Polarities 2: Doubt & Certainty


This week’s inspirational morsel comes from Goethe, and it’s particularly pithy: Doubt grows with knowledge. Nice. Short, sharp, simple, and, for me at least, one of those quotes to which there is an immediate and excitable response in the affirmative, followed swiftly by a more considered analysis. I often find this, and it irks me; I react to some philosophical or literary quip with child-like glee (or perhaps dog-like in my scrabblings to get to the door of understanding), then the boring adult of the conscious mind rolls up its sleeves and says ‘now then, what is it about that statement that’s got you in such a tizz, and please can you articulate your response so that the rest of the class can understand?’ GAH! Yes, I probably can, but it will take effort and I’d rather keep skipping around the room with the Ghost of Goethe.

However, after some musings, a lot of head scratching, and a few diversions into wholly unrelated areas (luckily I am trained in the art of academic writing, which seems mainly to consist of one’s essays being returned with STAY ON TOPIC scrawled numerously across them), I have realized that I’m doubtful of my own understanding of the word doubt. And of the word knowledge. An excellent starting point, n’est-ce pas?

Thinking about knowledge has got me wondering if there is an inherent tension in this word, or indeed concept, which is often overlooked. Knowledge is strongly linked with learning, which I see very much as a process, a verb, indeed one of the verbiest of all verbs, yet knowledge often seems to be a kind of immovable stone edifice that is often so noun-like it can barely stand up under its own weight. If I may use an analogy from the realm of KNOWLEDGE with a capital K (yes, I realize I’ve capitalized the entire word – this is where my performance skills would be much more applicable to a TED talk, I don’t know why they haven’t been in touch yet…) there has been much debate about whether light is a wave or a particle. The current consensus is that it is either, or both, according to how it is behaving! Well if that isn’t an argument for embracing the verby nature of existence then I don’t know what is. What a beautiful reminder that when we attempt to situate ourselves outside of something in order to define it we’re in hot water. ‘Lovely water today’ said one fish to another. ‘What’s water?’ the other fish replied.

If I may take the liberty of modifying Goethe for the purposes of this argument, I suggest that doubt is the sister of knowledge, and to separate them forces the latter into wholly unreliable and egotistical realms, from which it is in danger of losing all usefulness. When knowledge is not borne of a creative act, when it is not subject to questioning, amendments, or indeed abolishment, then is not knowledge but at best laziness, and at worst agenda. When we ourselves do not participate in gaining knowledge, when it is fed to us without room for critical analysis (‘education’), then it ceases to be knowledge and becomes fundamentalism. And what is fundamentalism? The absence of doubt. And what is doubt? The absence of certainty.

I could go round this paradox all day, being a great fan of existentialism. Indeed, one of the greatest contributions of this philosophical movement is that certainty is a false premise, created in order to assuage our own anxiety. To be uncertain is to stand on ever-shifting ground, to anxiously gaze into the coldly indifferent abyss. Certainty is the warm bath to which we return from the ice and keep topping up, not realizing how we are stagnating and becoming soft of mind. To paraphrase Kierkegaard, we must live life forwards but can only understand it backwards. What fallibility! No wonder we grasp for certainty in whatever shape or form it appears, yet how frequently we fall when we privilege surety over the sure knowledge of our paradoxical and ultimately absurd quest for fixity.

Perhaps it behoves us (never used that word before, and there’s an annoying debate as to the amount of ‘o’s it has, so I’m going with 1. Feel free to correct me, though that might be to miss the point of the essay. I also feel that if there are full stops within a parenthesis then the bracketed point is either irrelevant or should be addressed within the essay itself. Additionally, when the author of said essay is herself amused by the bracketed content then it’s almost certain it should be edited out) to ask who benefits from a particular set of reified ideas – KNOWLEDGE – and more importantly, who fears the opposition or dismantling of those ideas.

Let us retain our critical faculties and untainted curiosity, for these are some of our finest features as humans. As we move ever more rapidly towards conformism and censorship, may we remember that we are strange, flawed creatures who often think but do not know, but more often, and more worryingly, who know but do not think. Perspectives that place current narratives into the realm of uncertainty should not be dismissed purely for their divergence from the mainstream, for without these, we willingly embrace some of our worst features as humans. I will leave you to decide for yourselves what they may be.

 

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