OBSCURANTISM

[Anonymous No.17074380]

If the obscurantist _can't_ write in plain language when it's possible to do so, then he or she is an idiot and therefore has nothing of value to say.
If the obscurantist _can_ write in plain language but chooses not to, then he or she is self-consciously aware of not having anything of value to say.
Either way, avoid.

[Anonymous No.17074392]

>>17074380
What if they can only get their ideas across in complex language because the ideas are complex?

[Anonymous No.17074397]

>>17074392
what's an example of a complex idea worth comprehending?

[Anonymous No.17074422]

>>17074397
literally any specialized scientific field
as far as philosophy goes, not much

[Anonymous No.17074438]

>>17074397
Kant

[Anonymous No.17074447]

Maps of Meaning is nothing but this

[Anonymous No.17074476]

>>17074392
>>17074422
There is a case for this in the hard sciences and some other disciplines, where scientific terminology is needed for precision. In the humanities, I guarantee that this is not the case.

[Anonymous No.17074480]

>>17074380
>NOOO THOSE DUMB CUNTINENTALS WITH THEIR OBSCURANTIST JARGON WHAT THE FUCK IS CONATUS WHAT THE FUCK IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PAROLE AND LANGUE WHAT THE FUCK IS BwO
>*attends a course on Wittgenstein's Tractatus*
many such cases

[Anonymous No.17074493]

Why is this board so obsessed with proving the size of its braindick?

[Anonymous No.17074502]

>>17074476
>In the humanities, I guarantee that this is not the case.
In the humanities, I guarantee that precision of terminology is actually of incredible importance because the concepts are necessarily vaguer than in the matters of physics and chemistry.

[Anonymous No.17074521]

Poop

[Anonymous No.17074526]

>>17074502
>the concepts are necessarily vaguer than in the matters of physics and chemistry.
Why is that?

[Anonymous No.17074534]

>>17074380
I write iteratively, it usually takes me about 20 goes to do an essay. It starts of obscurantist, at first its faithful conjectures. Until I deduce the truths I'm reaching for and empirically validate them through applications.

[Anonymous No.17074537]

>>17074502
Yeah this. I heard some story from a teacher I had that Heidegger used to scold students who wrote like him. He expected them to write plainly. There were reasons for him writing the way he did (considering interpretation, possibility and contingency was always a constant theme in his work).

[Anonymous No.17074555]

>>17074526
Hard sciences use mathematics as their lingua sapia. Mathematics is a world with rules and frameworks. 1 = 1 irrespective of the individual, and if that individual disagrees, they are wrong if they don't have a compelling argument as to why the rules don't apply. While mathematical properties are not irreducibly axiomatic all the time, there are at least SOME axioms with which mathematicians can directly interact and apply. In the humanities, there's no such framework outside of things like formal logic. We cannot say "happy = happy" with any degree of confidence because the framework for the discussion of humanities doesn't establish happiness in an axiomatic way. You have to use your language in a precise way in order to have precision. It's not a given like in mathematics.

[Anonymous No.17074562]

>>17074480
Even Wittgenstein acknowledged that the tracactus was retarded
Can you imagine if a frog wrote PI
>A langue ludus is the performative series by which the lexiemes stop being organs without bodies and become bodies without organs as can be demonstrated by the below matheme
7x2+6x+2=0

[Anonymous No.17074565]

>>17074502
>In the humanities, I guarantee that precision of terminology is actually of incredible importance because the concepts are necessarily vaguer than in the matters of physics and chemistry.
There's a simple exercise that shows you are full of shit. Take a paragraph from one academic article in a STEM subject, and one academic article in a humanities subject. Attempt to simplify every sentence in the paragraph without losing any information. The STEM article will have already gone through a process of simplification because - by and large - the authors of STEM papers are striving to communicate complex domain-specific information in as simple a way as possible without losing precision. By contrast, you will be able to simplify the humanities paper several times until it is in plain english because scholars of the humanities intentionally inflate their writing with unnecessary complexity and jargon to signal in-group status using exotic vocabulary as a substitute for real substance and depth.

[Anonymous No.17074570]

>>17074565
>By contrast, you will be able to simplify the humanities paper several times until it is in plain english because
Everything beyond the "because" is 100% unfounded conjecture and can be disregarded, but you're not wrong.

[Anonymous No.17074614]

>>17074565
>scholars of the humanities intentionally inflate their writing with unnecessary complexity and jargon to signal in-group status using exotic vocabulary as a substitute for real substance and depth.
Have you read Kevin Solway's essay 'An Investigation into Academic Nothingness'? He says much the same thing you are saying here; it is well worth the read.

[Anonymous No.17074678]

>>17074526
Fuck, I typed a longer reply but closed the tab accidentally. Briefly:
STEM describes external objects.
Humanities works with cultural objects, within culture itself, with objects that do not exist without/outside the subject's consciousness, without the history, etc.
For example, a scientist doesn't really care whether you say that an object is X centimeters or Y feet long. On the other hand, to pick the seemingly most trivial example from literary studies, it is not the same to say that a verse of a poem has five iambs or ten syllables.

>>17074565
Humanities is not about maximising the transmission of "raw information". Would you get anything out of a history book which is just a table or list of raw information, e.g. "in 1616 Shakespeare and Cervantes died", "in 1848 there were revolutions X and Y and Z"? It absolutely requires the moment of interpretation, of the author's active work, to make any use of the information.
For what it's worth, I find 90% of the humanities papers, at least from my field, entirely readable and comprehensible. Not always rhetorically ideal, but that's something I'd rather assess on a case by case basis.
some poststructuralist wankers whose themes you don't care about =/= humanities as a whole

[Anonymous No.17074716]

>>17074678
Don't know what your field is, but coming from English Literature, I stand by everything I said in this post >>17074565 - this isn't to say that every English academic is a charlatan, but it is easy to be one and get away with it in such a subject.

>>17074614
I haven't, but maybe I'll give it a read.

>>17074570
Sure, I'm being hyperbolic and unfair.

[Anonymous No.17074752]

>>17074502
lmao

[Anonymous No.17074762]

>>17074555
No one responded to this post or these digits but I think you are correct

[Anonymous No.17074765]

>>17074565
Did this guy just come from the butler thread?

[Anonymous No.17074778]

This thread turned out to be super informative.

Thanks /lit/.

- Random lurker

[Anonymous No.17074782]

>>17074716
You mustn’t be very knowledgeable in English literature, because you seem to miss the fundamentals of hermeneutics; from Schleiermacher and Dilthe to Gadamer, and Habermas, up to Davidson and beyond. That being, raw value or raw data has no significance without interpretive, contextual and narratorial explanation. Fuck, frege came up with the same conclusions and he was a STEMfag

[Anonymous No.17074785]

>>17074765
Yeah bro, I'm everywhere

[Anonymous No.17074811]

>>17074380
This alleged "obscurantism" is just a necessary result of philosophers talking about other philosophers and their ideas.
Brainlets get mad at this because they think there should be an intrinsic meaning. They'd like philosophy to be a series of unrelated self-help books where each one tells something like "life is ultimately this or that" and thus request them to be readily understandable by everyone. But in actuality, all they want to say is "philosopher A thought this, philosopher B thought that, I think combining these thoughts yields this and that".
Philosophy is not about life or truth but ultumately about thought itself.

[Anonymous No.17074830]

>>17074811
Obviously this isn't the full truth, but it is an element of it. I think deliberate obscurantism for its own sake is so firmly established in philosophy that to pretend it is a "necessary result" is to bury your head in the sand.

[Anonymous No.17074862]

>>17074782
What I have said is not an argument for or against the value of raw data or raw information. I don't accept the argument made here >>17074678 that maximizing (within reason) clarity and simplicity in the use of language within academic circles is the same as some sort of reductive "stick to the raw facts" practice in literary scholarship. My arguments are not a critique of the scholarship itself, but are a serious sociolinguistic question - is there a legitimate need for the language community of literary scholars to use complex terminology to accomplish their work - or are they motivated by a desire for undeserved intellectual status by intentionally creating an unnecessary exclusive variety of language among literary scholars that distinguishes them from the community (without any other practical purpose).

The point is not that there should be no act of interpretation, no nuance, no context, etc. The point is that an author should be - despite the imperfection and inadequacy of language, despite the difficulties of communication between human beings - striving to be understood, striving to use the most simple and elegant expression they can possibly use to continue the conversation. If people are choosing to do otherwise without adequate justification, then I suggest that something is wrong with that and it should be stopped.

[Anonymous No.17074935]

>>17074862
Yeah sure I understand your critique. But it’s still naive to think that one can explain complex topics in common tongue that everyone can understand. Frameworks are often used, with jargons developed from discourses that precedes it, to draw upon as tools for explanation, ie. phenomenology, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, radical interpretation, Marxism, new formalism, post structuralism etc. An example I can draw you to is that passage in being and time about the carpenter and his hammer. We are effectively debating about the efficient cause of interpretation. I agree that one should write as clearly as possible, and obscurantism must be called out. That isn’t a controversial opinion. but really, when it comes to good quality work obscurantism isn’t that much of a problem.

[Anonymous No.17074978]

>>17074935
>tools for explanation, ie. phenomenology, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, radical interpretation, Marxism, new formalism, post structuralism etc.
I don't think anyone is arguing against using terminology like this. If you want to reference Marxism, you want to just say Marxism instead of "the aggregate system of thought originated by Karl Marx with respect to..." Obscurantism is in the reluctance to do more than allude to your point. It's not the use of jargon—sometimes you don't want to write for a complete ignoramus and want to assume your reader knows what you mean when you use a specific term. The obscurantist, even though he is perfectly capable of explicitly focussing his argument down to its composite axioms, refuses to do so. Often he will refuse to make the barest attempt. The obscurantist leaves breadcrumbs when even an educated reader is dying of starvation, and he owns a fucking bakery.

[Anonymous No.17075008]

>>17074570
I've read the postmodern pooh don't try to fool me

[Anonymous No.17075087]

>>17074978
I think you’ve fallen into your own trap. Is there an actual referent to “the Obscurantist” or a representation? Because if it’s the latter, then you’ve found the root cause of this debate.

[Anonymous No.17075109]

>>17074978
>The obscurantist, even though he is perfectly capable of explicitly focussing his argument down to its composite axioms, refuses to do so.
Ironically, this sentence reads as a stereotypical example of obscurantism, with the unnecessary specialist terminology and strained syntax.
Anyway, I'm not that other anon, but could you pick some actual paper and show examples of such exaggerated complexity?
(I argued with you some ten posts ago but am too lazy to continue doing it and feel like we'd go nowhere, so if you don't feel like replying it's all right by me, but giving examples would certainly make the problem clearer.)

[Anonymous No.17075118]

>>17075109
Incidentally, that's not me (the guy you argued with 10 posts ago). That guy is a different poster.

[Anonymous No.17075140]

>>17075087
Deleuze is a good enough example of what I'm talking about. Just to clarify, my main point is in the essence of the "allusive" versus its opposite (I'd propose "the explicit"). I think it's more of a continuum than anything explicit, but this is, in my eyes, the best metric for obscurantism. Referring to the works of others by their shorthands—Marxism, to run with my prior example—is not obscurantism; referring to original concepts in vague, allusive terms is. For example, when I referred to Deleuze earlier, I do not consider that to be obscurantism. We are engaged in a conversation on a heavily abstract concept that spans the breadth of multiple millennia of philosophical work. As such, I expect you to have read Deleuze, and to be familiar with his writing style, which I would characterize as almost archetypically obscurantist due to his heavy usage of atypical linguistic constructs, many of which being neologous, and his comfort with leaving important concepts defined either allusively, or composed of the formerly referenced idiosyncrasies.

The line separating the authentic obscurantist from the authentic idiot is one both parties are heavily invested in blurring.

[Anonymous No.17075143]

>>17075109
>Ironically, this sentence reads as a stereotypical example of obscurantism
Why, because I said axiom? I felt like I could reasonably expect you to be familiar with the term. Was I mistaken?

[Anonymous No.17075148]

>>17074380
You guys always suspect Foucault and Derrida on this, but this is true obscurantist literature

[Anonymous No.17075169]

>>17074438
Kant is just too autistic to express his words correctly.
It should be obvious to you if you aren't a brainlet pseud what he wants to say though.
Now Hegel that's another story...

[Anonymous No.17075170]

>>17074476
low iq

[Anonymous No.17075195]

>>17074565
>The STEM article will have already gone through a process of simplification because - by and large - the authors of STEM papers are striving to communicate complex domain-specific information in as simple a way as possible without losing precision
Can confirm. This is actually what we spent most of our time on when working on a paper. Communicate the principles and ideas clearly in simple language. That is also the reason why a lot of STEM papers have a very tight page limit. If you cannot explain yourself within that limit your idea needs refinement.

That is not to say such papers are flawless. There are lots of problems. However, those are unrelated to the topic of this thread.

[Anonymous No.17075221]

I think that obscurantism to some degree can be seen as a lack of an author's ability to empathize with a reader's confusion. Deleuze knows what a body without organs is; it's his idea, and he works with it on an intuitive level. He probably came to it by working with "advanced" concepts on an intuitive level. I'd bet that to him, it's literally unimaginable that a reader could be confused as to what the living fuck he is talking about. Because he can't imagine what it's like the come upon the concept in the wild, he can't imagine what his reader needs in order to come to a quick, complete understanding. This is the "authentic" obscurantism I referred to above. I see authentic obscurantism as more of an "incompatibility" issue viz. modalities of thought—his brain interacts with knowledge and meaning on a different level epistemologically. Authentic obscurantism is characterized by a communication breakdown, whereas "inauthentic" obscurantism is characterized by a masking. Behind the allusiveness of the inauthentic obscurantist is a man employing obscurantism as a methodology in pursuit of a specific goal, whereas the authentic obscurantist finds language's relationship with meaning overly tangential. I believe that both exist, and furthermore that the presence of obscurantist writing in and of itself signifies only the presence of obscurantism, and in/of itself does nothing to define its own authenticity.

[Anonymous No.17075237]

>>17075169
Not true, people have tried multiple times to simplify the Critique of Pure Reason, and it always end up into a 2000+ pages behemoth. Unless you want to turn each critique into a goddamn series, Kant's writing style is perfectly adequate.
>>17075148
I'm not sure Russell's formal trrminology is that hard to learn if you already know some contemporary formal logic. The latter can be learnt by anyone in a matter of weeks, and it will make any logic-related text immediatly intellegible.

[Anonymous No.17075283]

>>17075237
>Not true, people have tried multiple times to simplify the Critique of Pure Reason, and it always end up into a 2000+ pages behemoth
Yeah, and now we're getting down to what I see as a fundamental issue here, namely the "unfolding" nature of concepts. Every statement you make is based on an ontological hierarchy that CAN be reduced down to the Heisenberg limit. There are layers upon layers upon layers of dependencies which any concept relies on. If I wanted to 100% fully justify that statement, I probably could, but we'd end up so deep down in the trenches we'd lose sight of the actual point... which I've only just alluded to by now. When you attempt to simplify Kant, what you're really doing is unfolding him, and the unfolding takes time and space. Allusions are compact, but they rely upon a certain quality from the reader. An allusion is essentially a nodule, a quantity whose essence is that of a pattern. If you haven't accumulated enough data to see the pattern, it's completely meaningless. If you have, it's not. The question is how much allusion is "proper" in a work of philosophy. I don't have the answer, myself.

[Anonymous No.17075314]

>>17075283
Sorry for hijacking this thread with my schizo ramblings. I've been consumed with the relationship between language and meaning since I read Finnegans Wake, and a discussion on obscurantism necessarily involves the nature of the obscure, which itself implies the object of my interest.

[Anonymous No.17075362]

>>17074380
I am writing my own book of philosophy. I try to keep the language as simple as possible and sometimes share excerpts or ideas with my friends, but they have trouble understanding either way without me drawing pictures for them. There are cases in which making the language more complex facilitates understanding such as in the case where it greatly reduces the physical amount of exposition required. I have come up with a number of 1 or 2 word phrases to describe processes which would otherwise need 10-15 words to accurately describe and the injection of that into any stream of thought makes anything a lot harder to follow.

[Anonymous No.17075373]

Communication is for the crowd, a vile medium of exchange and standardization. In the dark cloud of the night of reason, we aristocrats of the soul—poets, philosophers, warriors—howl together in singular tongues!

[Anonymous No.17075503]

>>17075373

[Anonymous No.17075684]

>>17074380
you just said what I was pontificating maximally.

[Anonymous No.17075920]

>>17075684
You'mst juthay what're I DOLE

[Anonymous No.17075929]

>>17074380
Kek. Obscurantism is such a meme. Nussbaum criticized Butler for her crytpic writing then went on to criticize her arguments in the same fucking piece. Stop crying.

[Anonymous No.17076706]

>>17074392
This is not the same as obscurantism. There's a difference between using jargon and dense language, and writing a whole lot of hard to read shit that when broken down has little to no substance. Also, loads of inappropriate references out of no where as if it supports their position.

They are not working with complex ideas most of the time either.

[Anonymous No.17076741]

>>17076706
>Also, loads of inappropriate references out of no where as if it supports their position.
This is definitely my personal pet peeve. I cannot fucking stand it when an author feels the need to drop references constantly. I dropped Capitalist Realism because of that garbage (most recently).

[Anonymous No.17076771]

anyone else not really know what obscurantism really even means? Like, I've read shit like Deleuze and Guatarri, which is probably the most neologism/jargon filled stuff ever, and I didn't really find it any more difficult to understand than something like Plato, Aristotle, or The Bhagavad Gita.

[Anonymous No.17076818]

>>17074493
anger and disappointed. a young man tastes hellenistic philosophy, and gets excited. he plans. he wants to read all of philosophy. he wants to understand the world.
then he discovers all of the greats... are not so great. their work distorted by religious oppression, their prose dreadful, their ideas useless at best, and their personal lives reflecting dreadfully poor and untrustworthy character.

[Anonymous No.17076881]

>>17074476
>science is hard
>philosophy is easy
modern science literally came put of the rationalists and empericists you fucking retard, if philosophy wasn't using precision you would have never gotten STEM

[Anonymous No.17076898]

>>17074562
filtered by Deleuze

[Anonymous No.17076899]

>>17074480
Kek, Saussure isn't even complicated

[Anonymous No.17076946]

>>17076771
it means they used a word I don't understand and have taken personal offence because I am simultaneously insecure and narcissistic in the evaluation of my intelligence and insist that lack of comprehension could never be the result of my own failings

[Anonymous No.17076995]

>>17074380
>he doesn't get the beauty of performative writting
You are literally a subhuman, kys.

[Anonymous No.17077059]

>>17074565
Stem is shit.
And 'information transmission' is the death of art and life. Plain language is just a meme of journalistic society, it is used as a levelling mechanism to form a flattened man and a world/nationless culture.
The great paradox is that you and your thinking become the opposite of a fragile vessel within the sea. The idea begins to be seen as transmissible over the most impossible territories. In other words, it is refined so that it cannot be diminished - if it becomes lost temporarily it is secured in that all the refinement has made it impervious to the elements. This is something lower than the obscurantist, who only wants to remember the spirit of mystics and alchemists.

What is worse, the means of communication which acts as wire communication across the sea is obscure in its own way: the words become impenetrable in their being completely hollowed out. Yet they also hold the opposite quality, each word can be shifted to mean anything - may be impenetrable in its being nothing, but it can also be intercepted by other means. Cryptography and rationalist occasionalism are formed of the same period of human thought, they are one. Both are of a false egotism, and representative of a figure of man who sees himself above the necessity of art and spirit. We see this in the constant rehashing of works, an offense against both art and science, as the perceived ego begins to replace the law of becoming to which all the piles of information were dedicated in the first place. Book shops become filled with pop science and F#ck self-help books. The essence of all thought is progressively depleted.

Even the greatest works begin to be hollowed out by this garbage pile of information, placed in the store rooms of museums, the medicalised library - which is a worse treatment than their being burned down. Ideas become aseptic so that danger cannot spread, in the same way that hospitals grow in equal measure to the garbage dump. Discovery which loses sight of the "enterprise of the whole" can only lead to dissatisfaction and restlessness, the endless information production is a means of defense against the archetypal, our anxiety before it - thus we marry the highest to the lowest, but such is an endless task. As if a whole society cursed to documenting the ruins of the Great Library.

[Anonymous No.17077075]

>>17074447
False. Peterson has free, layman accessible content that elaborates on his thought. Thinking you can delve straight into the core of his work without the prerequisites is moronic.

[Anonymous No.17077087]

Let's try to name some great intellectuals which also have a great writing style. Nietzsche is obvious.

[Anonymous No.17077097]

>>17077059
>We see this in the constant rehashing of works, in the alteration of concepts in a way that does not reach into the substantial

[Anonymous No.17077098]

>>17075362
keep up the good work

[Anonymous No.17077173]

>>17074392
There's a difference between the complexity or challenge of ideas, and an over-complicated writing style, Simple rules can be followed. Such as breaking up long, elaborate sentences into shorter sentences which sum up to the same meaning but are easier to read. Another rule is to use regular words when jargon is not needed. Instead of "become cognizant of the knowlege apprehended therein and thereby assimilated" say "understand it."

[Anonymous No.17077633]

>>17077059
good effortpost

[Anonymous No.17077655]

>>17075195
>>17074565
>Option A) communicate idea in 300 words that 95% of people actually interested in the field will immediately understand and internalize.
>Option B) communicate idea in 1,500 "simple" words, becoming a tiresome war of attrition against the interest of the reader because some nigger can't be bothered to pick up a dictionary.
I wonder which one is better.

[Anonymous No.17077681]

>>17077655
This argument is sarcastic and reductive, but essentially correct

[Anonymous No.17077934]

kek you're not entitled to get it. Not every piece is made for maximum diffusion and shit. It just happens that while playing with context and references, a certain level of experience is required to realize the patrons, whether coming from intuition or intellectual sources. Everyone who cries about obscurantism in literature or continental philosophy can go on and find other stuff to read. There's no justification for whining because there are texts with hidden sense to you, and then hiding behind the lie that you're just demanding redaction simplicity. There are things that are worth using complex language for. To sum up: don't fucking go around demanding that everything should be understood by the most amount of people as possible, because that's retarded. Writing doesn't exist just to communicate, it's also a way of expressing the connections made between knowledge or intuition after using interpretative (hermeneutical) analysis, and this doesn't have to be necessarily interpreted for you in particular, not it's always precisely registered. "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" to quote the tratactus.

Now, I'm not defending stupid word-count gibberish. As I said, there is a lot of stuff out there. Just keep moving and don't cry like a baby if you don't feel welcomed in an imaginary club or something.

[Anonymous No.17077988]

>>17074562
>Even Wittgenstein acknowledged that the tracactus was retarded

And, yet, the Tractatus still has its own worth.