Scotology - the science of shadows
the utility of the obscure
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Referring to potential readers of Kierkegaard,
Opher Kutner writes:

> We have assimilated ourselves with him.
> We speak like him. We strive to be obscure.
> We are artists.

and later he added as postscript:

> I enjoyed writing this a lot more
> than the other option I had in mind, 
> having to do with being too stupid
> to know what the hell everybody's talking about.

I would like to adopt Opher's confession.

I do it too: philosophize to console myself for what I do now know.
That, in fact, has been the stylish thing to do,
ever since Socrates made it respectable
to boast of ones ignorance.
Perhaps to Kierkegaard himself was sometimes moved to philosophize
because he was frustrated
with deciphering Hegel and Fichte.

Opher writes: "We strive to be obscure."
Is that a claim ? a statement of fact ?  and admission ?
Haven't we, from the time
that we were first taught to write,
been told that we should strive to be clear,
lucid, unambiguous ?
So, is Opher being ironic, is he joking,
has he made an inadvertent confession,
or has he subtly suggested a topic worthy of 
serious consideration?

Whenever I read something that I
do not understand I assume that the fault is my own,
that I have read too fast or with insufficient thought,
and as a result I read again,
and over and over again
until I understand or give up.

If it does seem to become clear,
I must consider the possibility that the clarity
rather than being extracted from the text
is instead projected onto it by my determination,
by my insistence on reason.

The reason a text seems obscure to me may be 
that I just don't understand.
The reason why a text seems obscure to me
may be my unfamiliarity with the
verbal or mathematical language;
the reason may be the obscurity inherent in the subject matter,
it may be some fundamental inadequacy in the presentation.
The second alternative is tested 
by compariung my interpretation with that of someone
knowledgeable in the language.

The alternative is to assume that the obscurity is in the text

To the extent that the clarity is in the text,
I call it objective.
To the extent that I project the clarity onto the text,
it is called subjective.

But we have no word that reflects the circumstance
that the clarity reflects the quality
both of the text and of the determination.
Which suggests a limitation of the dichotomy.


One of the tests of clarity is that I myself see something
understand something very clearly; then that I understand it
clearly in the company of others.

It is edifying to think and talk and write about
what one does *not* know. There is little point 
to thinking or gloating about what one thinks one knows.
Nor is it at all obvious, what we should
mean when we claim to know or understand,
or when we complain that we do not understand an author or,
for that matter, one another.

But the last thing one demands of a teacher
is an answer to the question "What is knowledge."

Consequently much of what is taught to be knowledge
is not, is something entirely different.
The blame is with the schools that create an
artificial competition, honoring the one who "knows"
more and punishing him who "knows" less, with
little regard for the value of the supposed knowledge.

Anderson's story about the emperor's new clothes
is a pointed commentary on human nature in general,
and on the history of philosophy in particular.

The formal study of obscurity is overdue;
although the mathematicians have made a beginning
with their "fuzzy logic" and with "chaos theory".

One aspect of
Often obscurity is that it accurately
reflects the complexity of the concepts in issue
or of the situation to be described. The combinatory
powers of modern technology have created many
obscure texts. 
Consider only the obscurity of computer languages,
of computer organization,
which is surely determined 
by the complexity of the programming task ...
The same is true of many other if not most other
instances of technical obscurity

There is obscurity that flows from the readers inability
to understand.

There is obscurity created by foreign language barrier,
not only natural language, but also the technical languages
Most obvious is deliberate obscurity, as suggested
by Ophers: "We strive to be obscure." Before dismissing
deliberate obscurity as dishonesty, trickery, hochstapelei,
Included here would be not only the calculated concoction
of absurd irrational text and palming it off as wisdom,
I think obscurity has hermeneutic usefulness,
it invites the reader  to participate the more actively
in the construction of the conceptual structure
which cannot be built without his/her help.
It may be a deliberate admission of ignorance
on the part of the writer.

There is much social pressure on us to know,
to understand in order to be effective members
of the social machines of which our society consists;
and if we do not understand,
then there is much pressure to act as if
we understood, to pretend to understand,
not only in the professions
in law and medicine,
but also in the world of the teachers
and of the taught,
the academic world.
Since the teacher has obtained his/her authority
by possessing knowledge;
knowledge is deemed to be the prerequisite for
teaching (although Socrates didn't think so)
and there comes into being that
unnatural institution, the university,
whose Professoren and Privatdozenten
were so consistently the object of Kierkegaards barbs.
Most vivid in the memories of my college years
is the humiliation of having to pretend to know
what one did not know and what perhaps could not be
known, and to expound ethical and esthetic ideologies
that were foreign to ones spirit.
That was of course particularly the case
in the field of philosophy.
and to Kierkegaards description of the edification
of being in the wrong,
I add, in my own mind, the edification
of being in error.
The pretension of knowing was only compounded with
the diabolic and unnatural competition
engendered by the grading system.

The social pressures to pretend knowledge 
lead to the absurdities described by Anderson
in his story of the emperors new clothes.

Given the importance of the subject,
it seems reasonable to look at 
to examine our ignorance more closely.
To some extent it reflects the physical
and mental limitations of our being, the inability
to remember, the inability to distinguish,
the confusion of concepts and relationship
between them.
Failure to grasp for one reason or another
the words, the symbols of which like building blocks
our knowledge is constituted.

I have worked in academic departments
where the unsubstatial nature of the knowledge in issue 
was recognized and was admitted;
however confessions of ignorance were perfunctory
and did not relieve the members of the department from the
pressures of publishing, lecturing and otherwise
promoting themselves on the grounds of their purported knowledge.