Philosophers do not like ambiguity. In fact, some even think the basic cause of our philosophizing is ambiguity, the need to make things clear, to enlighten us about a certain conceptual usage, to make explicit a certain implied consequence to a commitment (of course philosophical prose might belie this intention - Kant no doubt ignored his editor). Ambiguity is the cause of a whole host of problems, one might say. Conceptual fuzziness does not help one to get along. All the things we wish to do with thinking is subverted by it, like setting up parameters for scientific inquiry (which ultimately helps us to control nature better), or setting up rules for political discourse, or trying to explain religious belief, etc. Ambiguity makes all of this more, not less, difficult.
I recently watched director Michael Haneke's first three films, which apparently form a trilogy: The Seventh Continent, Benny's Video, and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance. They all deal with similar themes: death (a family suicide in The Seventh, a teen murder in Benny's, and a triple homicide/suicide in 71 Fragments), distances between people, and material objects (in all three films much of the scenes are dominated not by faces, as is normal, but by hands, feet, and things).
Haneke, in addition, is the master of teaching us how to look, how to notice things we don't normally notice in an image. Haneke is a master of the precise image, the image that tells us everything we need to know, and hints at even more. As he says in one of the interviews connected with the DVDs, his intention is to get the scene just long enough that we really see what's happening, without assuming we immediately know. E.g., in 71 Fragments there is a scene of a character practicing ping-pong very seriously. It's a nine-minute shot, and he's doing one thing: hitting ping-pong balls. Haneke imagines an audience doing this: seeing the shot, and saying 'I know what that's about.' Then waiting for the scene to end, and realizing it won't, getting bored; then getting a bit upset, because it hasn't ended; and after being upset and bored, realizing that there is something to look at, and starting to actually see what's there. I think I had this exact experience when I watched it.
Another very important aspects of these films it he lack of explanation. We never know why the family commits suicide in the Seventh Continent, why Benny kills the girl, or why Maximillian B. opens fire at the bank. These are all completely unexplained, and Haneke wants it that way. As opposed to famous film explanations - I'm thinking of Hitchock's Psycho, with that deflating scene at the end, trying to explain Baits, or Don Siegel's 1956 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with an explanation and wrap up at the end - Haneke never lets anything be explained. The ambiguity of the motives is an essential aspect of these films, one that really allows the viewer to feel emotion. One of the problems with films like Psycho is that the emotion that is conjured up with that last view of Baits, who is talking in a voice like his mother's, is completely evaporated in the very next scene with an explanation. Explanation guides you, directs you, forces you into one particular view of the matter at hand that any emotion you may have particularly felt is immediately lost.
Which is exactly what Plato wanted philosophy to do. The problem with poets is just that - it guides you to whatever particular emotion you have, not to the correct emotion, the emotion that leads to the truth, to the correct behavior, etc.
Contrast this to what Haneke does. He juxtaposes exactness of images with ambiguity of narration. Sensations of course are the most particular thing we can have, and so instead of guiding our thought, he lays out the possibility of reactions through sensations - which of course is the point of a film image instead of theater production (although, as Jean Renoir has said, much film is actually theater). The ambiguity of the narration then takes up where these sensations leave off, and leave us as viewers as participants in the production, in the story itself. Why does the family commit suicide? We have no idea, but as they are flushing money down the toilet, as they are sitting watching T.V., slowly dying, we are barraged with questions from our own selves - how could they do this? How much like their lives mine has been! What would drive a father and mother to help their 8 year-old daughter kill herself? What does this say about our society (it was a true story)? These questions are productive, they produce reflection, instead of answers. There are no answers.
And perhaps that's the most important aspect of philosophy - to question. Ambiguity is not something to be afraid of. It's something to stimulate, to move you, to make you wonder. Why? Because it asks you to think. That's the point, right?
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