Some ideas convince with astonishing force, and the people who share them feel that they see clearly. Yet these ideas are simplistic, because they rest on the denial of part of reality, and since it is a denial, these people do not know that their conviction depends on it. I propose to call “nuanced thinking” the way of thinking of a person who knows what they are leaving aside in order to conclude, and I propose a few methods for practising it.
The feeling of seeing clearly
I have known that feeling. When I discovered TikTok, around 2017, a few videos were enough: the app was damaging the image young people have of themselves, and my job was to warn them. I felt that I saw clearly. It took me time, as I recounted in What if we changed our posture ?, to see that my explanation retained only part of the facts, and left out what young people were actually doing there. Nothing in what I felt at the time signalled to me what was missing. On the contrary: the fewer elements an explanation contains, the easier it is to follow, and the more obvious it seems.
The psychologist Daniel Kahneman described this mechanism in Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), in a phrase that has become famous: “What you see is all there is.” With the elements at our disposal, we build a coherent story, and we trust it all the more because it is coherent, whatever the amount of information we built it on. We are therefore often surer of ourselves with partial information than with complete information, since it contains fewer elements that contradict one another. Rolf Reber and Norbert Schwarz showed a related phenomenon in a study published in 1999: the same statements, printed in colours that stood out more or less well against the background, were more often judged true when they were easy to read. We take ease for a sign of truth.
The elements retained in a simplistic idea may, moreover, all be accurate. Gilles Deleuze noted this in Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962): there are imbecilic thoughts, imbecilic discourses, that are made up entirely of truths. Fact-checking, which is often presented as the heart of critical thinking, is therefore not enough. One can check the facts of a simplistic idea one by one and find them all true. It is simplistic because of what it lacks.
A denial, not an error
Why speak of denial, rather than error or lying? A person who lies knows the truth, since they are hiding it. A person who is mistaken can be set right by a new piece of information. Denial is neither one nor the other. Sigmund Freud described it in a short text on fetishism, published in 1927, under the name of Verleugnung, disavowal: a perception is at once acknowledged and refused, and two contradictory attitudes coexist in the same person without ever meeting. The psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni gave it its formula in a text collected in Clefs pour l’imaginaire ou l’Autre Scène (1969): “I know very well, but all the same…”
Serge Tisseron, in Le Déni ou la fabrique de l’aveuglement (Denial, or the Making of Blindness, Albin Michel, 2022), shows that denial bears on “a reality which it seems impossible to us, at least for the time being, to face” (my translation). We do not deny just anything: we deny what would threaten the image we have of ourselves, our place, our supports. In The Simplifying False Nuance, I called “pillars of denial” those zones a person forbids themselves to think about in order to stay standing, including among intellectuals whose thinking is otherwise very fine. The sociologist Stanley Cohen, born in South Africa, lived in Israel from 1980 to 1996; he investigated torture during interrogations there, and for years he read the reports of human rights organisations, asking himself how informed people live with what they know. In States of Denial (2001), he gave a name to the denial that interests me here, because nobody denies anything in it: implicatory denial, in which one admits the facts and their gravity, but refuses to draw the consequences, because it is not our business, or because nothing can be done. Cohen distinguishes it from literal denial (it did not happen) and from interpretive denial, for which his example is the Israeli commission that, in 1987, authorised what it called “moderate physical pressure” on people under interrogation. Implicatory denial is, to my mind, the most widespread in public debate, and the hardest to see.
Gustave Flaubert wrote it in 1850, in a letter to his friend Louis Bouilhet sent from Damascus during his journey to the East: “Yes, stupidity consists in wanting to conclude. We are a thread and we want to know the weave” (my translation). Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about the same stupidity, and in his lines I recognise what I see in my own practice. A pastor engaged in the resistance against Hitler, he wrote at Christmas 1942, for a few fellow conspirators, a text entitled “Nach zehn Jahren” (“After Ten Years”), which now opens Letters and Papers from Prison, in which he states that stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice: against malice one can protest, against stupidity one is defenceless, and arguments are of no use. It is overcome, he adds, not by an act of instruction but only by an act of liberation. To oppose arguments to a person in denial is indeed to threaten what their denial protects, and they then cling to it all the more. And since they do not know that their conviction depends on a denial, they are sincere, often more lucid than others about everything else, and that is precisely why they are believed.
Words that are not enough
If we need a concept, it is because the words we have for talking about these questions cover different things. The word “nuance”, first, is most often understood as moderation: to be nuanced would be not to commit oneself too much, to look for the middle ground, to split the difference. It is then opposed to radicalism, and one ends up believing that one must choose between thinking finely and taking a position. The word “complexity”, next, refers to the work of Edgar Morin, who died on 29 May 2026 at the age of a hundred and four, and who defined it with great precision, and for other objects. As for “critical thinking”, it is increasingly reduced to fact-checking, and checking facts does not bring out what is missing.
Morin devoted a large part of his work to what he called the paradigm of simplification. In Introduction à la pensée complexe (1990), he shows that we ordinarily organise our knowledge according to a principle of simplicity, which “either separates what is linked (disjunction), or unifies what is diverse (reduction)”, and he holds this mode of knowledge to be “mutilating”, incapable of grasping the complexity of the real (my translation). For him, the word complexity comes from the Latin complexus, what is woven together. Complex thought bears first on the real, which is a weave, and on the way we organise the knowledge we have of it. Flaubert, incidentally, was already using the same image nearly a century and a half earlier: each of us is only a thread, and would like to know the whole weave.
Yet one can know that the real is woven, and still judge without the slightest nuance. Robert Musil said so in 1937, in the lecture he gave in Vienna under the title “On Stupidity”. He distinguishes a simple stupidity, slow and poor in concepts, from a stupidity he calls higher, which is not a lack of intelligence but a failure of intelligence, and which he holds to be “the real disease of culture” (my translation), the more dangerous of the two. It is the one I described in The Simplifying False Nuance, with the example of people who know all of psychoanalysis, explain to others how much good therapy would do them, and absolutely refuse to undertake one themselves; I wrote there that I could bear witness to it, having observed it in myself.
Blaise Pascal sheds a different light on this difference. In the fragment of the Pensées that distinguishes the mathematical mind from the intuitive mind, he describes domains in which the principles are so subtle and so numerous that it is almost impossible for none of them to escape us. Intuition, for Pascal, is as demanding as geometry, but in another way: it is only a matter of having good eyesight, he writes, in order to see all these principles at once. Geometers who want to treat “these subtle matters” in their own manner, he adds, “make themselves ridiculous”, because they want to begin with definitions and principles, which is not the way to reason about such things (my translation).
Knowing what one leaves aside
I therefore call nuanced thinking the way of thinking of a person who knows what they are leaving aside in order to conclude. Morin, for his part, spoke of the real and of the way we know it; what I am speaking of comes later, at the moment when a person states a judgement in front of other people. One can think with nuance and take sides very firmly. Simply, one knows what one has not looked at, and one can say so. When one thinks without nuance, on the contrary, one is leaning, without knowing it, on a denial: one needs not to see a part of reality, and it is from this denial that the thought draws its sharpness.
Hence the question I propose to put to any idea, and first of all to one’s own: what must one not see for this idea to hold? You can put it to any conviction, starting with yours. If one thinks with nuance, one can answer it, and one gains in precision. Otherwise, it is the thought that loses its sharpness, since one then finds before one’s eyes what one needed to ignore.
In Morin himself, I find what is needed to connect complexity to this nuance. He called dialogic the fact of associating two contrary logics without merging them into a synthesis, and he summed it up in a 2008 interview: “The dialogic is the complementarity of antagonisms” (my translation). This is what, for a judgement, I call nuance: one decides, and one keeps in view what one has left aside in order to decide.
An adversary rather than an enemy
This concept seems to me necessary for two reasons, one democratic, the other humanist.
The philosopher Chantal Mouffe distinguishes the enemy, with whom one shares nothing, from the adversary, whose ideas one fights while recognising their legitimate place in the debate; for her, democracy consists in turning enemies into adversaries, without for all that seeking a consensus that would erase conflicts. Now when, on both sides, people think without nuance, each feels that they see clearly, and the people opposite often see the part of reality that one is denying oneself. They then appear blind or in bad faith, since they “refuse to see the obvious”. They become enemies. Thinking with nuance, on the contrary, makes it possible to keep the disagreement whole, by giving it a precise object, and by keeping in front of oneself a person with whom one can still talk.
The second reason has to do with what is most often denied: people. To think simplistically, one almost always needs to erase those whose experience would contradict us, or to reduce them to a single one of their behaviours. Morin wrote this in a 2008 text on teaching human understanding: “The error of the mind is to reduce a person to one behaviour, generally a bad one, which is thrown into relief while all the other aspects are forgotten” (my translation). Hannah Arendt, in “Truth and Politics” (1967), called political thinking “representative”: one forms an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to one’s mind the standpoints of those who are absent. Nuanced thinking is its everyday form. In the appendix, I give the example of a book in which people are erased in this way.
The root of things
It is often believed that nuance is opposed to radicalism. I believe the opposite, and an example from this autumn of 2026 makes it possible to show why. From 21 September, secondary school students blockaded their schools across France, to protest against unfilled teaching posts, overcrowded classes, dilapidated buildings, the lack of school nurses and social workers, the Parcoursup admissions platform, and so on. There was violence on the part of some demonstrators, and a very harsh repression: according to Amnesty International France, citing figures from the Ministry of the Interior, more than five thousand people were arrested in twelve days, 85% of them minors, and on 5 October in Lens a fifteen-year-old student had his hand torn off by a stun grenade. Amnesty also reproaches political leaders for having called the students “troublemakers”.
To condemn the students’ violence without saying anything about what they are rebelling against is a textbook case of implicatory denial in Stanley Cohen’s sense: nobody denies that classes go without a teacher for months, but people refuse to draw the consequence. Hélder Câmara, archbishop of Recife, described this mechanism in 1970 in a short book, Spiral of Violence. Injustice, he writes, is everywhere the first of all forms of violence, violence number one. This violence attracts violence number two, revolt, that of the oppressed or that of the young, whom he names in so many words: violence attracts violence, let us repeat it fearlessly and ceaselessly, injustices bring revolt. And revolt attracts violence number three, repression, when the authorities feel obliged to restore order. When one sees only the second, one has already decided not to see the first, and the third then looks like a simple response.
Martin Luther King described, in the letter he wrote from Birmingham jail on 16 April 1963, the “white moderate, who is more devoted to ’order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice”. I hold this moderation to be the opposite of nuance: one looks measured when one condemns violence, and one is in reality very clear-cut, since one has chosen in advance which violence one would see.
When one thinks with nuance, one goes back to the causes, and in this sense nuance is radical, in the first meaning of the word, which comes from the Latin radix, the root. Marx wrote in 1844 that to be radical is to grasp things by the root. For the school blockades, I did not have to look far: the Amnesty page sets side by side the violence of some demonstrators, the collapsed walls and the rats the students complain of, and the torn-off hand of the student in Lens. It remains to look for where the spiral starts, and that is not a middle ground between the students and the police.
Three other ways of speaking about nuance
A serious objection can be made to nuance, and I want to hear it. In 2017, the sociologist Kieran Healy published in the journal Sociological Theory an article entitled “Fuck Nuance”. In it he reproaches his colleagues for answering every theory that “it’s more complicated than that”, and for adding particular cases until the theory no longer says anything; nuance then becomes, he writes, “a rejection of theory masquerading as increased accuracy”. Healy is right on this point, and that is not the nuance I am proposing. One does not make an idea nuanced by adding precautions to it: a strong, abstract, even very simple thesis can be nuanced, if one knows what one is leaving aside in it and can say so. I join Healy in his defence of abstraction, but my criterion, for its part, bears on denial.
Jean Birnbaum, in Le Courage de la nuance (The Courage of Nuance, Seuil, 2021), has already said that nuance is not the middle ground. He looks for it in Albert Camus, George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Raymond Aron, Georges Bernanos, Germaine Tillion and Roland Barthes, and in a 2021 interview he spoke of it as a “fighting lucidity”. I am going in the same direction. Birnbaum makes nuance a form of courage, an intellectual’s virtue, whereas I am trying to make it a concept, with a criterion that can be checked, denial, and methods for practising it.
Roland Barthes, precisely, devoted his 1977-1978 course at the Collège de France to the Neutral, which he defined as everything that outplays the paradigm, that is to say the binary opposition on which meaning rests. He presents his project there as “a guide to life”, and writes: “I want to live according to nuance”. But with the Neutral, it seems to me that Barthes suspends the conflict, whereas nuance as I understand it leaves it whole, in the sense in which Mouffe speaks of adversaries.
Methods for thinking with nuance
I do not believe that nuance can be preached, if Bonhoeffer is right about arguments. I can only say how I go about it, taking up the examples of this article, and offer it.
Faced with a conviction that seems obvious to me, I first ask myself what I would have to not see for it to hold. For TikTok, the answer fitted in one sentence: not look at what young people were doing there. I then ask myself what this conviction brings me, since denial always protects something, a place, a role, membership of a group. My judgement on TikTok gave me the good part, that of the adult who warns the young. Since then, when a certainty reassures or flatters me, I distrust it, and I look more closely.
When a simplistic idea convinces me, it is almost always through the right point it contains. Rather than accepting or rejecting the whole, I try to say what my agreement bears on and what my disagreement bears on; this is what I do in the appendix with Jocelyne Porcher’s book, whose starting point I share but not its conclusion.
Faced with violence, anger, or behaviour that shocks me, I first look for where it comes from, as Câmara asks us to see violence number one before violence number two. Understanding excuses nothing, but it makes it possible to see where the spiral starts. On the school blockades, I tried above to name the three forms of violence before taking a position: one can then assert firmly, and others know what one has not taken into account, which allows them to discuss it.
The people a simplistic idea erases, I try to bring into the conversation. When I speak of a group, I ask myself how those who belong to it would themselves describe the situation, and whether I have ever listened to them. With a person who holds a general discourse, I ask the question I proposed in The screen discourse: “and you, how do you do it?” As soon as they describe their actual practice, what they say becomes more nuanced, because their practice contains what they were leaving aside in their discourse. And since one rarely sees one’s own denials alone, I often open a lecture with the “sit-stand” exercise, borrowed from popular education, which I described in Sit Stand: I ask questions, and people stand up if their answer is yes. When half of the people present stand up at the question “Who thinks social networks are dangerous for young people?”, everyone sees that half of their neighbours think the opposite, and it becomes harder to speak of “social networks” as if everyone thought the same thing about them.
That is why I believe that nuance is a matter of democracy and critical thinking. By thinking without nuance, one gains a reassuring belief and the security of a camp. I propose to prefer to this security a more uncomfortable effort: knowing what one does not see, and going to look for it in others. It is on this condition, it seems to me, that we can build ourselves, each of us and together, with what disturbs us!
