Continental Connections Thursday #2: On clarity and exact thinking

 In this short 40 second clip, Bertrand Russell expresses what is likely a widely shared sentiment - clarity and exact thinking can serve a therapeutic function. Inexact thinking allows for our prejudices, biases, and self-interest to come into play without our noticing, but if we pursue a path of clarity and exact thinking, we will notice. Whether or not "philosophy in the old-fashioned sense," as he puts it, is by its nature immersed in inexact thinking he does not say, though he no doubt thinks a healthy amount of it is so immersed - Russell is nonetheless quite clear that this is not what the world needs now, or it's not the philosophy that will save us from ourselves.

Following up on last week's post on Lou Reed and white noise (as examples of the Deleuzian concept of a concrete universal), I want to challenge Russell's faith in clarity by way of another musical example - in this case, Brian Eno. I wrote about this a few months back on my own blog (here) but felt it was worth revisiting here in light of what I posted last week about concrete universals. If a concrete universal is, at least for Deleuze, much like white noise, then my first experience of hearing Brian Eno's album Another Green World was unnerving at best. As I said in the original post, I felt like jumping from my friend's car. I didn't, and eventually this became one of my favorite albums. What happened here? Is this a case of clear and exact thinking winning out in the end where with delicacy of taste (à la Hume) I was able to detect the subtle differences and patterns where for others who lack such taste what is present is, as Hume puts it, 'all mixed up with other such qualities, so that one can't pick out all the particular flavors from the jumble in which they are presented.' To the uninitiated, therefore, Eno (or take your pick) simply is senseless white noise because they cannot begin to be affected by the patterns and their relations - they are indeed uninitiated. 

Turning now to philosophy, continental philosophers have long been attributed by many with being unclear, at best, or obscurantists, at worst. I can't even count how many times I've heard people complain of Derrida, Deleuze, etc., for being impenetrable, and unnecessarily so - though ironically Derrida claims he found Kripke's Naming and Necessity unclear (and I'd bet he'd say the same of Davidson's term "anomalous monism"). There's a whole host of sociological and other factors we could probably bring in to account for Derrida's reaction - of which I am not qualified to do - but what I'm interested in is the methodological question surrounding clarity. Should we philosophers give greater weight to what is initially senseless white noise and through a delicacy of philosophical taste, through the rigors of and discipline of our training, so to speak, seek an advance in our knowledge as we discern an inner sense that others without such powers of discernment are unable to detect, seeing merely a 'muddled, confused mess'; or should we begin, as Descartes would have us begin, with our Archimedean point, with first principles that are clearly and distinctly perceived, and then build from there a system that can then become increasingly complex and harder to follow (which about describes my experience of going through Halmos's Naive Set Theory)?

For Deleuze we need not choose between one or the other of the two alternatives, but we can follow Leibniz and assert that although the clarity and distinctness of ideas is important they themselves presuppose the confused and obscure - or concrete universals. As counter-intuitive and non-Russellian as this might sound (though perhaps I should not push this point for Russell was himself heavily indebted to Leibniz and wrote an important book on him), Deleuze draws an important contrast between the Cartesian emphasis upon the clear and distinct and the Leibnizian acknowledgement of the confused and obscure. With Leibniz's famous passage on the murmuring of the sea as the textual context, Deleuze states the contrast as follows:

Either we say that the apperception of the whole noise [of the sea] is clear but confused (not distinct) because the component little perceptions are themselves distinct and obscure (not clear): distinct because they grasp differential relations and singularities; obscure because they are not yet 'distinguished', not yet differenciated. These singularities then condense to determine a threshold of consciousness in relation to our bodies, a threshold of differenciation on the basis of which the little perceptions are actualized, but actualized in an apperception which in turn is only clear and confused; clear because it is distinguished or differenciated, and confused because it is clear. DR 213

In other words, an idea is the integration and fusion – con-fusion – of singularities or the component little perceptions (it is their differenciation), and hence it is clear only on the condition of this confusion. We are only conscious of, and have a clear perception of, the murmuring of the sea because the micro-perceptions have crossed a critical threshold and become con-fused to the point where the idea of the murmuring of the sea becomes, as differenciated, conscious and clear. And similarly an idea is distinct only on the condition that the component little micro-perceptions are obscured and filtered from the scene. We thus do not begin with the clear and distinct but with what one could call the hyper-real, and the clear and distinct is in itself nothing other than an expression of what our body can do.

On this last point about what our body can do, since all individual monads, according to Leibniz, express the totality of the world, it might seem every individual is a bundle of confusion and obscurity. To some extent this is indeed the case, but individuals become individuated from one another by virtue of their point of view, by the clear space that is carved out amidst the confusion and obscurity - in short, by what the body can do. Take Jakob von Uexküll's example of the tick. Although much of the world remains confused and obscure to the tick, there is a clear and distinct portion that consists of butyric acid, tactile stimulus, and warmth stimulus. As Uexküll puts it, 'From the enormous world surrounding the tick, three stimuli glow like signal lights in the darkness and serve as directional signs taht lead the tick surely to its target.' A clear and distinct perception is thus inseparable from the confused and obscure.

Returning now to Russell's praise of clarity and exact thinking. To achieve the clarity and exact thinking that will produce the therapeutic effects he seeks, philosophy must also embrace the obscure and confused that is inseparable from this clarity. This is not in an effort to intentionally muddy one's thinking, but rather to caution us against presuming that the clear, exact thinking which has just helped us to recognize and circumvent our prejudices and biases is not itself an instance of a prejudice and bias, a consequence of an unquestioned commonsense given. And philosophers are particularly good at revealing the confusions and obscurities that lurk beneath our most cherished assumptions, assumptions we take to be absolutely clear and distinct. Where Russell may see the confused and obscure as a sign that more work is to be done, and for that reason it is to be taken as a positive first step, it nonetheless remains for Russell a means to an and, a subordinate reality. What if the confused and obscure were to be taken seriously, not as a means to an end, but as a sufficient reality in its own right, and moreover as the condition for the very possibility of clear thinking?