We worship nuance these days. First, I agree it is an extremely seductive word. It just sounds pleasing, and it is an extreme pleasure to say it out loud (add a bit of french accent to it for the flourish). Second, it means something that sounds very beautiful: a subtle shade, a gradation, a degree. Almost poetic. Third, it makes the speaker sound intelligent. Nuance is supposed to take you from the unintelligent, binary looking person to an intelligent, thoughtful person who sees shades. A caveman would see purple, a nuanced person sees lavender, mauve, and periwinkle. John Stuart Mill, the proponent of Libertarianism, had the notion of “marketplace of ideas”, where all ideas true and false exist. His point was simple: our truths need sharpening, and false ideas help us question our understanding of the truth. In some sense, Mill loved nuance. Perhaps then nuance is unacceptance of truth in its bare form, a constant process of refining what we consider to be true. There is usually the mention of “Hegelian dialectic” in the Humanities, and nobody understands Hegel - so, I will not pretend to do so either. Dialectic is a way of understanding how one reaches the true understanding of the world through ideas, and how they lead to a higher, more comprehensive idea in the world. For Hegel, the higher, more comprehensive idea in turn has internal contradictions of its own; this process repeats until we reach what he calls “absolute knowledge”. This way of understanding is fueled by tensions with what we consider to be true, what we consider to be is-the-case. Perhaps, this is nuance. An ever growing, infinite even, process of resolving contradictions within what we believe.

However, there are concerns that nuance might not always be a good thing. Nuance, many philosophers think, can be used as a proxy for moral cowardice. In one conversation with my friend, who stated that his education at NYUAD has made him more nuanced as a person, I kept wondering what he meant by that (instead of, of course, asking it directly to him). Is he saying that he can think of the same issue through multiple perspectives? Or, is he saying he is so full of doubts that taking one side is not an option at all for him, that he is crippled by the intellectuality of it all, and that nuance is nothing but indecision draped. Stated clearly, the question is the following: Is nuance just intellectual virtue signaling to hide our cowardice and indecision?

One might argue that nuance protects us from dogmatism and oversimplification. With furrowed eyebrows, one could just stare at this piece and say, “but life is just so so complex”. Do we want a world where everything is true or false? Do we want a world where you have to either be in the left or in the right but never in the middle? I would not imagine so. But, if it is rhetoric that we have come down to, I could ask similar questions back. Do we want a world where we can never land on anything as true or false? Do we want a world where everyone is in the middle, and all they have opinions about are of the form: Well, both sides have their own arguments, and both side X and side Y have good points, and I kind of lean towards X, but given I had slept on a different side of the bed that night, I could as well have leaned towards Y (in sum, basically nothing substantial)? For now, we assume presumably not.

What we want people to be in this weird position: We want people to be not dogmatic, be open to change, be aware of the other side, and still have strong opinions about things. If you think this is what “actual nuance” is, I am on your side. But I am not entirely sure the fetishization of nuance has led us to what we might desire in our communities. When we see some argument about X, and we intellectually procrastinate in the following form: “this issue is so much more complicated than most people think”, we are signaling intellectual virtues like intellectual humility, and open-mindedness. But the problem it seems is when we do not instead actually cultivate these virtues.

If one thinks that an issue is complicated and requires nuance, a good-faith person would do their research—be curious about X, learn more about X, and form an opinion on X. This open-mindedness, I think, does not have to be restraining us from having strong opinions about issues. The answer need not be in the middle. Nuance, it seems, is not about the answer but about the context around the answer. You could have an extremely radical take on an issue, and still be nuanced (if you understand where the issue stands, what the opposing side thinks, and are wrong about). On the other hand, you could have an extremely indecisive in-the-middle take, and be not nuanced at all. Thus there seems to be two kinds of nuance: nuance-as-middle, and nuance-as-actual-virtue.

Sometimes, nuance-as-middle might coincide with nuance-as-actual-virtue. In most cases, it seems it does not. Nuance-as-middle is about what the output is (where in the line do you have your stance). Nuance-as-actual-virtue is about how you tackle the process of deliberation. One worry political philosophers have is that nuance-as-middle can be used by people in power to make people who are oppressed and marginalized feel guilty for their opinions against those in power. Nuance-as-middle provides a way to always create the sense of indetermination of what is the case. An argument of the following form can often be employed: Perhaps, if you were more intellectually virtuous, you could realize why that atrocity happening in country X is not as bad as you thought. Lack of nuance-as-middle can be associated with being brutish, not complicated enough, one-sided. And because of this, understanding which kind of nuance should be appreciated as a virtue is even more important. The point I make is clear: Nuance does not always have to be bad, as long as it is about the process of forming our beliefs, and not as a restraint on what beliefs we have. For that matter, and even ironically, one could ask the same question about this piece: how nuanced of a take did I take on nuance?