Clarity, simplicity

In philosophy in America you're usually either for clear arguments, or you're against using the standard of clarity to judge all argumentation. While the former position excludes much good argument by saying it's not clear, a lot of ink is spilled trying to show how the latter position also demands some sort of rigor, rather than an "anything goes" form of argumentation. A lot of this is predicated on a stodgy sort of suspicion of rhetoric, but also on a real and pressing need to show how philosophical discussion itself works at a certain sophisticated level, and doesn't gain its technicality or professional status just through the robustness of the objects or issues it tackles or the sorts of insight into those issues ("results") it generates.

But maybe this situation can be changed if we distinguish clarity from simplicity, and say that good arguments are simple. Now, clarity presupposed a sort of guiding rationality and openness of discussion, along the lines that Popper (always enjoyed by Anglo-Americans) outlines in his nice 1959 preface to his Logik der Forschung: here, proper philosophical work proceeds by

stating one's problem clearly and examining its various proposed solutions critically. [...] Whenever we propose a solution to a problem, we ought to try as hard as we can to overthrow our solution, rather than defend it. Few of us, unfortunately, practice this precept; but other people, fortunately, will supply the criticism for us if we fail to supply it ourselves. Yet criticism will be fruitful only if we state our problem as clearly as we can and put our solution in a sufficiently definite form--a form in which it can be critically discussed.

That is, in a clear form. When either rationality or criticality become compromised, then, the discussion becomes unclear--irrational, and something like the sharing of mere beliefs about the world.

But instead of privileging these opposites--or, since we never really have to go that far in order for Popper's edifice to appear too constraining, showing that discussion doesn't immediately become these opposites if it lacks rationality or criticality--we might just say they both rational discussion and irrational discussion can either state the problem simply or not.

But why simplicity? Frankly because it allows that sort of critical refinement or processing that clarity calls for, without clarity itself. It allows criticism to become something like elaboration, rather than the attempt to try as hard as we can to overthrow any particular solution, etc. etc. And I think that, really, this is what most attempts to be clear already try to accomplish: the elaboration of a problem along finer and more specific lines. Thus, there's a sort of alternate history of simplicity lying underneath all that lip service paid to clarity.

Of course, this all is opposed to complexity--complexity becomes the bad term here. But is that really so unfortunate? I remember an ethics class where my professor scoffed at the word "problematize," because it is used so often now to denote the process of making rigorous consideration of something possible. But--and you all know I'm quite an avid reader of some serious problematizers--I've always been quite inclined to agree with him. Complexity and contradiction might be interesting for architecture, but the best and most creative American philosophy often proceeds by simplifying (thinking, often, that it is being clear). This philosophy's greatest weapon here is the coining of some particular word that is useful, that shifts the argument, that is just metaphoric enough to make the rest of the discourse pull towards it and use it--and allow the rest of the discourse to avoid multiplying unnecessary (because not really used, tinkered with, reused) metaphors. This all perhaps appears naive to people in the Continental tradition, but I don't think that's because such they think such simplifying overlooks the complexity of various issues: it's just because such minimal problematization sounds that way, or has something of an over-humble quality to it (which can often turn around into a sort of tablethumping growl that "that's all there is to it," etc., which is just dogmatism).

Now, much bad American philosophy works with the same sort of tone, but it can obviously now be dismissed as just trying to be clear while it multiplies problems needlessly. Word-coining can multiply things here too, unfortunately (though often because a new word is not coined, and the word loses its usability--which does not mean, either, that it has at that point become technical: in reality, the discourse has just become nominalist). But if simplicity is good argument, we shouldn't have much to do with micro-issues piled upon micro-issues as is prevalent in, say, philosophy of mind--though there are also a lot of great game-changing, simplifying maneuvers here.

Especially if we don't think of avoiding complexity in any old Occam's razor sense--something again that falls perhaps in the clarity-box, oddly enough (and makes the effort to say nothing at all seem like the goal of certain arid essays by Putnam, for instance--however much they are occasionally lit up by crazy flashes of weirdness). If we could make complexity the enemy in a Latourian sense--we shouldn't multiply causes before we've followed the actors (which is how I read him, perhaps a bit against the grain: let's get complex in only the right ways!)--then keeping things simple would mean something slightly different and less agonizing. It would allow us to say that keeping things simple involves not letting too much needless detail take over the presentation of even detailed issues, or understand how specificity (which I referred to earlier) can be simplifying (something we often forget). Thus, issues can get small and fine, but they often will be expressed and discussed with a goal of reducing complexity, rather than creating it. And if this means using a technical language, that's okay too, isn't it (especially if we refrain from equating nominalism or un-use with technicality, as I did above)? It's use should just have similar goals (and that might make the American language, when it is simple, sound less naive).

In short, a lot of what we privilege under clarity can be chalked up to privileging simplicity. Some of the best American Continental philosophers seem to work in this way already (Graham Harman's "overmining" is a great example of what I take to be a very Anglo-like phrase-coining), combining, as it were, the best of both traditions. Here, I'd just like to emphasize what their work has to say back to the Anglo-American love of clarity.