Simple Freedom

Introduction

I want the focus of my essay to land somewhat more on the modifier simple than the noun freedom in my title, but the theme of freedom best anticipates what is at stake in my case for simplicity as a concept. Freedom is, I suspect, more likely to mean something concrete to us than simplicity, at least as a political value if not as an actual state of affairs. Freedom thus figures prominently in an essay that’s primarily about simplicity, because freedom is a value with which you probably identify more intuitively than you do with simplicity. Accordingly, my aim is to persuade you that since simplicity is tantamount to the freedom you presumably value, it is also worth your esteem. My case for simplicity is a case for freedom.

Equating simplicity with freedom may appear counterintuitive—more often simplicity is held to be either simplistic or the result of expedient (or inattentive) simplification. In this view, simplicity is unrealistic; i.e., inadequate to some real state of affairs. Simplicity is then a good or bad faith misrepresentation (it is a biased constative claim, a biased description of a complex reality) or a one-sided command (it is an arbitrary performative utterance, not grounded in a balanced view of reality). Even skeptics would concede that simplicity has its attractions, ones we might, with Nietzsche, call Apollonian: order, efficiency, limpidity, control. But for the skeptic, giving in to simplicity’s temptations is to run roughshod over the multiplicity of meaning and fact. Whether being represented or performed, simplicity, it may be said, reduces the phenomenal world to some underlying purity, essentiality, or transparency. If simplicity’s original sin is to be ontologically false, then for all its elegance, we must condemn its neglect of details, its domination of multiplicity, and its inattention to difference. Who could argue with such a critique of simplicity?

Rather than trying to answer this argument from ontological falsity, my alternate approach, to link simplicity and freedom, opens the discussion to different stakes, those of determinism and volition. As we’ll see, this approach has its challenges as well, the chief of which is to understand the subject of volition. Nonetheless, I think it is more than a matter of exchanging the devil for Beelzebub, because seeing simplicity in terms of freedom highlights what I see as the main liability of complexity theory: its failure to articulate a clear idea of individuation. Everything in complexity theory is a mediated element of an encompassing system, which itself has no clear individuality distinguishing it from its situation. In a system of encompassing mediation, when, if ever, does one system become two? And in what would such twoness consist? The simplicity of division requires freedom (separation from given determinations), and freedom requires the simplicity of division (self-determination of a new individual). From the perspective I am proposing, freedom occurs at the paradoxical spot where no determination is operative (its negative condition) and a new individual presents itself (its positive condition). This spot is simple because it lacks any ground in a mediating term, in a genus. It is all differentia.

I should share a last introductory word to try to forestall a basic misunderstanding. It would be easy to reject simplicity for implying the idea of a single substance and to dismiss my case for simplicity as asserting such a transcendental being. From the few words of my introduction I hope it is clear that I see simplicity as the absoluteness of division, not of eternal transcendence. I call such a division simple because there is no third term mediating its rupture. The lack of a third does not, however, imply one unchanging substance: two elements, after all, also lack a third. Indeed, the etymology of the word simplicity is that of single fold: sim (once) and plex (fold, plait) (Strong). If the concept of one fold, a single ply, reads as paradoxical, its perplexity is clarified by thinking of its singularity as consisting of two sides: that of being given as such and that of being distinctly separate.

Basic Intuitions

There are, of course, engaging arguments to...