may be arguments and propositions there, but they're not an essential part of the philosopher's central projects, which are too fluid, freewheeling, and exploratory to be undertaken through any combination of "clear and distinct" ideas.
I don't see what this has to do with obscurantism. Indeterminacy need not entail impenetrability. One can write clearly without having clear ideas––see Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, for instance, or even St. Augustine at times. It's not their general lack of discrete arguments and propositions that makes Derrida et al. unreadable; it's the density and abstruseness of their prose.
4. What good could come from venerable philosophical ideas falling into what Kant called "bad hands," particularly hands of those too slothful to read and re-read a text that at first seems unreadable? A bit of intentional obfuscation may be necessary to prevent such a thing from happening.
The strategy is neither practical nor commendable. It isn't practical because it's too imprecise. If the philosopher goes out of their way to write obscurely, they risk being understood by no one. Even if they are understood by a select few, the author may find that these few don't match their preconceived notion of the "fit reader." Worse still: the more obscurely one writes, the easier it is for those who are malicious or simply naive to come along and read the text in a way that would make the author wince. Basically, obscurantism is message-in-a-bottle business. Perhaps the message makes it to the (apocryphal) fit reader, but it's much more likely to end up at the bottom of the ocean, on the shore of an uninhabited island, or in the belly of a fish.
The strategy isn't commendable because it's elitist. Suppose a philosopher is rightly convinced that they have hit upon a number of brilliant and valuable ideas. Would we admire them if they cloaked these ideas in a cloud of obscurity in their writings, so that the average man or woman on the streets could never see them? Is this not like a greedy dragon hoarding up treasures in its lair and raining down fire upon practically all those who dare to enter? Does this accomplish anything other than the satisfaction of the philosopher's egotistical desires? Indeed, it seems not just unadmirable, but reprobable. It would be far more commendable if, like the freed prisoner who returns to Plato's cave to rescue his fellow prisoners, or the bodhisattva who defers enlightenment to help save the unenlightened, they were to make their valuable ideas as accessible to both lay and professional readers as possible. The harder this task is, the more the philosopher is to be commended for trying to carry it out. But if they not only fail to try but go in the opposite direction––by making their ideas as inaccessible as possible––they have earned condemnation, not praise. Brand Blanshard had a point when he wrote, in "On Philosophical Style," that "[persistently] obscure writers will usually be found to be defective human beings." (Credit goes to the Maverick Philosopher for the reference.)
5. Impenetrable prose is meant to have a certain shock value. It forces the reader to reconsider how philosophy is done and whether their most cherished beliefs about the proper uses of language might be more suspect than they were otherwise willing to admit.
I imagine that for most readers, impenetrable prose is too frustrating to have shock value. Personally, reading Derrida makes me question my beliefs much less than it makes me wonder why I'm blindly digging for treasure here when I know I'm virtually guaranteed to find it in many other locations. I read philosophy to learn, in the most general terms possible, about myself and the world, and that's tough to do when I can hardly understand what I'm reading.
6. But––and this is the crux of (3)––perhaps your obscurantists don't see philosophy in the same light you do. You see philosophy as the love of wisdom; they may see it as more of an art. Art is performative, and performance grants the performer certain creative liberties, among which is the freedom to write however one pleases. The performance may not be intelligible by common standards, but––as such timeless works as Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Beckett's The Unnamable demonstrate––it may still be riveting and insightful. Or they may think that philosophy is indeed the love of wisdom, but it's the journey that matters just as much as, if not more, than the destination; and they may even doubt that there is a fixed destination. Either way, they may prefer to write texts which are inaccessible to most or even all readers, and they are perfectly entitled to do so.
This is probably the single best defense of obscurantist practices. We wouldn't consider an author obscurantist if we didn't approach them with a preexisting idea of what philosophy is and how it ought to be done. If the boundaries of philosophy aren't so hard and fast as tradition holds them to be, there may very well be considerable overlap between it and other disciplines such as the visual arts or literature. This wouldn't demand the use of obscurantist writing styles in philosophy, but it would justify them, at least provisionally.
The most compelling response to such a proposal is, it seems, that it's simply absurd. The classical view––to build on what was said at the end of the previous section––is that there is such a thing as capital T Truth (whether or not this is understood theologically), and that philosophy is one of our highest means of discovering it. The postmodern idea that "we are not . . . born into this world hard-wired to . . . Truth Itself," as John Caputo expresses it, is self-defeating because it presupposes an orientation to the very thing it says we aren't oriented to. Without Truth, there are no true or false statements. There clearly are true or false statements, though––Caputo's being just one of them––so there must be Truth, and it is the central task of philosophy to discover it. Philosophy may have a performative side, and the journey to Truth may have its own merits, but it is arriving at Truth that ultimately matters, and that ought to guide the manner in which we philosophize. Hence, if we're committed to Truth, we should steer clear of needlessly obscure writing.
Everyone can decide for themselves whether they fall more on this or on the other side of the debate. Further argumentation is unlikely to resolve any conflict of visions here.
The Future of Obscurantism: Some Noncommittal Thoughts
I'll conclude by reflecting on how much of a presence obscurantism is likely to have in Western philosophy moving forward. I'm no prophet, so take the following with a sizable grain of salt.
I don't see obscurantism vanishing anytime soon, for a few reasons. First, obscurantism now has strong precedents, which could scarcely be said as recently as a century ago. Second, it can––as illustrated by the French obscurantists of the 20th century––be glamorous. The less understandable you are, the more cultured people may feel for reading (or at least trying to read) you; the more students and defenders you may acquire; and the more time you may have in the spotlight. Third, it grants you invincibility, like a dip in the river Styx. This is Derrida's terrorism of obscurantism: if someone criticizes something you've written, you can always say they have simply misunderstood you. More than that, if they really want to offer a serious criticism, they should read your text more carefully. Give the exact same response if and when they return with additional criticisms.
So obscurantism will probably have a few takers for as long as philosophy is a thing. And "a few" is a reasonable expectation. Even if it has its distinct advantages, the obscurantist route is risky: one's chances of failure are probably far greater than those of success. It is, if nothing else, safe to be readable. One's philosophical views may get eviscerated, but at least others know what one's views are. Most young, enterprising philosophers are presumably aware that if they write obscurely enough to dodge all criticism, there's a good chance they'll simply be ignored.
Another reason why I don't think obscurantism will ever gain too much steam is that from birth, we are trained to express ourselves clearly in both speech and writing. If a mother accuses her child of stealing a cookie out of the oven, it will not do for the child to reply that mommy has failed to specify the morphogenetic processes that result in the actualization of cookies; down that road lies a trip to the child psychiatrist's office, or maybe just a spanking. And in school we are penalized if we can't write or speak "properly," i.e., clearly. It is only after years of having a drive for clarity hammered into our heads that we might fall under the spell of obscurantism. Because of this, obscurantism doesn't come naturally to us: some of our most primitive social instincts must be overridden for us to practice it.
I thus venture the underwhelming prediction that obscurantism will remain what it is now: neither prevalent nor totally absent. But we'll see.
This is all in the West, in any case. There doesn't seem to be much discussion of obscurantism in Eastern philosophy, and even if there were, I wouldn't know enough to remark on it.
