Simplicity contrasts with psychological convolutedness

Secondly, true simplicity is opposed to complexity taken in a specific sense. Certain people are prevented by their various psychic complexes and tensions, from giving a plain response to the logos of a situation. Hence, instead of keeping on the straight road that points to the object, they are always compelled to choose bypaths and detours. Everywhere they come to grips with artificial problems and complications. Their inferiority complex, for instance, makes them feel embarrassed by a complaisance which would rejoice a healthier type of person, or makes them reciprocate it with some objectively incongruous act.

They are deformed by their inhibitions and are continually delayed in their reactions by many unnecessary sentiments. Everything becomes thus over-complicated: a huge amount of time is wasted on the simplest things and the most unequivocal tasks are denatured into portentous problems. Their false way of being conscious, in the sense of an ever-present reflectiveness, is often responsible for such people’s lack of simplicity. They are, as Shakespeare says in Hamlet, “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”

Simplicity does not mistake complexity for profundity

Or again, a man may develop a predilection for complicating as many things as possible because he mistakes complexity for profundity. This species of complexity, unlike the aforementioned one, is more or less an appanage of the intellectual. Its lover prefers obscurity to clarity; he is liable to credit oracular stammerings with profundity and to dismiss whatever is unequivocally and tersely enounced as trivial. He thus tends to make everything appear more complicated than it really is and consequently falls short of an adequate knowledge of reality.

For such people are blind to the trait of simplicity associated with the metaphysical wealth and height of being; they overlook the metaphysical law that the higher a thing is the simpler it is, in a sense—in the sense of inner unity, as expressed by the dictum, “simplicity is the seal of verity.” They are insensitive to the value of true simplicity.

Simplicity avoids the cult of the abstruse

This kind of complexity, too, is connected with the false type of consciousness, particularly its second form: what we have called the overdevelopment of the cognitive attitude, and the cult of cognition as a self-contained process. The category of the intellectually interesting takes precedence over the category of truth. The protean vastness of untruth, the maze of arbitrary and extravagant but witty errors and sophistries are considered with great interest—if only because they divert the intellect from platitude and simplicity. The mere fact of their complexity (and often enough, of their abstruseness) confers on these errors—in the eyes of such people—a claim to be taken seriously, indeed, even a glamor outshining the simple dignity of plain truth.

Obviously the realm of concepts in which these minds roam about is a highly complicated and disharmonious world, for the possibilities of error are innumerable, whereas truth is one.

Those infatuated with complexity also enjoy the involved aspects of their own psychic life; more, they purposely complicate it by the reflective attention they pay to their feeling or impulse, no matter whether in the given case there is any legitimate need for self-observation. A person of this type takes pleasure in his emotional detours and blind-alleys which provide him with a sense of being deep and interesting. Jacobsen, the Danish novelist, has succeeded in presenting such states of mind (from which he was not free himself) in a remarkably plastic way; Dostoyevsky has depicted them with superior mastery.