Stating the Obvious | Introduction

On the Value of Stating the Obvious

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Back in 2003, philosopher Alain De Botton authored a book called The Art of Travel, which was subsequently adapted into a TV series of the same name. Reviewing the programme in his column Screen Burn, Charlie Brooker described De Botton as, “an absolute pair-of-aching-balls of a man - a slapheaded, ruby-lipped pop philosopher who's forged a lucrative career stating the bleeding obvious.”

This description will be our entry point into a brief examination of the concept of stating the obvious. We’ll be particularly interested in whether, contrary what the tone of Brooker’s quote may suggest, there can ever be value to stating the obvious, and if so, where and when this value arises.

Stating the Obvious | Nature of Obvious

The Nature of the Obvious

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As evidenced by Brooker’s criticism, stating the obvious is a concept that is often denigrated. He goes on to say that, “[De Botton] reveals that guide books are no substitute for exploring a place yourself, and that a hotel is an "anonymous" place … [his] entire travel philosophy boils down to "wherever you go, there you are" … if you pick up one of his books and read it cover to cover, you'll come away with less insight into the human condition than if you'd worked your way through a copy of Mr Tickle instead.”

It is safe to infer that Brooker feels he is being told things he knows already, information that is likely within clear sight. In other words, he fails to see the value of De Botton’s insights, most likely because they are, in his estimation, obvious. In this instance at least, he sees no value in being told things he either knows already, or could easily have inferred by himself - rather, he is looking for “insight into the human condition,” and insight, presumably, is not obvious.

Stating the Obvious | Nature of Obvious | Obvious vs. Not Obvious

Obvious vs. Not-obvious

But what is it that Brooker means by ‘obvious’? How do we work out what knowledge is obvious and what isn’t?

If we conceptualize the idea of knowledge on a sliding scale, with the most self-evident of propositions at one end, and the most esoteric and obscure at the other, then we can view the point at which knowledge goes from obvious to not-obvious as subjective and changeable - its position, like most other elements of the scale, being unique to each person. So, one person’s obvious can be another person’s obscure, just as what is obvious to one may also be obvious to another. There are forms of knowledge that, for most of us, will fall within the boundary of obvious, including, amongst other things, self-evident empirical facts related to the most basic of human experience (knowledge, for example, derived from intuition or sensation).

It is, however, a point of contention as to whether any form of knowledge can truly be called ‘obvious’, in the sense that it would be similarly self-evident to all – the things that we regard as most self-evident begin to lose their universal clarity when subjected to rigorous philosophic analysis. However, as interesting as it may be to probe deeper into this matter, this is not the place to explore the bounds of self-evident knowledge, or whether anything can be known without doubt: suffice it to say that when we refer to ‘obvious’ we are taking it as a subjectivism.

Now, let’s visualize Brooker’s sliding scale; he was disappointed with De Botton’s programme because the insight it afforded him, in his estimation, was not not-obvious. His expectations had led him to hope for not-obvious insight, expectations that De Botton confounded with insight that, on Brooker’s sliding scale, fell short of becoming not-obvious.

It is worth noting that there appears to be an assumption at play here; that is, when we watch a TV programme like this (a programme that in some way purports to expound knowledge, or insight) we should be told things that we consider not-obvious. We watch, therefore, in order to gain knowledge, amongst other things.

If Brooker is making this assumption, then it may not be unreasonable for him to feel short-changed by De Botton’s programme; it may, however, be unreasonable for him to make the assumption in the first place. The idea that insight is achieved through gain is an interesting one, and we’ll return to it later.

Having not seen the programme it would be unwise of me to assess its various successes and failures, and an analysis of it is not wholly useful to our investigation. We are interested in the fact that it has been criticized for stating the obvious, not that it has been criticized for stating the obvious in an uninteresting way (which may, in fact, be Brooker’s real criticism, even if he himself is unaware of it). The former attacks the notion of stating the obvious, whereas the latter attacks the manner in which the obvious is stated.

To clarify; we aren’t interested in the merits of De Botton’s work, or the validity of Brooker’s criticism in regard to these merits, both of which are subjectivisms; our interest lies in an element of this exchange.

Stating the Obvious | Nature of Obvious | Value of Not-obvious

Value of Not-obvious

Let’s get back to the idea of not-obvious insight, the kind of insight that Brooker was hoping for. De Botton is a philosopher, a person who makes it his project to ask questions about life, and to think things through, coming back from his mental travails with jewels of insight. But why is it that we need philosophers to do this thinking for us? We are capable of thought, of meditation; surely we could, if we wished, think things through ourselves and come to our own conclusions?

The value of philosophical insight is, amongst other things, that it comes to conclusions that our minds are theoretically capable of reaching; yet, due to intellectual limitations (resulting from, amongst other things, genetic, environmental, and psychological (intra-personal) factors) it is insight that we are, or believe ourselves to be, incapable of inducing. It may also be insight that we feel ourselves able to reach, but are, for whatever circumstances, unwilling to induce (e.g. we don’t have the time, motivation, etc).

In the same way that being able to kick a ball doesn’t make a professional footballer, to be able to think doesn’t necessarily lead to philosophical (not-obvious) insight.

Stating the Obvious | Value of the Obvious

Value of the Obvious

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Brooker could not see the value of being afforded insight that he viewed as obvious, perhaps because it was the not-obvious that he was expecting. It is at this point that we’ll ask; is there ever value to obvious insight? And, more generally, is there ever value in stating the obvious?

Stating the Obvious | Value of the Obvious | Dog-thought and Lion-thought

Dog-thought and Lion-thought

To Brooker the observation that a hotel is an anonymous place is a seemingly obvious one, just as it may be to many of us; yet, whilst we may have thought it before, we may not have given it much thought. In calling attention to it, De Botton allows us to meditate upon the idea.

Due to the pace of our lives, we may find it hard to find the time to think about things. Buddhist Matthieu Ricard describes two ways of thinking, ‘like a dog and like a lion. You might try to tackle your thoughts in the same way that a dog runs after every stone thrown at it, one after another. That’s just what human beings do most of the time, in fact. Whenever a thought arises, we let ourselves be carried away by it. That first thought gives rise to a second, then to a third, and to a whole endless chain of thoughts that only sustain our mental confusion. But the other way to react is like a lion. You can only throw one stone at a lion – because he turns on the thrower and jumps on him.”1

We may already know that a hotel is an anonymous place, but what is it to know this? To know something does not necessarily imply that we have given the thing in question much thought, something that is symptomatic of the ‘dog-like’ thinking that Ricard describes; as we think one thing (‘this hotel feels like an anonymous place’) the thought may quickly be replaced by another (‘I can smell food, which reminds me, I’m hungry’), and another (‘Where can I eat?’) and so on. Very soon the initial thought has become lost within the rhythm of experience.

In this sense we could see De Botton’s work as an invitation to react like a lion; that is, to step outside the flow of thoughts, in which most get lost, and to hold onto this one thought. We are allowed access to it; it is hauled up from a turbulent sea, and we are able to examine it once again; to see if it looks the same as we remember it looking, or if, perhaps, it appears changed.

Stating the Obvious | Value of the Obvious | Premature Cognitive Commitments

Premature Cognitive Commitments

This re-examining can be useful for a number of reasons. Importantly, we are afforded the opportunity to re-assess our position in relation to the thought in question. For example, in thinking a hotel an anonymous place, we may have, consciously or not, associated a value judgement: ‘hotels are mostly anonymous places (and therefore I don’t like hotels)’. It may be that this value was influenced by unexamined factors; in this instance, conventional wisdom could be the agency (‘an anonymous place is an undesirable place’), wisdom that we applied without considering whether it was true for us or not.

This mindset had its genesis in a fleeting moment, and was concretized without much consideration of the various judgements involved. Psychologist Ellen Langer describes these mindsets as ‘premature cognitive commitments’. She goes on to say, “When we accept an impression or a piece of information at face value, with no reason to think critically about it, perhaps because it seems irrelevant, that impression settles unobtrusively into our minds until a similar signal from the outside world calls it up again. At that next time it may no longer be irrelevant, but most of us don't reconsider what we mindlessly accepted earlier.”2

If, as Ricard describes, we mostly follow our thought in a mindless fashion, hurrying from one thought to the next, then there is a danger that we are unconsciously forming many premature cognitive commitments that may subsequently affect our experience of the world. In the example above, the person in question formed a negative opinion about hotels because they unquestioningly referred to conventional wisdom, without thinking through their own thoughts on the matter. It may be that this person, having considered whether anonymity was a good or bad thing in this instance, would have drawn much the same conclusions; however, these conclusions would be erected in much firmer ground.

It would be impractical to constantly be on the watch for premature cognitive commitments, or to always approach our thoughts like the aforementioned lion. Indeed, dog-like thinking is often a functional necessity of our daily experience. Yet as we’ve seen, the benefit of having something we already know brought to mind is that it allows us, if we wish, to engage our thoughts in a specific way; to re-assess ‘the obvious’ and our position in relation to it.

Stating the Obvious | Value of the Obvious | Knowing and Thinking

Knowing and Thinking

It might be handy at this point to probe briefly into the idea of ‘knowing.’ We’ll ingress with a quote from the Journal of Analytical Psychology, in which a reviewer, writing about R.D. Laing’s book The Divided Self, describes it as having “that particular touch of genius which causes one to say “Yes, I have always known that, why have I never thought of it before?”” This quote is of interest because it suggests that to know something can be different than to think of it; in other words, we can know something without having consciously articulated it in thought.

It may be that most of what we ‘know’ we have devoted very little concentrated thought to, and in this sense a lot of our knowledge may be unexamined. We’ve already looked into different ways of thinking, with Ricard’s ideas of dog-thought and lion-thought, and have seen how unexamined thought can lead to premature cognitive commitments, with all the various negative implications that these entail.

So it is worth bearing in mind that knowledge can be articulated to varying degrees, from unconscious knowledge through to articulated knowledge. Knowledge needn’t have been articulated –passed through a conscious thought process - in order to become assimilated. This is how we can arrive at the situation touched upon in the quote above, when we read a book and think ‘How obvious! How come I’ve never thought of it like that before?’

To meditate upon a thought is to flesh it out, and to assimilate it in a different way. To think about something in a concentrated fashion allows us to develop our own approach to it, and to prune away any unhelpful second-hand assumptions and prejudices that may, heretofore, have been attached.

It is in this sense that devoting thought to an obvious subject can produce valuable insight. In retrospect the insight offered by others may seem obvious because, had we allowed ourselves the conditions necessary to hold onto the thought, to pursue it to some conclusions, then we may have come to these same conclusions ourselves. It may well have been that we were only ever a short distance away from such insight.

Often it may be that a subject appears so obvious that we simply never devote any time to truly thinking about it; it is taken as a truism and left as that. In this sense we avoid ownership of the thought, and we open ourselves to the danger of committing to things that we do not truly believe in. To assess an idea and to come to our own conclusions is to take possession of it; to assume ownership of our thoughts is to assume responsibility for them.

It is natural that most knowledge will at some point recede to the back of our mind, as we once again get caught up in the daily flow of thought; in this sense knowledge becomes structural; unseen, yet potentially informing what we do and how we think. To know that we have taken the time to meditate upon important ideas, to fully take possession of them, allows us to be more in control of our knowledge and the way that it subsequently affects further thought and action.

Stating the Obvious | Value of the Obvious | Chipping Away

Chipping Away

In his introduction to the Positive Psychology class that ran at Harvard University in 2006, lecturer Tal Ben-Shahar inserted the following disclaimer; “You’re going to learn very few new things in this class … but [I hope to] provide you the opportunity – create the conditions – for you to chip away some excess stone …”

Shahar’s course was a master-class in stating the obvious, hence his well placed disclaimer. He elucidated, amongst other things, the benefits of getting enough sleep, of doing regular exercise, of meditation, of keeping a diary; he examined the dangers of perfectionism, surveyed techniques for becoming more productive, and expounded on the value of positive emotions. In all this he was true to his word; very few ‘new things’ were divulged.

So what then, was the value of his course?

It may be helpful to call to mind a maxim from American writer Henry David Thoreau; “The soul grows by subtraction, not addition.” We’ve already seen how we can become mindless to the frameworks that we are constructing in our minds; those commitments that we make without even realising that we are doing so. As we grow older we may have adopted many pervasive mindsets based upon un-examined information; we may be accepting things that we needn’t accept, placing limitations where they needn’t exist, or denying ourselves experience based upon insignificant fears.

In examining commonplace ideas, Shahar allowed his students a re-entry to them. The clue to the emphasis of the course is in the title; his explicit project was to provide insight into the field of Positive Psychology, which itself is concerned with examining and elucidating happiness (within Psychology, it can be seen as the positivist Yang to the traditional pathology-oriented Yin). In laying out these familiar ideas, Shahar invited his students to examine their approach to them, and to re-assess any troublesome assumptions or mindsets that they may have formed without noticing. In doing this they were able to break down (and subtract) negative or unhelpful frameworks, as well as put certain thoughts and ideas in perspective.

Psychologist James Hillman talks of this process – he describes it as “Shedding pseudoskins, crusted stuff that you've accumulated. Shedding dead wood. That's one of the big sheddings. Things that don't work anymore, things that don't keep you - keep you alive. Sets of ideas that you've had too long. People that you don't really like to be with, habits of thought, habits of sexuality … Or put it another way: Growth is always loss.”3

Crucially, the Positive Psychology course offered the chance to re-examine familiar ideas, but within an environment that facilitated the thorough consideration of those ideas. We can contrast this environment with the kind of day-to-day experience that brings about the dog-thought referred to by Ricard earlier. Shahar’s students were allowed to behave like lions: to (re)capture their thoughts, and, if necessary, re-frame them. Through looking at what was already there, already close at hand, and known, they were given the chance to shed what was not needed.

Stating the Obvious | Value of the Obvious | Stepping Outside the Flow

Stepping Outside the Flow

If things are as Ricard describes; if we are frequently victim to the rapid flow of our thoughts; and, if having our attention centred on something we already know can be a way of stepping outside of this flow, then it would seem that stating the obvious can also have value as a method for controlling time.

A statement like, ‘that monument is really big’ could function as a way of channelling vision – to point out something like this, is, amongst other things, to centre the flow of thoughts upon something. It may be that the next moment our thoughts have already forgotten about the monument and are onto something else, but the statement affords us to the opportunity to alight for a while.

It is, of course, possible that we may have thought about the monument without having it brought to our attention; and indeed, we may have meditated upon it of our own volition. But stating the obvious implies a social function, a subject to state the obvious to, and in this sense a truism like this can have value as a flow-altering device, both for the person saying it (as a reminder to themselves) and the person receiving the information.

Stating the Obvious | Value of the Obvious | A Reminder

A Reminder

We have seen that through recalling information we are afforded the opportunity to re-assess our relation to it. It’s also worth considering that stating the obvious can simply function as a reminder, bringing to mind something that we may have forgotten or become oblivious to.

Obvious things by their nature are often subject to being overlooked, and as such we run the risk of becoming mindless to them. In other words, the knowledge may have become so commonplace that we no longer are aware of it in the way that, at one point, we may have been.

This idea can be seen when a new person enters a workplace. If this person needs to be shown the ropes by a more experienced member of staff, then this process could, for the latter, involve relating a number of ‘obvious’ pieces of information. However, it may be that to the experienced staff member this information has become so obvious, so everyday, that they no longer remember that they even know it. The information has, in other words, become unconscious; it has become part of a process, and no longer exists in the way that, outside of this process, it may have done.

Langer talks about this idea, ‘Repetition can lead to mindlessness in almost any profession. If you asked an experienced and a novice typist to type a paragraph without the usual spaces separating words … it is likely that the person with less experience will have an edge … A familiar structure or rhythm helps lead to mental laziness, acting as a signal that there is no need to pay attention. The rhythm of the familiar lulls us into mindlessness …’4

So the presence of the novice, asking questions and making statements about the obvious, could function to retrieve information from the unconscious, and remind the expert of what they had, in some sense, forgotten.

Stating the Obvious | Against the Obvious

Against the Obvious

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To say that a person is stating the obvious is an observation, and is, in itself, not a criticism. At what point then does this neutral observation become a value-judgement? Let’s examine some of the ways in which the concept of stating the obvious may be devalued.

Stating the Obvious | Against the Obvious | Progress

Progress

The idea of progress is a prevalent myth in contemporary society. Scientific discoveries and technological advancements are frequently used to convince us that, as a race, we are advancing, even if voices from outside these areas would have us think otherwise. If science is a secular religion, then faith in progress is an inevitable fiction amongst the faithful.

Progress implies motion, a moving-forward, and engenders catchwords like ‘new’, ‘latest’, ‘modern’ and ‘original.’ In this sense, progress can often be at odds with the idea of inaction, and its various synonyms (‘reflection’, ‘meditation’, and ‘day-dreaming’). This, of course, needn’t be the case; progress can be achieved through inaction, but our interest lies in the point at which these two ideas become antithetical.

We’ve seen how, in allowing us to examine what we already know, stating the obvious can be of benefit, inasmuch as it allows us to ‘chip away’ at ourselves, or to shed skin. These ideas imply loss as a means of progression, and in this sense run contrary to the idea of progress that feeds the popular imagination, that of progress through discoveries - through gain.

We are led to covet the new and the latest, attitudes that are crystallised in the world of commodities. We live with a constant sense of motion, of moving forward, and this is compounded by the disposability of things; to have the latest model often involves jettisoning the one that is out of fashion, and so we become used to a constant sense of flux, to jumping from one to the next. Philosopher John Gray talks about this idea, “Progress condemns idleness. The work needed to deliver humanity is vast. Indeed it is limitless, since as one plateau of achievement is reached another looms up. Of course this is only a mirage; but the worst of progress is not that it is an illusion. It is that it is endless.”5

In many ways, then, the idea of inaction is foreign to the dominant way of life in our society. In light of this, the concept of stating the obvious, with its implications of deceleration (lion-thought vs. dog-thought), and loss as opposed to gain, can often be denigrated and belittled.

Stating the Obvious | Against the Obvious | Belief in Limited Resources

Belief in Limited Resources

At the beginning of this text we glanced at a quote from Charlie Brooker, in which he described philosopher Alain De Botton as having “forged a lucrative career stating the bleeding obvious.” At this point we should concede that Brooker is, amongst other things, a comedian; and as such, we aren’t to take his writings entirely at face value. However, inasmuch as they exhibit a recognizable attitude that exists at large they are useful to us, and it is in this sense that we shall use them as a jumping off point. With this in mind, our investigation of this attitude isn’t to be taken as a direct assailment of Brooker. It is also worth reiterating that, in questioning Brooker our project is not to be taken as a defence of De Botton; whatever merit his work has or does not have is of no interest to us here.

Getting back to the quote, it appears to imply that through stating the obvious De Botton’s ‘lucrative career’ is somehow undeserved. In speaking of the lucrative nature of De Botton’s work, Brooker’s overarching criticism appears to be rooted in a belief in limited resources. He is conscious of the fact that De Botton makes, in his estimation, a considerable amount of money from his work, work which draws value through telling us things that we know already.

Brooker’s unvoiced question may well be, ‘why should he forge a lucrative career through telling us things we know already (and therefore not trying very hard), whilst I am impelled to work hard for just rewards?’ Of course, it may be that Brooker is aware of the value of stating the obvious and merely feels that De Botton does so in an uninteresting or uninspired fashion; however, his criticism may be, as we touched upon, symptomatic of an attitude at large, the kind of attitude that does not see the value that could come from ‘stating the bleeding obvious.’ Because it allows us to elucidate an interesting point, we shall take him, in this instance, at face value.

So why might it be that someone would be opposed to a person making a career from stating the obvious, or, to a person simply stating the obvious in general? As we saw above, if we are all going somewhere, advancing, then the person stating the obvious – sticking with what is known – can be seen as standing still, and in this sense as going against the grain.

Capitalist values promote the idea of competition, of going out and taking before someone else takes it instead of you. Inherent within capitalist thinking (although not necessarily an exclusive product of it) is the idea we touched upon above, that is, the belief in limited resources. Ellen Langer talks of this idea; “One of the main reasons we may become entrapped by the absolute categories we create (or are given by someone else) rather than accept the world as dynamic and continuous is because we believe that resources are limited.”6

Langer goes on to mention how, “In discussions of limited resources, someone will always bring up money. Money, in most people’s experience, is limited.”7 Is this what we see in Brooker’s talk of a “lucrative career”? His criticism appears to rest on the idea that De Botton makes money from what, in his estimation, is doing very little of value. But why should it concern Brooker whether De Botton makes a lot of money? An ingrained and unexamined belief in limited resources (and by extension, absolute categories) may be partly to blame for this attitude, an attitude that is facilitated and fostered by the prevalent capitalist values that surround us.

Stating the Obvious | Conclusion

Conclusion

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Our investigation has shown that there can be value to stating the obvious. We’ve seen how it can allow us to re-access our thoughts, and to reconsider our relation to them, something that can be handy in combating premature cognitive commitments; we’ve also considered how it can act as a device for arresting the flow of thought, or as a way to bring to mind things we may have forgotten.

We briefly touched upon the ways in which the concept of stating the obvious may be devalued, inasmuch as it clashes with prevailing ideas that are seemingly inherent in current capitalism-engendered modes of thought, those that champion gain, through, amongst other things, the pursuit of knowledge.

Despite what commonplace assumptions may have us believe, it is worth remembering the value that we have explored here, especially if we are at all concerned with controlling and defining the way that we, as individuals, experience the world.


Earlier we considered Thoreau’s quote on the soul growing through subtraction, not addition; an idea that is prevalent in Eastern philosophy, and is exemplified in the following maxim from the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu: “In the pursuit of learning [knowledge], every day something is acquired. In the pursuit of Tao [wisdom], every day something is dropped.”8

We can gain knowledge through stating the obvious, or having the obvious stated to us; but perhaps, more importantly, stating the obvious allows us to pursue wisdom, the kind of wisdom that comes, not through gain, but through loss.

Stating the Obvious | Endnotes

Endnotes

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1. Ricard, Matthieu. The Monk and the Philosopher: A Father and Son Discuss the Meaning of Life (co-authored with Jean-Francois Revel), p.84-5
2. Langer, Ellen. Mindfulness, p.22
3. Hillman, James. We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy - And the World's Getting Worse, p.8
4. Langer, Ellen. Mindfulness, p.21
5. Gray, John, Straw Dogs, p.195
6. Langer, Ellen. Mindfulness, p.27
7. Ibid., p.28
8. Lao-Tzu. Tao Te Ching, Chapter 48