Thinkling

Are things that cannot be expressed simply just not worth expressing? In other words, can simplicity be forged into an absolute measure of worth and truthfulness? Not only that such claim is highly disputable, it probably carries slightly totalitarian tendencies in it. To postulate that simplicity is the ultimate standard necessarily presumes that existing problems, conflicts, dichotomies, and questions, all in principle have a clear, unambiguous, "simple" answer and solution. If simplicity is the thing, there must be a simple formula to settle every dubious point. That relegates any difficult complexity of non-simple treatments of problems, conflicts, issues, into the dustbin. For such difficult complexity then can only be possibly conceived as showy intellectualism or muddleheaded self-absorbed dreaminess, neither of which is capable of simply getting things clear.

This stance can assume interestingly wide array of guises: the cult of simplicity has been prominently romantic in its many documented historical varieties; but it can just as well pose as a rationale for very cynical types of world-view. For one thing, an ostensible preference for things and statements "simple" has often been a convenient excuse for intellectual sluggishness and sloppiness, or even for a more fundamental type of mental laziness: if something requires effort to be understood, then it is at fault, not my lack of perseverance in trying to grasp the meaning.

Of course, the distinction here is tricky, because there actually is beyond doubt any number of examples of statements, sermons, speeches, texts, etc. which render simple truths in convoluted and strained language, or worse still, which hide their hollow emptiness behind a facade of verbose terminological jungle. The gift of clear expression and lucid writing is as immensely valuable as it is rare. However, if there are subjects that do not lend themselves easily to a simple and brief statement, this probably still does not disqualify the subject as such. After all, we do not expect an untrained mind to be able to effortlessly and immediately penetrate the formulations of the general theory of relativity, of Crick's and Watson's description of DNA double helix, or of Edmund Husserl's elaboration of transcendental phenomenology. Still, all of these do have something crucial to say to our understanding and self-understanding as human beings, although they undoubtedly require study of expert vocabularies and conventions of logical argument to even begin to be vaguely comprehensible.

That something is "difficult to understand" surely cannot be counted as the sole disqualifying factor in its disadvantage. Little profound beauty or value or significance is to be found without some degree of effort. And it is impossible to know whether the effort is actually worth the result obtained, unless there exists at least a modicum of mental readiness to make such effort. At the end of, or at least half way down, a difficult text or film we may – most likely we often will – well find that the effort is not worth it. But, as is usually the case in this joyfully ambiguous and multifaceted world of ours, there is no simple way to cut the Gordian knot by disposing wholesale of all those observations and statements which someone may find not suiting their taste just because they are not sufficiently simple. Simple is by no means identical with simplistic.