Clarity becomes a liability when explanation is treated as a moral obligation rather than a response to the nature of reality itself. Explanation presupposes a stable world, and in a reality defined by flux and becoming, as Heraclitus understood, clarity often falsifies what it claims to illuminate. By recovering Heraclitus’ orientational mode of thinking, depth and intellectual seriousness are preserved not through resolution, but through sustained attentiveness within a culture shaped by technos.
Why Modern Culture Treats Clarity as a Moral Obligation
In our technological society of the spectacle, the notion of clarity enjoys an almost unassailable moral stature, where honesty and responsibility is collapsed into a clear and well-explained expression.
We treat something that is unclear as in need of correction because we assume, under advanced capitalism, that confusion is a sign of failure, whether of thought, communication, or of one’s integrity, and so the remedy is, obviously, the need for further explanation and definition of terms, to resolve the ambiguity and stabilize meaning.
Our reflex towards clarity as an ethical obligation now feels so natural that it is rarely, if ever, questioned.
The idea of being clear in ones communication appears neutral, and perhaps, even benevolent, because it promotes understanding and order, and yet, what this fails to acknowledge is the kind of world this idea presupposes.
Why Explanation Presupposes a Stable Reality
Explanation can only work when the reality it is describing is itself stable, when objects themselves remain in a fixed position long enough to be named, and the conditions for naming are repeated, or, in other words, when the signifier holds still.
Clarity assumes that what is being explained can survive the act of articulation without being changed or distorted by that very act, and it assumes that the nature of truth itself improves when that truth is made transparent.
As we are all aware not all realities behave in this way; there are religious and psychological truths where the act of explanation actually falsifies the experience rather than providing insight, and where fixing meaning actually collapses what is essentially constantly in motion and closes that which was supposed to remain open.
Here, clarity prevents the truth because it has replaced it with a more manageable and stable substitute.
Heraclitus on Flux, Becoming, and the Limits of Explanation
Heraclitus is one thinker who lived in such a reality.
Certainly, what survives of him comes to us in fragments, incomplete thoughts that read less as explanations than as provocations, and this fragmented nature of his thinking could be labeled as obscure, cryptic, and needlessly difficult.
Contemporary readers who have been trained to equate clarity with an earnestness and moral stature could assume that if Heraclitus were only clearer then his thinking would be more useful.
This idea misreads him entirely because he is describing a reality that resists usefulness and clarity, and thus, what fragments we have of him provide a complete and precise response to a world defined by flux, tension, and becoming, where to say that something cleanly is, as being, is to lie about it.
For Heraclitus reality isn’t a collection of stable things that map cleanly into categories but a process of constant becoming, an impermanence rather than any form or structure, where opposites generate one another and any notion of stability or identity is temporary and relational.
In such a reality, explanation freezes the very thing which should remain dynamic, and turns the very movement of impermanence itself into object, creating a false resolution where none actually exists.
Orientation Instead of Authority: Indication, Not Instruction
This is why explanation weakens intellectual authority when reality itself is unstable.
Authority, in Heraclitus’ sense, cannot be created from telling the world what it is because it is ever-changing, so what he is proposing is a sort of orientational power by placing attention on how it is.
Orientation, rather than the traditional philosophic authority, is why his language never bears the resemblance of instruction, but can only ever indicate and point without any resolution, always refusing to do the reader’s work for them like a Zen koan designed to disrupt the habitual thinking of the student.
There is one fragment of Heraclitus that makes this orientational power more explicit than any others, “the lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals, but gives a sign.”
The logic here is practical in that authority lies not in speech or it’s opposite, silence, but in indication; the oracle creates orientation without clarification, explanation, or competition, and thus meaning emerges in the listener’s (or reader’s) mind through the engagement with the indication, rather than consumption of some insight.
This distinction matters since explanation delivers meaning fully formed while indication creates the conditions under which meaning may be found, so that one closes a sense of interpretation while the other sustains it and creates it.
We see that this is precisely why Heraclitus’ fragments endure because their very incompleteness creates these conditions of indication which his thought elucidates; his fragments resist absorption by demanding an active participation from the reader, and in doing so, they preserve a form of authority or orientation that explanation could never replicate.
Heraclitus survives because he does not submit to the demand for clarity.
Why Technos Filters Out Depth and Rewards Legibility
Our contemporary environments are at odds with this type of orientational authority because we have been steeped in technos, which identifies legibility as legitimacy so that what can be made explicit gets rewarded, but what resists this immediacy gets filtered out.
This most modern demand for clarity is never neutral, it is precisely a filtering mechanism that selects against depth.
Heraclitus fails this filter almost immediately because his thinking cannot be summarized without being distorted in the same moment.
If he were alive today he would be forever pressured to explain himself and clarify his terms so that his insights might be made actionable, and therefore, sharable, within the information networks of our social media saturated world, and the moment he complied with this pressure for clarity would be the moment his authority would falter.
The irony here is that what appears as obscurity from within technos is actually a fidelity to reality, and thus we see that Heraclitus isn’t withholding clarity out of elitism, as is so often the charge, but is refusing to stabilize something that could never be stabilized to begin with.
Intelligent people today feel an unrelenting pressure to explain themselves and thus translate nuance into certainty and make depth immediately legible.
This pressure is experienced as an almost ethical responsibility, and it feels necessary, but it often produces the opposite effect, because explanation satisfies this incessant demand for clarity while almost instantaneously dissolving the very authoritative orientation it was meant to secure, for the more fully something is explained and resolved, the less attention and weight it holds.
However, as we have seen from Heraclitus, there is another posture one may take in which authority is preserved through an orientation which refuses completion.
It is a position which requires a tolerance for misinterpretation and for allowing meaning to remain partially unclaimed, but it is a position grounded in fidelity to reality itself.
What Heraclitus models is an intellectual seriousness rooted in orientation: the sustained capacity to remain with movement, tension, and becoming without forcing them into premature form, and his fragments, as well as his thinking, cultivate an attentive participatory depth rather than the consumptive immediacy of resolution, so that meaning arises through engagement and not mere reception.
In our own society of the spectacle shaped by technos, his orientational posture preserves thought as an encounter rather than a consumable product, thus allowing reality to disclose itself as the process it is, instead of the object it’s been made to be.
Where in your own thinking or work have you felt the pressure to clarify something that may have been truer if left unresolved? Let me know in the comments below.
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Dr. Samuel Gilpin is a poet and essayist working where poetic intelligence meets intellectual status: a space where language becomes a tool for perception, presence, and the shaping of a mind that can be felt before it is understood. At samuelgilpin.com, he writes about the architecture of authority, the cultivation of presence, and the role of disciplined thought in a world saturated with noise. He holds a PhD in English Literature, but what he offers isn’t academic; it’s personal, exacting, and built for those who want their intelligence to carry weight. When he’s not writing, he’s reading Eliot for the hundredth time, rewatching The Wire, or lifting weights.