I recently realised that one of the big goals in my life is the pursuit of clarity. Clarity in all things, in my understanding of myself, my relationships and those around me. Clarity in an intellectual sense; that I have clear justified opinions crafted out of deep and sound knowledge. Clarity in an emotional sense, that I am sensitive to and can isolate what I am feeling and what has caused it and that I can understand the emotions of others in turn. I’ve only recently realised this goal, and I’m still only beginning to understand it. Seeing as one of the least clear things in my life is my understanding of myself, it’s ironic that I’m trying to gain clarity of my own nature by exploring my own pursuit of clarity.

When I was younger, as for most children, everything was much clearer. I was brought up with Christianity and that was able to answer most of the questions I had, but at the same time I used to read a great deal of science. As I grew older the influence of scientific thinking on me increased and by the time I reached my mid teens and discovered philosophy and Philip K Dick my Christianity crumbled under the weight of all the new ideas I was coming into contact with. This was a great turning point in my life and I certainly don’t regret moving away from Christianity, but because of it a great number of questions that I used to have answers to now seem to be bottomless pits of questions leading to more questions. These aren’t just big metaphysical issues like ‘is there a God?’, but also smaller things like how to manage relationships and what knowledge I should be acquiring. It means I am generally lost in a sea of questions and misunderstandings, however I’d rather be drowning here than commit to an authority just for the sake of providing answers and security for myself.

I first realised that I was seeking a form of life-wide clarity when I was last trying to work out my political opinions. I have read a fair bit of political and economic theory, as well as history and social commentary, but I still have no firm political stance or opinions on how society should be organised, I only have moral responses to things I see going on around me. If anything, as I find that as I learn more about social science, my views become increasingly cloudy and I find myself flipping between opinions as I read convincing (or unconvincing) arguments from different sides.

I think part of the reason I like mathematics and the hard sciences is that they tend to provide coherent and generally-accepted answers to questions, and the unknown questions are unknown for everyone until some sort of breakthrough occurs. This new knowledge then tends to be accepted fairly rapidly as it is scrutinised by other scientists (unless controversy is involved) and becomes part of the established scientific canon. Of course, there are revolutions in science, however in any given paradigm most people tend to be on the same page. In the social sciences, on the other hand, there can be multiple answers to questions and seemingly intelligent and convincing arguments to believe many of them. Even if I spent the rest of my life studying social science, my answers to questions and problems would be changing from year to year as I gained clarity in my knowledge and understanding. In the hard sciences there is a continuous process of clarification too, but there is often a distinct level of clarity required to understand an answer and once this is gained the answer is concrete, even if the full intricacies and repercussion of the solution are not apparent.

Why do I pursue this clarity? Well, that’s still mostly unclear to me (ha!). I think that I desire a solid foundation to work from. If I have a set political or social ideal to work towards and I know the path to realise that ideal then I can get cracking and work on it. As it stands, I have no idea what direction I should be heading in. I know what I want from a moral perspective, peace, love, tolerance etc, but I can’t begin to imagine what a society with those values would look like, how to work to create one or whether such a utopia is even possible. I’m reduced to acting on relatively small scale issues such as ‘I know it’s good to support amnesty international because they have clear moral aims’, I leave the logistics of achieving those aims for them to worry about.

I’m unlikely to ever gain the clarity I seek, and even if I do that probably wouldn’t be a good thing. Unless I have some sort of epiphany and join a religion or line up behind some towering intellectual figure I’m just going to have to make do with piecemeal, narrow and shallow knowledge I do have and try and live more by my moral convictions rather than my ever-shifting opinions.