Besides getting tenure, being compared to Alain de Botton, or writing columns for The New York Times, getting away with obscure prose is one of the most widely accepted signs of making it as a philosopher. It’s a signal that your time has become so valuable, you can effectively offload the task of writing by jumbling words together and leaving it to the poor undergrads reading your work to decipher the sentences. They call this the ‘obscure turn’. With Nietzsche’s firm grip on the record for youngest full Professor, aspiring philosophers now strive for the record of the earliest obscure turn. Here’s the philosopher John McDowell doing Pittsburgh proud by butchering an explanation of ‘secondary qualities’:

A secondary quality is a property the ascription of which to an object is not adequately understood except as true, if it is true, in virtue of the object’s disposition to present a certain sort of perceptual appearance: specifically, an appearance characterizable by using a word for the property itself to say how the object perceptually appears.

In clearer English, a secondary quality is a perception-dependent property which produces a particular sensation, like taste, colour or smell. This is one of McDowell’s clearer and shorter sentences. Not all obscurantism is created equal; like sparkling wine and apologies, it depends where it’s coming from. Socrates, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Kevin Rudd, each in their particular style, did not simply advance some thesis but aimed to have their readers discover the truth themselves. On rare occasions, being unintelligible is necessary; former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, was obscure because speaking frankly in his position might have moved the market by ten points. Nothing, however, can justify Hegel’s method of wearing down readers into agreement by verbiage. Understanding Hegel is one of those things people go to the Wizard of Oz for. Yet some still endeavour to defend obscure prose.

Some say that obscure prose is subversive. According to Judith Butler, using intelligible language forsakes the “resource of language to rethink the world radically” and does not “make people think critically.” In the summary of one academic, “obfuscatory prose, in short, strikes a blow for the proletariat!” And what a blow it is, somewhere between an ant’s poke and beetle’s biff. Hark, the wall totters! Ours is hardly an age when subversives must employ satire and humour to avoid censorship. If it’s obscure prose style, not content, that makes your writing subversive, then I don’t see your Harvard University Press book ending up on the Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum. It’s not as if: “Taking as your object of sustenance those who have accumulated a greater proportion of capital, undertake the consumptive process, utilising the mode of mastication and proceed through all the digestive stages,” is more subversive than “Eat the rich!” Others, like Marcuse, claim that radical ideas cannot be expressed in clear language. Radical ideas like “abolish the police.” This conception of clarity carouses in the same dive bar as John McCumber’s notion that the pursuit of clarity is a “misguided effort” to “force us all to remain in ancient and oppressive habits of thought.” Because “All power to the Soviets” was never revolutionary and influential. There’s such a gaping hole in this argument, the Australian Government will probably declare it a mine and make John tax exempt.

At the last barricade, some defend obscure prose on the grounds that complex ideas require complex writing. This sounds good but deceives. The critique of obscurity is not a critique of complex writing, but a critique of needlessly complex writing. A genuinely complex idea will necessarily entail a complex explanation, if not, it is not a complex idea. The explanation needn’t be more complex than the idea. The problem with defending obscurity is that comprehending obscure sentences entails parsing the obscure into clear sentences, thereby showing that the obscure could have been clearer all along. I imagine the process as something like this scene from The Thick of It:

Simon Weir: You describe yourself as the human router in government. Can you explain what you meant by that?

Stewart Pearson: I’m a router in the sense that I control the governmental, informational ingestion and egestion process.

Simon Weir: Mr. Pearson, just to clarify, your job is to make sure that the public perception of your government’s programme is a positive one. Is that fair?

Stewart Pearson: It’s not about perception. Yeah. I believe in government as a transceiver.

Simon Weir: Transceiver

Stewart Pearson: Yeah, it’s really important, sure, to give out a strong signal, but to be effective, you’ve got to listen for an echo.

Simon Weir: Could you possibly speak in plain English?

Stewart Pearson: I’m sorry, I thought I was.