Concept

Obscurantism

Overview

Obscurantism, also called obscurationism, is a polemical charge of deliberately presenting information in an abstruse and imprecise manner that limits further inquiry and understanding of a subject. Obscurantism has been defined as anti-intellectual opposition to the dissemination of knowledge and as writing characterized by deliberate vagueness.

In the 18th century, Enlightenment philosophers applied the term obscurantist to any enemy of intellectual enlightenment and the liberal diffusion of knowledge. In the 19th century, in distinguishing the varieties of obscurantism found in metaphysics and theology, from the "more subtle" obscurantism of the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant and of modern philosophical skepticism, Friedrich Nietzsche said that: "The essential element in the black art of obscurantism is not that it wants to darken individual understanding, but that it wants to blacken our picture of the world, and darken our idea of existence."

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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So much the wider field, it may appear, lies open to hypothesis; as, where we cannot know with certainty, we are at liberty to make guesses and to form suppositions. Imagination may be allowed, under the strict surveillance of reason, to invent suppositions; but, these must be based on something that is perfectly certain—and that is the possibility of the object. If we are well assured upon this point, it is…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
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They go so far as to accept a man who is _not affected at all_ by some particular moment in the past as the right man to describe it. This is the usual relation of the Greeks and the classical scholars. They have nothing to do with each other--and this is called "objectivity"!
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thoughts Out of Season, Part II
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In the second part, however, when Kant examines the _application,_ as it is called, which Reason makes of the categories in order to know its objects, the content of the categories, at least in some points of view, comes in for discussion: or, at any rate, an opportunity presented itself for a discussion of the question. It is worth while to see what decision Kant arrives at on the subject of metaphysic, as this…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
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Obscurantism

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