Our world, you suggest in your latest book A World Without Why, is not one which is ‘in order’, but one which seems characterized by instability, insecurity, unintelligibility and uncertainty. Could you expand on what vision of the world this gives us? Is it intended to be a substantive claim or more of an exaggeration prompting critical reflection?

Raymond Geuss: At the beginning of The German Ideology, Marx writes that in the future there will only be one science: the science of history. If you look at the history of the human species, it seems reasonable to assume that human beings have generally been confronted with a world that did not immediately reveal itself to them in its true shape and also did not automatically satisfy their needs. As members of the human species acted on this environment so as to cause it to satisfy their needs, they thereby created new needs. When humans need water, that water is not always easily available. When the Romans began to build aqueducts to make water available, they did contribute to satisfying that need more reliably but at the cost of generating a new need, namely a need for engineers with a certain kind of specialized experience and expertise who could ensure that the aqueducts were maintained in good order.

To say that the world is unstable, insecure, and uncertain was not intended to be an exaggeration, but simply an expression of this historical observation. The claim that the world is not ‘in order’ adds to that generalisation an evaluative twist. Socrates expected the book by Anaxagoras to show that it was for the best that the world was as it was, but you could only expect to have to learn this from a book if your immediate experience did not incline you to take it for granted. The world we live in does not on the whole conform to the patterns, which we think it would be good for it to instantiate. There is a discrepancy between how we perceive the world to be and how we think it would be good for it to be. To assert this (rather than just entertaining it, as it were, silently) is to act so as to highlight or draw attention to this discrepancy, and thus to intervene politically (in a minimal way) in the struggle against complacency.

In response to this, you suggest that at times seeking clarity ‘can be seen as a requirement of conformity to structures of repression’ (A World Without Why, 41). Why, and to what extent can a focus on clarification be a bad thing? And how can obscurity have a positive force and value?

RG: The concept of ‘clarity’ is not itself absolutely clear, indisputable, and self-validating virtue in all contexts. It does not unquestionably take priority over all other virtues. What clarity is, and what sorts of things concretely count as ‘clear’ depends on context.

Something is clear for someone, in some context, for some purpose. How important is it to be clear (and what that will mean) equally depends on the context, and that means on a set of presupposed human purposes and assumptions about background conditions. It is not, then, that ‘unclarity’ is a positive virtue, as that the whole question of what should count as clear in a given context is more open than people often take it to be. Given that clarity is often depended on context, it is very often (and almost invariably in politics) a good idea to ask what kind of clarity is being demanded. Clarity for whom – for what kind of people, how placed and with what beliefs and interests – clarity for what purposes, under what further assumptions, in what context. The point about ‘clarity’ is parallel to that made by Herbert Marcuse in the 1960s in his essay on ‘repressive toleration’, which everyone used to read, or at any rate pretend to know about, but which now seems to have dropped out of view. He did not hold that all toleration was bad, but rather he wanted to make two slightly distinct points. The first was that in reality the liberal societies that professed universal tolerance, actually did not practice it – roughly speaking they exercised toleration toward the Right, but found various ways of repressing views from the Left. The second point was that it would actually be a catastrophe to treat the views of those who preach sociability, compassion, human cooperation and those who actively propagated sadistic practices as equally to be tolerated. Whatever the practical complications involved in dealing with real cases, it seems wrong not to discriminate at all here.

Similarly, the demand for ‘clarity’ can in some circumstances be an expression of a more or less innocent incapacity on the part of the person who makes the demand. If you think what I am saying is ‘not clear’ it is not apriori true that that is my problem. This demand, can, however, also in some circumstances be a mask for a highly motivated rejection of something that would threaten my own position or interests.