Acknowledge the Truth of Your Confusion: It’s Helpful

Interview framing (Jeremy Bendik-Keymer):

Some people think because they want a world that is intimate and clear.  This is a world where things fit together, and you can see how things make sense.  Moreover, what matters is clear.  You are not avoiding reality.  You sit with confusion when it comes.  To give up on facing confusion would be a betrayal.  It would be like accepting confusion and acting as if it were not really there.  It would be like acting that you know when you can see that you really do not know.

But facing confusion is not easy.  It’s uncomfortable, deeply so, acting on the inside of your mind, shaking up even your nights and, sometimes, the comfort of daily things – sitting down for coffee but remaining unsettled, talking with friends while something bothers you in the back of your mind, or doing your work but with some uncertainty beside you like movement flickering just out of your field of vision. 

We might think that confusion has a home in, of all places, philosophy.  Mightn't getting lost in thought be congenial to philosophical practice?  But after talking with Mark Fiocco, I came to appreciate how confusion can be exiled from philosophical training in the academy.  Why isn't confusion congenial to professional philosophy?  Has the profession exiled something basic to having a mind, to being oneself, and to living in the world, exiled it right where and when the discipline should be one of the places where being confused belongs?  Shouldn't confusion be welcome?

I talked with Mark Fiocco in January and February of this year, reconnecting after many years.  Mark and I used to work together at American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, where Mark also knew Sidra.  Having known Mark personally, I trust his philosophical instincts.  He has a lot of integrity and philosophizes from a personal place.  Yet his work is highly abstract and, although not conventional in analytic philosophy for its conclusions, is solidly engaged with analytic metaphysics, epistemology, and ontology.  I know Mark philosophizes by acquaintance as well as through theory.  I wanted to ask him about the intimacy of the mind with its questions and with even highly abstract things.  That, I thought, would shake up some of the ways we might think of the personal in philosophy and interrupt expectations that a series on the interpersonal in philosophy would be just about dramas between people, interpersonal morality, or things on the side of sentimentality.

What I came to consider after talking to Mark were three things:

1.  Getting to know the world begins in confusion.

2.  The profession of philosophy can fail to support confusion. (Mark corrected the term ”discipline” to be “profession”  when I first conflated the two.)

3.  What should be congenial in philosophy is staying with a certain sort of confusion together, and it would be good for philosophical institutions to support just that.

I then wrote up these things and asked Mark to carry on our discussions via an email interview.  Since Mark is so exacting with words, I was nervous about reporting on what I'd heard.  I thought it best to relay our discussions in dialogue.

Jeremy:  Mark, I took away (1) from our discussions, that “Getting to know the world begins in confusion.”  Can you qualify or correct that claim?  Can you explain what confusion means to you?  What sort of confusion are we talking about?  How did you come to some such thought?  What place does it have in your life and work?

Mark: I wouldn’t say that “Getting to know the world begins in confusion.” I think knowledge is pretty easy to get: you just have to be acquainted with things, and accept them. To be acquainted with things, all you have to do is confront, passively, what is there. I also don’t think there is a world, some one thing that is everything — I think there is just a multiplicity of things. This point might seem a quibble, but I actually think it’s quite important.

Now regarding confusion, I would say something like “Understanding things begins in confusion” or “Acquiring insight into things begins with confusion,” where understanding or having insight are more sophisticated epistemic states.  Cats and dogs and babies and small children have plenty of knowledge — I’m not sure, though, that they’re ever confused. Confusion is, I think, a much more advanced cognitive position.

It’s a position that arises not through merely trying to know what a thing is or what it’s like, what qualities it itself has. Rather, confusion arises through trying to see how some thing is related to other things and to understand how those connections might (or ought to) be meaningful to oneself or are meaningful to someone else—and what this complex of relations and meanings reveal about yet other things less obviously related to the one with which you began.

Confusion is, then, different than just not knowing something in particular, it’s much more involved than that. You can get a good sense of what I mean by considering the difference between not knowing what someone said on a particular occasion (“what did they say?”) and knowing exactly what they said but being disconcerted by it (“did they just say what I think they did?!”), trying to square what was said with one’s expectations in that context and the ostensible motivation of the speaker and other associated considerations. Confusion’s an active mental state with a unique phenomenal character — being confused has a distinctive feel. It is, for me, very unpleasant, almost repulsive, in the sense that it defies engagement — it repels reflection — and so is a difficult state to maintain. One can easily — too easily — just turn away from it.

Confusion arises in everyday circumstances for me all the time: watching some interaction between my two young children, hearing some political position a friend holds, seeing something in the news, trying to guide myself on a live map through a warren of streets. But what got me reflecting on confusion in a more serious way is its presence in my professional life. Most of the time that I am really doing philosophy I am deeply confused. Seriously.

When things are going well, when I’m really getting into a project, I spend literally hours a day uncomfortably confused. It is, for me, a so-familiar and crucial part of the process I go through when writing anything of real significance (to me). It’s unpleasant, but worthwhile. Being confused is what leads to novel questions and interesting answers — and resolving confusion is the most satisfying intellectual pleasure I know. It can be exhilarating — that thrill is a large part of why I do philosophy.

Jeremy:  Thanks, Mark.  This is all really interesting, and I hope to come back to some of your assumptions later. Your comment about multiplicity and the world was intriguing.  But for now, I’d like to press on with the discussions we’ve had, since they were so rich. 

The second time we met over Zoom, you led the discussion with some responses to the place of confusion in professional philosophy, especially when working with young career scholars.  Specifically, you were concerned that (2) the profession of philosophy can fail to support confusion.  Can you tell us a little about what you meant by that and why you think that it is true?

Mark:  I had a few things in mind when I said that our profession – not ”discipline” – can fail to support confusion. I have some qualms, relevant here, about how undergrads are introduced to and taught philosophy, but I’ll set those aside to focus on concerns I have regarding the education of grad students.

As is perhaps clear from what I said earlier, I think confusion is a good thing (or it can be). Confusion can lead to incisive questions and, eventually, to answers that provide the basis for original and insightful work. Most likely grad students are frequently confused. Yet they aren’t told that confusion is a thing to appreciate and embrace and exploit. They’re probably told nothing about it. So, they reject it because confusion is such an unpleasant state and because it’s usually associated with novices.

They also probably reject it because it seems incompatible with what they’re experiencing. They’re hearing professors present material that’s been mastered by them. So, even if that material once did confuse those professors, it no longer does. They’re reading papers that even if they are the products of confusion might no longer bear its marks. The grad students that are the most conspicuous are the ones that appear the least confused, the ones who have the most to say in seminars and colloquia.

Since they’re not told anything positive about confusion, I think grad students feel some pressure to deny their confusion or to get rid of it as soon as possible or to hide it, to “fake it until they make it.” I think grad students should be told that confusion is a good thing for the reasons I’ve already given. Confusion is crucial to real learning. They shouldn’t expect it to go away or even hope that it does. If it did, they would be losing something that could be invaluable to us all. I’m confused all the time, and I’ve been devoting myself to philosophy for over 25 years.

Yet even if they wanted to take full advantage of their confusion, and were encouraged to, they can’t really. It takes a lot of time to inhabit and work through confusion. Often, grad students are not afforded that time and urged to take it. They are sometimes pressed to speak when they — justifiably — have nothing to say. They might be pressed to ask certain kinds of questions, pushed to be the first to ask a question in the discussion at a colloquium, where the expectation is that they be critical of what was just presented — to show what’s wrong with it or, more charitably, to say something illuminating in light of what was just presented — instead of being allowed to engage it more openly or obliquely. It would be great if students felt they could say in discussion: “I’m totally confused. I don’t know what to say.” This prompts the response, “What’s confusing you?”. Then one can ask a “naïve”, yet penetrating question like: “What does it mean to say…?” or “Why do you say…?” or “What exactly is the issue here?” or “What is at stake here?” or “Why are you assuming…has anything to do with…?”

Jeremy: This is wonderful. Thanks for saying this, Mark. It’s both humane and philosophical.

Mark: Another thing that inhibits confusion is the immediate pressure that grad students are under, from a number of directions (their peers, some faculty, social media), to publish. They think they have to publish if they’re ever going to get a job.

Maybe this is true. But if you’re not allowed to be confused and to work through the confusion, in the arduous, idiosyncratic way this demands, and you’re pushed to publish, you’re going to publish something that’s not that different from what’s already there, a little twist on something that you — and others — already understand. And that’s probably not going to be very interesting or significant. It’s probably not even going to be very interesting or significant to the person who wrote it. It’s likely not going to fulfill the interests that motivated the student to do philosophy in the first place!

This banishment of confusion in the education of philosophers is detrimental to the profession and to all of us in it. If confusion isn’t regarded as positive, and if you never learn to acquire the pleasures and benefits of working through it, you will recoil from confusion and dismiss its source. However, work that is extraordinary, challenging or unusually profound is going to be confusing.

Jeremy:  Mark, I wonder if we can come back to some things, which I will try to relate through where I point.  From our initial talks over Zoom, I took away (3), that what should be congenial in philosophy is staying with a certain sort of confusion together, and it would be good for philosophical institutions to support just that.  I take this to be a comment about being disciplined when doing philosophy, and I was struck by your distinction between the profession and the discipline of philosophy.  (Was it analogous to my distinction between philosophy and its institutions?  How was it different?)  This led me to want to ask you how being confused is part of being disciplined when doing philosophy.

You may have already spoken to some of that in your previous reply.  But I wonder if there is more to say?  In particular, since this series is about the intra- and inter-personal in philosophy, I wondered about what it is to be personally disciplined to engage with productive confusion in philosophy.  What are the qualities – or more broadly, what are the main phenomenological marks – of how to be disciplined in one’s personal responses when confronting philosophical confusion?

Relating these concerns together, I wonder more basically how philosophical confusion presents itself to a person.  Do you have anything more or less systematic to say about how particularly philosophical confusion appears to someone who is living as a whole person, not simply as a professional?

Mark: When you talk about being ‘disciplined’, do you have in mind a traditional, familiar notion — like, along the lines of exhibiting self-control and firmly maintaining a direction — or do you have something else in mind? A sort of punning notion related to being part of or working within a particular discipline? It’s not clear to me from your comments.

Jeremy: I meant the former but as a feature of the latter.  In other words, to do philosophy takes a certain sort (or certain sorts) of discipline (e.g., consistency with words and thoughts, fidelity to questions, fastidiousness with sources and evidence).  I am wondering about sitting with confusion in this regard and its personal dimensions.

Mark: Ok, got it.

By the discipline of philosophy, I mean the art of thinking critically, the cultivation of that skill that enables one to gain insight into things and to understand them. The profession of philosophy is all the social apparatus that makes it possible for one to make a living practicing the discipline. The former is, at least for me, mostly private and guided by curiosity about some thing(s) or other. The latter is necessarily public and maintained by interests that might have nothing to do with curiosity, insight or understanding. I guess, then, the distinction I’m making is similar to yours.

I really don’t know the extent to which people can be confused together. If you can articulate what’s confusing you — to the point where you can get someone on the same page to think with you — you aren’t deeply confused. It’s that sort of deep confusion — being completely at sea — that I was trying to give voice to. Confusion, of this deep kind, seems like a solitary state to me. So, consequently, I really don’t know the extent to which the profession (or the institutions relevant to the discipline) should try to support interpersonal confusion.

If you want to see past “the box” (the one we are supposed to think outside of) or see what holds the box together — in whatever context — you have to challenge what many take for granted to the point where things look new and confusing. Asking those (difficult) questions and evaluating their answers require a doggedness that’s hard to maintain without discipline. Then, when familiar things look strange — or disappear altogether — you have to be disciplined to withstand and hold the confusion that ensues. Sometimes you need to keep that confusion for a while, if you’re going to work through and benefit from it (by seeing things anew).

Being confused is uncomfortable, even painful, and we have, it seems, a number of different mechanisms to alleviate it in a cheap way (that is, in a way that probably won’t be beneficial), like accepting something that is dubious or deferring to authority or just dismissing what’s confusing to take up something else. Obviously, in some cases, accepting what you’ve always accepted or just letting something go might be the apt course — but satisfying yourself that it is, is what takes time and the discipline to get uncomfortable, going against the grain of how you were thinking or what everyone else is doing. And then going on (and on) in that uncomfortable way.

What prompts confusion initially is thinking that something ought to make sense — be illuminating or clearly valuable — and recognizing that it doesn’t. You have to want things to make sense in order to be confused in the first place, and you need to be piqued when they don’t. That pique has a distinctive feel. One part of being disciplined, with respect to confusion, then, is demanding things make sense. The next part is fighting to see to the bottom of things, staying with them until they make sense — until one understands the relevant things and their putative connections well enough to apprehend that they actually do fit together in the ways they are supposed to. Perhaps the hardest part, and the most important, is not letting yourself stop inquiring until you’re satisfied that things actually do make sense.

This confused inquiry, the inquiry where you’re trying to get things to make sense, also has a distinctive feel — for me it’s of pushing against a wall or trying to see through it — as you struggle to find the right angle or idea or question that will enable you to make sense of what’s confusing you. It’s hard to say more about what it is to make sense, which is obviously a key notion here, because this can differ from person to person and be different in different contexts for the same person. What it is for things to make sense to a metaphysician is different than what it is for things to make sense to someone buying a car or choosing a grad program. When things make sense, they fit together smoothly with a persuasive pull — even if you suspend judgment on that pull or recognize it to be illusory. (And that pull has a distinctive feel, too.) In the end, productive confusion results in things making sense. Once they do, you’re in a position to accept that view of things or to engage meaningfully with it in some other way, say, by challenging it or taking it apart in an instructive way.

I should say that I don’t think there is anything special about philosophical confusion or, in other words, that there is such a thing as distinctly philosophical confusion. I think there is just confusion, the expectation of sense and yet not finding it; it just has different objects in different circumstances. The confusion I experience as a professional philosopher is really no different in feel than the confusion I have when I am not “doing philosophy”, you know, when I’m just living life.

I sometimes get confused when talking to a friend or my wife when things aren’t fitting together in a way that I find satisfying. My wife will have presented all the details she regards as relevant and yet things won’t make sense to me, so I have to stop and ask questions and backtrack and go over things. In some cases, the issue really is not that significant. So this sort of confusion can be very frustrating to people if they are just trying to have a casual conversation or are making what they regard as a quick point. My point here is that the confusion I feel in these situations is just the same as when I am earnestly writing. Sometimes the disciplined response is to just let things go, to leave them jumbled.

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This is an installment of Into Philosophy.

ge·ni·al | ˈjēnyəl | adjective friendly and cheerful: waved to them in genial greeting. • literary (especially of air or climate) pleasantly mild and warm. DERIVATIVES genially | ˈjēnyəlē | adverb ORIGIN mid 16th century: from Latin genialis ‘nuptial, productive.’ The Latin sense was adopted into English; hence the senses ‘mild and conducive to growth’ (mid 17th century), later ‘cheerful, kindly’ (mid 18th century).

Thanks to Katherine Cassese for the expression "You sit with confusion when it comes" and for some strikethroughs.