Clarity in thought is certainly a sine-qua-non for one’s act of understanding and knowing.
That this is so has been attested to by the very terms one has been using to refer to acts or process leading to it.
“Clarify,” “explain,” “enlighten,” “illustrate,” “highlight,” “shed light,” and “illuminate” quickly come to our mind in this regard.
Similarly, in the Malay language, such words as “terang,” “jelas,” “nyata,” and “perlihat” (especially in one’s requesting of proof) are widely employed.
Yet, to really define “knowledge,” as numerous great scholars of Islam have long realised, is so difficult, if not utterly impossible, that one frequently has to resort to more humanly reasonable approaches in grasping its nature and characteristics.
Hence, in so doing, a method usually preferred by many reputable scholars—such as Imam al-Haramayn Abu Ma‛ali al-Juwayni (d. 1085) and his illustrious student, Hujjat al-Islam Imam Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali (d. 1111)—is mithal (metaphor).
Clarity playing such a defining role in understanding and knowing, one easily finds in the religious, intellectual and scientific tradition of Islam a widespread use of both light and clarity as its salient feature in referring not only to knowledge but also to the epistemic process and act.
In fact, one of the established technical descriptions of knowledge in the aforementioned tradition is “an attribute by means of which the intention (al-madhkur) becomes clear to the person in which the attribute inheres.”
In any true epistemic act, one cannot start from either what is unclear or what one is ignorant of, hoping to grasp what is clear and understandable.
As such, knowing as a mental act has often been formulated asthe progress of one’s mind from ‘what-has-already-been-known’ to ‘what-is-still-unknown’.
Such a formula is meant to be a general principle that guides any act or activity deserving of being regarded as knowledge-oriented, be it one’s act of reading, defining, clarifying, thinking, and so on.
In fact, thinking, being an integral cognitive component in knowledge and science, is also guided and regulated by that epistemic principle.
Thinking has thus been described in ‘ilm al-mantiq, the discipline of logic in the above tradition, as the mental act of putting what one has already known into meaningful order in order to arrive at what one is still ignorant of.
In spite of the fact that thinking is an essential cognitive component in knowledge and science, it cannot be realized without ideas, notions and concepts.
Ideas or concepts are therefore the rudiments of thinking.
As such, more basic but yet so integral to thinking is one’s grasp of ideas, notions and concepts.
Nevertheless, as the human mind primarily thinks by means of words or linguistic symbols, ideas or concepts being the essential constituents of thinking are primarily expressed by and couched in words or terms as well.
Hence, at that basic epistemic level, one cannot do without the proper act of clarifying a term or word and thereby truly knowing an idea or a concept, an act that is referred to as definition.
Yet, in attempts at a correct or valid definition, one again finds the same epistemic formula applying thereto as a guiding principle.
To define something correctly, one has to meet certain conditions or requirements.
Some such conditions turn out to be the ramifications of the above principle.
One of them requires that the definiens (that is, words or terms which are used to define a particular word or term) must be more clear than the definiendum (the word or term being defined).
We may want to refer to this condition as The Rule of Clarity.
To illustrate this, suppose that one is asked to explain what “reason” actually is to an audience comprising primarily novices and the general public.
In explaining, one says: “It is an important noetic power concerned with analysis and discursive thinking.”
The above explanation however, unless further clarified, contains such words as “noetic” and “discursive” which, to the layman, are no more enlightening than what was originally being defined, namely, reason.
In fact, we may well assume that reason itself is better understood by such an audience than all those words purportedly intended to define it.
Such an explanation, in other words, simply does not make “reason” any more lucid.
Another condition, which we may want to regard as The Rule of Non-Circularity, demands that the definiendum not be present in the definition itself.
In other words, the definiendum must not in any way turn out to be any of the definiens.
For instance, suppose that one is asked about what knowledge essentially is and in answering, one says: “It is that which renders a person who has the potentiality to know an actual knower.”
Such an answer, unfortunately, does not really explain what knowledge is because, clearly, the term one seeks to make plain appears itself, in a slightly different form, in one’s very explanation—namely, in the words “know” and “knower.”
Therefore, in using the same terms to define a word, the explanation is circular and thus purely redundant.
Upon scrutiny, however, one may well conclude that this latter rule is a detailed elucidation of the former, i.e., The Rule of Clarity.
By virtue of the fact that the definiens is required to be more clear than the definiendum, it cannot therefore be just as ambiguous, let alone more ambiguous than that it seeks to clarify.
As such, the definiendum being present in the definition, which is nothing more than a set of definiens, renders the definition no better than the thing one is ignorant of initially.
In short, one’s not meeting any, or both, of the aforementioned conditions pertaining to the valid definition of words and terms, is tantamount to one’s violating the above epistemic principle thereby depriving one of true knowledge.
Therefore, attempts at clarity in thoughts and ideas, which are even more pressing amidst competing slogans and enticing rhetoric, which at present seems to have fully occupied our intellectual space, require that the foregoing epistemic principle not only be afforded its paramount role again, but also to be abided.