The impression that our general populace is better educated depends on — Ambiguity

"That gray net of abstraction, used to cover the world in order to simplify and explain it in a way that is pleasing to us, has become the world in our eyes. The only way to see the phenomena, rather than sterile distillations of them, to experience them in their ambiguity again, would be to have available alternate visions, a diversity of profound opinions. … Souls artificially constituted by a new kind of education live in a world transformed by man’s artifice and believe that all values are relative and determined by the private economic or sexual drives of those who hold them. How are they to recover the primary natural experience?"

"Ambiguity, multivalence, the fact that language simply cannot be regarded as a clear and final exposition of what it says, is central to both science and... literature. Why to science? ...you cannot make a single general statement about anything in the world which is really wholly delimited, wholly unambiguous, and divides the world into two pieces. ...you cannot say anything about a table or a chair which does not leave you open to challenge, "...I am using this chair as a table." ...the word "table" was not invented in order to bisect the universe into tables and non-tables. And if that is true of "table," it is true of "honor,"... "love,"..."gravity,"... "mass" and "energy" and everything else."

"Ambiguity— Maybe it’s not something to fear. Maybe it’s just another adventure to take or puzzle to solve."

"The chief obstacle... to our improvement in the moral and metaphysical sciences is the obscurity of the ideas, and ambiguity of the terms."

"Ambiguity is not desirable or meaningful if it confuses an issue that is meant to be clear. This is the challenge of making a film that communicates but doesnt talk down: a lot of viewers and studio execs (and directors) hold that ANY ambiguity is the result of the filmmakers failure. I disagree, but I also hold that, in order for ambiguity to be effective, certain things NEED to be unambiguous."

"Something happens whose ambiguity has left the historians of medicine at a loss: blind repression in an absolutist regime, according to some; but according to others, the gradual discovery by science and philanthropy of madness in its positive truth. As a matter of fact, beneath these reversible meanings, a structure is forming which does not resolve the ambiguity but determines it. It is this structure which accounts for the transition from the medieval and humanist experience of madness to our own experience, which confines insanity within mental illness. In the Middle Ages and until the Renaissance, mans dispute with madness was a dramatic debate in which he confronted the secret powers of the world; the experience of madness was clouded by images of the Fall and the Will of God, of the Beast and the Metamorphosis, and of all the marvelous secrets of Knowledge. In our era, the experience of madness remains silent in the composure of a knowledge which, knowing too much about madness, forgets it. But from one of these experiences to the other, the shift has been made by a world without images, without positive character, in a kind of silent transparency which reveals— as mute institution, act without commentary, immediate knowledge — a great motionless structure; this structure is one of neither drama nor knowledge; it is the point where history is immobilized in the tragic category which both establishes and impugns it."