Obscurantism (from the Latin obscurans, "darkening") is the
practice of deliberately preventing the facts or full details of
something from becoming known. There are two common senses of
this: (1) opposition to the spread of knowledge—a policy of
withholding knowledge from the general public; and (2) a style
(as in literature or art) characterized by deliberate vagueness
or abstruseness.  In this article, obscurantism in the first and
second senses are explained in the following two separate
sections, respectively. Friedrich Nietzsche distinguishes the
obscurantism of metaphysics and theology from the "more subtle"
obscurantism of Kant's critical philosophy and modern
philosophical skepticism, claiming that obscurantism is that
which obscures existence: "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. Friedrich Wilhelm
Nietzsche (October 15 1844 August 25 1900