Tip-Off #205 - The Freedom of Mystery
The danger of clarity.
In times of breakdown, clarity becomes a weapon. Enduring apologists for the crisis—tearing through democracies, identities, and shared meaning—cling to certainty. It’s darkest before dawn, they insist, as if collapse ensures renewal, as if liberal democracy’s demise redeems Absolutes once blurred by pluralism.
But maybe it’s darkest at dawn—when the urge to explain, define, and dominate passes for insight. Opacity offers another kind of lucidity that doesn’t just see what it wants.
We’re obsessed with making things add up. We demand clarity and expect explanations. Lives, cultures, and stories get pressed into neat boxes. The unfamiliar isn’t just noticed; it’s labeled, translated, broken down—acceptable only on our terms.
Take a simple example. “Where are you from?” leads from “Chicago” to the real question: “No, I mean—I know you’re Asian, but what kind?” As if identity were a multiple-choice test.
Or a friend describes her spiritual practice, and someone cuts in, “Oh, so like Buddhism”—boxing it up before hearing it. Or a news anchor presses a protester to “clarify their goals,” as if decades of injustice could be boiled down to a mission statement.
Every moment carries the same pressure: make the unfamiliar familiar, difference safe, and everything look like understanding. What doesn’t fit gets fixed—then praised as “authentic.”
This urge is arrogant: believing nothing is real until we’ve dissected it. Expecting openness becomes a pretext for control, treating everything—and everyone—as a problem to solve. In fighting one another, we grow more alike. We express grievance, urgency, and identity in the same terms—each side emulating the victims it claims to defend.
Leaving room for the unknown in others is trust—that who they are isn’t limited by what we perceive. We don’t get total clarity, but something better: freedom that doesn’t try to take over.
Not everything that resists is hiding. Sometimes it’s just another way of being present. Silence can be tender, holding, honest. It can also be bold: nothing says credibility like knowing when to be quiet.
Even silence has a spine.
Theologians speak of “negative theology”: understanding God as absence, unnamed, unclassified. It echoes the ineffability of the Tao—“The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao”—and Moses approaching “the thick darkness where God was.”
As the poet Roethke said, “In a dark time, the eye begins to see.” Truth talks its face away.
Cultural critic Édouard Glissant links this to “opacity”—a right not to be understood. Not as evasion but as a form of respect. He rejects the idea that transparency guarantees truth.
Drawing on his Caribbean heritage, Glissant urged “thinking like an archipelago”—seeing things as distinct yet connected, like islands. Opacity resists reducing others to our reflection. It defies the Western impulse to universalize, opening space for a more inclusive world.
G.K. Chesterton once wrote, “I had always vaguely felt, of course, that there were other people. But it is only in moments of definite psychological experience that one truly realizes it, as a man might suddenly notice that the house next door, which he had always thought empty, is actually lived in.”
Other people exist—not as our extensions but as full, irreducible presences.
Mystery isn’t what keeps us apart. It’s what makes connection possible.
Let differences speak for themselves. Generosity shows in how we stay, not just in what we accept.
Now and then, we glimpse this politically. In citizens’ gatherings, strangers with opposing views sometimes truly listen—no slogans, no grandstanding—just the slow work of staying curious.
Why prefer an enemy to a conversation? Not to tame differences but to hear what they actually are.
There’s more to others than we’ve known—and more to ourselves than we admit. Mystery makes room for truth beyond what we’ve chosen to believe.
Genuine clarity is possible only when what is to be “known” is allowed to remain open and itself: an attitude close to reverence.
Darkness may be the dawn of fresh insight.
Notes and reading
“…each side emulating the victims it claims to defend.” - “Right-Wing Victim Power,” Geoff Shullenberger (Substack - May 23, 2025). Shullenberger is managing editor of Compact. Here, he traces how the New Right has co-opted René Girard—Thiel, Vance, and company as connoisseurs of mimetic theory, while feigning “anti-mimetic” to justify their own rivalries.
Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) accepted universal reason but asked how reason functions and what can truly be said in its name. He introduced “archipelagic thinking”—a concept now gaining wider attention—linking global créolisation to the view that identity is inherently plural. Differences, for Glissant, coexist without being reducible to sameness. Poetics of Relation (1997).
> Michael Wiedorn, Think Like an Archipelago: Paradox in Édouard Glissant (2018). Glissant envisions an inclusive singularity—persuasive, not prescriptive—a unity forged through conversation rather than conformity. This vision resists both prescriptive universality, which flattens difference, and populist nativism, which exploits it.
Strangers to Ourselves – Julia Kristeva (1991): “We are foreigners to ourselves, and it is with the help of that sole support that we can attempt to live with others.” Bulgarian-born French philosopher and psychoanalyst Kristeva explored language, subjectivity, and the unconscious, and watched postmodernism come and go.
“The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao,” Tao Te Ching, Chapter One. “Moses approached the thick darkness where God was” - Exodus 20:21.
Theodore Roethke - “In a Dark Time” from Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (1963).
G.K. Chesterton - The Napoleon of Notting Hill (2023), chapter 1.
“Genuine clarity…an attitude close to reverence” —after philosophical theologian Catherine Pickstock, in another context. After Writing (1998), 20. A hard, radical read that construes “presence” sacramentally—redeeming it from the confines of conventional postmodernism and recovering Real Presence.
Other
“Negative Capability” - “It struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” - John Keats, The Complete Sonnets of John Keats - All 64 Poems - Chapter VIII (Kindle Edition, 2017).
The Transparency Society and The Burnout Society (2015) - Byung-Chul Han, a cultural theorist currently teaching in Berlin. “Transparency is an ideology… a compulsion that flattens us—making us functional elements within a system.” Han, German-Korean, blends Eastern and Western philosophical traditions—a synthesis that has earned him significant acclaim.
Tip-Off #204 - Contradiction and clarity
Thanks! Re rich insights: you surely reciprocate.
Rich insights all through this post with your striking, aphoristic turns of phrase. Some of what you write here strikes me as outlooks my experience has prepared me for but waited until now to find expressions for them. Three examples: ". . . nothing says credibility like knowing when to be quiet." Glissant "rejects the idea that transparency guarantees truth." and our need for "the slow work of staying curious." Yes to all three. Michael Wiedorn's book looks fascinating, too.