If two people are in disagreement in that one (person A) believes that the meaning or outcome of a particular thing is clear whereas the other (person B) thinks that the meaning or outcome is unclear, murky, ambiguous, then it is nearly always best to side with person B, for she is closer to the truth. This is so even when the meaning which person A believes is so clear is in fact, in some demonstrable way, the correct meaning. For the dispute is not over what the meaning is but over whether it is clear. And until one has seen how the meaning of a thing is confusing and uncertain, one has no right to declare that one understands the thing. One who has not passed through the swamp cannot be said to have reached the castle. If they are found in the castle, it is only by chance and by ignorance. They should be sent back out of it.
Is it not the great mistake of our age that we believe that things can be made perfectly clear and wish to make them perfectly clear: either that we can know precisely the nature of the divine (fundamentalist religion) or that we can know precisely the nature of the world (fundamentalist “Sciencism” and radical materialism)? Is it not in the name of clarity, of removing all that refuses to submit to the clarifying gaze of some vast monolith, that nearly everything is to be destroyed: the heathen and the infidel, along with every untamed spark of the soul, the very existence of the soul, the reality of sensation and of thought? Even the possibility of meaning itself must fall before the insistence that all meanings be made clear. There are many here among us who are prepared to reduce the world to absolutely nothing, so long as that nothing will finally be clear and definitely known. But even then the unclarity persists, and they are forced to obliterate nothing as well.
When, in my introductory physics lecture, I explain Galileo’s principle, that all motion is relative, that nothing can be said to be moving or stationary on its own but only in relation to other objects; or when I write on the blackboard Newton’s Third Law of Motion, that if I exert a force on you, you must exert an equal and opposite force on me; or, to take a simpler example, when I tell my students that it is possible for an object to accelerate at a constant rate, that is to be forever changing (its velocity) but changing in a way that remains forever the same; or when I reveal many other things like these— my students always nod and agree that this makes sense, and I know that none of them has understood a thing. Weeks later, the clever ones will grow confused; they will squint and furrow their brows and say that they cannot understand; the most honest of them will doubt me outright, will think perhaps I am wrong about these laws of motion. A few then will come to understand, but to understand in such a way that they can readily find their way back into the position of doubting and not understanding. Over time, it is very possible that they will forget the position of doubting and remember only the fact that was finally stated. In this case, they will have lost understanding and retained only an empty statement. I know that this can happen, because it happens to me. Every semester, going through the same material, I at first can only state the laws; but by dint of effort, I can bring myself back to not understanding them, to finding them baffling.
I tell my students that they must go by way of confusion. This means nothing to them at first, for in many cases they hardly know what it is to be confused in the sense that I mean. They know, of course, what it is to fail an exam, to get an answer wrong, to be “lost”— by which they mean a sort of blankness in the face of something. But to be confused, to discover confusion, one must have thrown oneself at an idea with a kind of blind faith that there is something there in the darkness beyond their understanding to grasp. Knowledge may be got simply, by reading or listening; but understanding can result only from a leap of faith. This is what I am trying to teach my students. Some of them gain an inkling of it, a few even slightly more than an inkling. I am saved, professionally speaking, by the fact that I am only expected to teach them "physics"— by which is not meant the true science of physics but only a set of formulae and diagram-drawing techniques.
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