In Praise of Confusion

"The obsession with 'knowing' is our most distinguishing and perilous quality."

That's John Fowles, the novelist, writing not about fiction but about how we know anything at all. In a culture that treats confusion as failure—a bug to be fixed, a gap to be closed—Fowles offers something counterintuitive: what if confusion is the more honest position?

The Clarity Trap

We want things to resolve. The ambiguous situation to clarify. The uncertain relationship to declare itself. The murky feeling to name itself so we can address it. This impulse seems healthy—it's problem-solving, after all. Progress requires knowing where you stand.

But Fowles noticed something: the pursuit of clarity can itself become a distortion. When we refuse to sit with confusion, we often manufacture false clarity instead. We pick a framework, impose it, and call the result understanding. The mess didn't actually resolve—we just decided to stop looking at the parts that didn't fit.

Coherenceism calls this resonance failure through premature closure. The pattern isn't stabilized; it's forced. And forced patterns require ongoing energy to maintain because they're fighting what's actually there.

What Fog Teaches

Laura Pashby writes about chasing fog—literally walking toward obscured landscapes, seeking the places where vision fails. "Losing sight clarifies what matters," she writes. It sounds paradoxical until you try it.

When you can't see everything, you notice what you notice. The small sounds, the quality of the air, the direction you're pulled without visual cues. Fog strips away the dominance of sight and reminds you that you have other ways of knowing. The disorientation isn't dysfunction—it's an invitation to attend differently.

This is what Fowles means about confusion as "a better state of being." Not because ignorance is bliss, but because confusion keeps the question open. The confused person hasn't collapsed the wave function. They're still available to what might emerge.

Productive Disorientation

There's a difference between confusion as paralysis and confusion as practice.

Paralyzed confusion grasps: I need to figure this out before I can act. It treats confusion as an obstacle between you and the real work. The confused state is suffered, not inhabited.

Practiced confusion is different. It asks: What can I learn here that I couldn't learn from clarity? It treats confusion as its own kind of information—a signal that your existing frameworks haven't captured something. The confused state isn't obstacle; it's encounter.

The distinction matters for inner alignment. When your inner life doesn't make sense—when you feel contradictory things, when your stated values don't match your actual choices, when the self seems less unified than you'd like—the clarity impulse says: figure it out, resolve it, get your story straight.

But what if the confusion is accurate? What if the self isn't unified, the values do conflict, and the story has multiple endings? Forcing coherence onto genuine complexity doesn't create alignment. It creates performance.

The Practice

This isn't about celebrating ignorance or refusing to learn. It's about the timing. There's wisdom in knowing when to push for resolution and when to let confusion teach you first.

Some markers of premature closure:

• The "answer" arrived very quickly, without much discomfort
• The resolution required ignoring or minimizing significant data
• You feel defended about your clarity, not curious
• The pattern requires ongoing effort to maintain

Some markers of productive confusion:

• You can name what you don't know without anxiety
• The not-knowing feels spacious rather than stuck
• You notice new information you would have filtered out before
• Your questions are evolving, getting more precise

The goal isn't permanent confusion. It's confusion that earns its clarity—understanding that emerges from genuine encounter rather than premature forcing.

Which raises a deeper question: what if confusion isn't just a waypoint, but a way of attending?

Confusion as Attention Practice

Fowles connects this to something larger: "confused" direct experience often contains more truth than analytical knowledge. This isn't anti-intellectual mysticism. It's a recognition that the analytical mind can only work with what it already has categories for. The confused mind hasn't limited itself yet.

The Zen tradition calls this beginner's mind—shoshin. The expert knows too much to see what's actually there. The beginner, unencumbered by knowing, remains available to what's unfolding. Confusion, in this frame, is the opposite of arrogance. It's the acknowledgment that reality exceeds your current grasp.

That seems honest.

What This Invites

If you've been treating confusion as problem—something to eliminate before the real work can begin—consider inverting the frame.

What if the confusion is the work? What if sitting with not-knowing, resisting premature closure, and remaining available to emergence is its own practice of alignment?

The foggy landscape doesn't stop existing when you stop demanding to see it clearly. And sometimes what you find in the fog is better than what you were looking for.

Losing sight, it turns out, can clarify what matters.