more on premature clarity

The problem with premature clarity in intellectual life is that there’s only way to attain quick clarity: namely, by taking sides in an already existing trench war.

For example, you can attain a great deal of clarity, and win many debates about evolution, simply by reading 2 or 3 books by Richard Dawkins and aggressively mimicking his arguments in order to tear other people to shreds. But that doesn’t mean you’ve really gained a good grounding in the subject, it just means that you’re taking on the easy role of aggressively advocating work that was done by someone else. Some people make an entire early career (it doesn’t work into late career) out of simply staying one step ahead of other people’s reading and using this cutting-edge reading program to provide ammunition for aggressive assaults on those who are a bit slower in working through things. Such people tend to dominate graduate schools and junior faculty life, but to get beyond that it’s usually necessary to have some ideas of your own, and those can take years of solitary work to digest and process.

If you want to see the world with your own eyes, it takes time to free yourself from the thoughts of others that you haven’t yet earned with your own first-hand experience. When new intellectual alternatives emerge, they won’t be entirely clear at first. Worked by few hands, they are not yet polished stones, and will not yet have a ready-made answer for every objection. But if you want to be an orthodox Kantian, orthodox Heideggerian, or something else along those lines, your path will be much easier, because Party Headquarters will already be able to provide answers for any challenge you might face.

It is no exaggeration to say that many of the clearest people I’ve met have also been among the most shallow. They simply have lots of ammunition on hand, paid for by the labor of others.

The kind of clarity worth having is the hard-earned kind: the kind of clarity that you can only finish with, not start with.