“Clarity is the good faith of philosophers.”Luc de Vauvenargues · Reflecții și maxime · 1746 · Maxima 391
If you can't be understood, you don't want to be: clarity is honesty, obscurity is hiding.
Vauvenargues ties style to ethics: just as honesty in business means hiding nothing, clarity in thought means hiding nothing behind heavy words. The mechanism is simple — formulating clearly forces you to check whether you have anything to say; an obscure sentence can mask emptiness. A scientific text may be hard because its subject is hard, but a philosopher who is needlessly hard to understand asks the reader to trust him on his word, not to understand him.
Clarity is not only a virtue of the writer; it is also a tool for the reader. Asking a page to be paraphrased in plain words is not laziness; it is a test of honesty. If the author has a thought, the paraphrase preserves it. If not, the paraphrase empties it. Think of a rental contract: if you cannot say in other words what your obligations are, someone chose not to be clear. Likewise, a philosopher who resists paraphrase is really asking you to accept his authority, not his argument. Yet clarity has an honest limit: not every thought can be simplified without loss, and genuine difficulty is not the author's fault. How, then, do you tell authentic difficulty from obscurity that hides a void?
Why it matters A quick test for any theoretical text: if it cannot be paraphrased simply, it was probably never thought through to the end.