Deliberate Obscurity
In the second sense, “obscurantism” denotes making knowledge abstrusely difficult to grasp. In the 19th and 20th centuries "obscurantism" became a polemical term for accusing an author of deliberately writing obscurely, to hide his or her intellectual vacuousness. Philosophers who are neither empiricists nor positivists often are accused of obscurantism in describing the abstract concepts of their disciplines. For philosophic reasons, these authors might modify, or reject, verifiability, falsifiability, or logical non-contradiction. From said perspective, obscure (clouded, vague, abstruse) writing does not necessarily signal that the writer has a poor grasp of the subject, because unintelligible writing sometimes is purposeful and philosophically considered.
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Famous quotes containing the words deliberate and/or obscurity:
“‘Beware
The soft-voiced owl, the ferret’s smile,
The hawk’s deliberate stoop in air,
Cold eyes, and bodies hooped in steel,
Forever bent upon the kill.’”
—Geoffrey Hill (b. 1932)
“That hour in the life of a man when first the help of humanity fails him, and he learns that in his obscurity and indigence humanity holds him a dog and no man: that hour is a hard one, but not the hardest. There is still another hour which follows, when he learns that in his infinite comparative minuteness and abjectness, the gods do likewise despise him, and own him not of their clan.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)