The Profane (Sacred Later)

But making explicit doesn’t just do damage to selves.

Remember what I wrote about the explicit? Neither do I, but I'm looking. Meanwhile, turns out David Weinberger said it better anyway. Okay, maybe not better, but isn't that the charm of someone else's words, they seem to nail what you cannot, which is one of the reasons we love them.

In general, making explicit does violence to what is being made explicit. (In the modern age, Heidegger gets credit for this idea.) Making things explicit isn’t like unearthing an archaeological find that’s just been sitting there, waiting to be dug up. Making explicit often—usually—means disambiguating and reducing complexity.

The reason is simple. The things of the world exist as they are only within deep, messy, inarticulate, shifting, continuous, fuzzy contexts. This is certainly true of human relationships, although I believe it’s also true of all that we find on the earth, waiting in it, or promised above it. The analog world—the real world—is ambiguous. That’s a source of its richness. In making a piece of it explicit, we make it less ambiguous and thus lose some of its value and truth.