Doubt is a starting point for philosophy, as much as wonder or conflict or the experience of being wrong. I am interested in doubt, but I am not sure that I understand it. I am hoping to find a few good questions.
Socrates adopted the standpoint of questioning all manner of beliefs and subjecting them to a kind of cross-examination, as if the belief were on trial and had to testify and endure the prosecution.
Descartes decided to pursue a method of universal doubt in order to purge his mind of all opinions held merely on trust and open it to genuine knowledge.
Kant held that reason must harm itself if it limits its own powers of criticism, skepticism, or doubt, by censoring itself or prohibiting any line of inquiry or search: “Nothing is so important through its usefulness, nothing so sacred, that it may be exempted from this searching examination, which knows no respect for persons or traditions. Reason depends on this freedom for its very existence.”
Russell extended the method of doubt from problems of knowledge to problems of action and even considered doubt to be the key to human happiness, since doubt easily shows furious and intolerant believers that they have no good reason to hold their creeds. “Dogmatism, in the present age as in former times, is the greatest of mental obstacles to human happiness.”
Searching through history, the inquirer also notes many kinds of doubts about doubt, which he will have to include in the search if he wants to see the whole. Doubt can be exhilarating and seems at first like a release; but it is also dangerous; it’s easy to lose your way. There is an ancient charge that that the doubter is a poor companion; that doubt alienates the doubter, separating him from his community; that doubters lose touch with the reality of their times, with the speech and habits of their city; that doubt makes the doubter unpractical; that doubt defies common sense. It has even been objected that doubt can become fanatical and thereby imperil the very freedom of thought it is intended to serve. Hume pursued a course of doubt but then brushed aside his own conclusions, because he also doubted whether he or anyone else could follow them. More recently, thinkers have raised the problem of total doubt, which is roughly the problem that absolutely consistent doubt tends to eliminate itself. Other thinkers have explored the unsuspected and hidden uncritical bases of doubt: the undoubted and unacknowledged assumptions that make doubt possible. Doubt that rests on undoubted or unquestioned assertions or prejudices no longer appears to be ‘doubt’ at all; but even this may be doubted.
Gautama encouraged doubt as an invitation to think for oneself. He encouraged questioning, but he also tried to dispel doubt by bringing a question to a head and answering it. Sometimes he calls doubt a hindrance, since it is easy to open up into doubt and then get stuck in it. But he never forbade it, or upheld mere faith; he taught that you overcome doubt by searching.
I conclude that I should begin with doubt and see if I can find my way beyond it.
Skepticism
A good place to start the inquiry is to think about some of the words surrounding the word ‘doubt’—words, concepts, ideas, what Kant called “representations” (the markers we use to find our way around)—words like skepticism, cynicism, criticism, also reason and assumption.
‘Skepticism’ comes from the Greek word skepsis, which means to see, also to look. The skeptic is literally the inquirer, someone who wishes to know more than he already knows, a person who searches or seeks. There is a beautiful passage in Hesse’s novel Siddhartha that expresses this idea: “Seeking means: to have a goal. But finding means: to come to the end, to have no goal.” Socrates is perhaps the quintessential seeker in the Western tradition. He seeks but does not find. But he is happy to confess his failure. He says that he knows enough to know that he is ignorant. This puts him in an odd position, from which he draws his famous eironeia or ‘irony.’ He has the humility to admit that he doesn’t have the answers—or understand his own experience—or grasp much even about the things he cares about most, such as courage, justice, beauty and wisdom. He tries to find out if anyone else knows—he discovers that they don’t (thus his humility often seems like arrogance). Plato’s ‘Socratic’ dialogues end with more questions—more inquiries—more skepticism.
All these words generate rich argument and debate: inquiry, irony, ignorance, humility and arrogance. For example, Socrates’ famous irony is the first step in an amazing and convoluted history. Some have called it a pose, an act, the pretense of not knowing what he (thought he) knew very well. Others have granted that it is sincere, but also claimed it was empty (leading nowhere) or mean-spirited (Socrates seems to enjoy humiliating his opponents). Hegel defined Socratic irony as “infinite absolute negativity.” Kierkegaard believed that Socratic irony was the key to the solution of the deep problems of subjectivity (character or personality) and time (finitude or death). More simply, perhaps: irony is the link between admitting that you do not know and (despite this) carrying on with the effort of trying to know.
Here is one way of putting Socrates’ skeptical and ironic project of inquiry: You believe in and trust the power of intellect; you constantly remind yourself that you do not know; you believe that knowledge is possible, that truth is attainable, that you are bound to seek it—even though the evidence is overwhelmingly against your finding it; you note that it is absurd to go on with an inquiry you cannot complete; but it also seems (somehow) exactly right.
“I would be happy to cross-examine you, provided that you are the same sort of human being as I am. By this I mean the sort of person who is pleased to be refuted if he says something untrue, and pleased to refute someone else if that person says something untrue, but more pleased to be refuted that to refute. It is better to rid oneself of an error than it is to rid anyone else of it; especially of the greatest error of all; and I do not believe that anything could be worse for a human being than to harbor false beliefs” (Gorgias, 458ab).
Cynicism
Continuing our inquiry into doubt, we want to dig into concepts like cynicism and pessimism, which get at the ‘critical’ element in different ways.
Antisthenes (circa 444-371 BCE) was an early follower of Socrates who founded a new school of thought that stressed self-sufficiency, disregard for pleasure and pain, and neglect of the body. Antisthenes and his followers rejected social conventions such as money, marriage and family, hygiene and modesty, choosing instead a nonconforming life of wandering homelessness; this seemed to their contemporaries something like a dog’s life, for which reason they were called the Cynics (from the Greek word for dog, kuon). History records the names of several well-known Cynic philosophers, such as Metrocles and Crates and Hipparchia. Crates is often compared to Gautama: both renounced family wealth, both practiced austerity and self-denial, and both taught that self-discipline was sufficient to bring about human fulfillment. Hipparchia is one of the first women philosophers in the Western intellectual tradition—she is sometimes called the first ‘liberated’ woman—she encouraged Greek and non-Greek women to unite against male tyranny, claiming their natural rights as citizens in society. By far the most famous Cynic of ancient times was Diogenes of Sinope. According to legend, Diogenes lived for several years in a large bathtub, which he rolled around on wheels. He also carried a lamp with him, which he would keep lit even in daytime, saying that he was “looking for an honest man.” Diogenes practiced scorn for all social customs and perfected various forms of sarcasm and ridicule.
The modern term ‘cynicism’ seems to have little connection with these ancient thinkers, though it does capture something of Diogenes’ practice of scorn. Nowadays the term mainly indicates a tendency to find fault, to sneer or smirk. The cynic disbelieves; he mocks and spoils; he rejects and scoffs. St. Augustine and Rousseau and Bertrand Russell all attacked the ‘fashionable’ cynicism of their times. They argued that cynicism is a stage of life that young people go through when their idealism is crushed by disappointment. Part of the idea here is that each generation defines its values by pushing against its predecessor. This relates to Shaw’s principle that “any person under the age of thirty, who, having any knowledge of the existing social order, is not a revolutionist, is an inferior.” But the pretense of offended self-importance is a very different thing than advocacy and action on behalf of a new cause. Russell argued that the real cause behind youthful cynicism is that young people have such difficulty finding their way into society.
The skeptic is an inquirer, someone who demands proof, demonstration, evidence—someone who wants to know the truth and is unsatisfied with mere opinion. He searches and is willing to go on with the inquiry—thus he has hope. The cynic is not looking for anything but has already found something—though not the thing he sought. The cynic is like the disappointed lover who curses love and swears that he will never love again. Thus the cynic is a self-denier. He practices a strict discipline, since he is constantly reminding himself that he cannot have what he really wants.
Typically also he insists that no one else can either. Cynicism needs an audience; the cynic wants to broadcast his scorn; his disappointment is lifted when others’ dreams are crushed.
Pessimism
The inquiry sighted skepticism and cynicism, but scorn also came up, as well as hope. These concepts are all worth studying—also the familiar opposition between pessimism and optimism.
Albert Camus wrestled with the concept of scorn by digging into the ancient myth of Sisyphus, who was condemned for all eternity to push a rock up a steep hill, only to see it fall back to the bottom again and again. Camus imagines that Sisyphus might still be happy, because “there is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.” Condemned to meaningless drudgery, unable to change even the smallest detail of his harsh fate, Sisyphus somehow rescues his spirit by his angry protest. This idea is important because it gets at the anger that young people feel, once they open up into doubt, towards the harsh realities of social life. But anger is only a beginning; Camus discovers a strange hope buried in protest and scorn. He argues that happiness has nothing to do with outward success—but instead has to do with passionate effort. “The struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart.” (Or as he wrote in his unfinished novel The First Man: "Life, so vivid and mysterious, was enough to occupy his entire being.")
Scorn is directed outwards, like an angry protest or a fist raised to the sky, but in some cases people turn inwards in the face of suffering, with a result more like depression or resignation than anger or rebellion. I am thinking of emotions like melancholy and despair, about dark moods and bad moods and brooding, about the feeling that life is hollow, about the fascination with ‘the dark side’ that often leads to pessimism.
‘Pessimism’ is a far older word than ‘optimism.’ The English word ‘pessimism’ ultimately derives from the Sanskrit padyate, i.e., falling, later to the root word ped, the foot. ‘Optimism’ derives from the Latin word ops, which signifies wealth and power. These old words suggest that people take a gloomy or sunny disposition for accidental reasons: because something befalls them or because they strike it rich. But the difference between optimism and pessimism, putting the best or worst possible construction on the issue at hand, gets at something deeper than accidents of birth, or good luck, or having to face obstacles. It is a judgment about life itself.
The ancient Greeks were ‘pessimists’ in a sense we can hardly appreciate. Their concepts of divine wrath, anger and jealousy portray a dangerous world that may lash out and destroy a human being at any moment. The poets often cite the story that King Midas chased after wise old Silenus, Dionysus’ companion, carrying on the chase for years, because Silenus was reputed to possess all the secrets of life and death: Midas finally caught him one day and demanded to know “the very best thing for all men.” Silenus explained that this was simply “never to have been born.” There are many ancient references to “Silenus’ wisdom”—a euphemism for utter despair. Above the entrance to the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, the ancients’ holiest shrine, a motto read “know thyself”: but scholars explain that this maxim did not suggest the modern idea that each of us should examine ourselves through honest reflection—instead it conveyed the idea: know yourself for what you are, know that you are nothing.
Pessimism considered as a philosophy of life appears in the thought of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) and goes through various transformations in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900).
Schopenhauer held that existence is constituted by the objectivization of “the will,” an hypothesized underlying force or energy that he held to be the sole and universal reality. Will is blind and unconscious until it is objectivized in human beings, in whom it first attains consciousness or the “power of representation.” Thus the title of his work The World as Will and Representation. Schopenhauer is another Western sojourner and philosopher seeking inspiration from the classic works of ancient India—the Vedas and the Upanishads—and he believes that these ancient texts also teach his theory of will, representation and denial. He argues that the essential nature of will is to strive and desire; that the consciousness of perpetual unfulfilled striving is pain or suffering; that to relieve suffering, the agent must extinguish the will, and not will at all; so that the goal of life is overcome the will to live.
Nietzsche sees this whole approach in Schopenhauer to be the result of exhaustion and “enfeebled instinct.” But Nietzsche does not drop the whole issue about pessimism—as if to say, this is the wrong question—but instead he tries to rethink pessimism and create a “pessimism of the strong” (the first of many formulations)—a love for the dreadful, angry, difficult and problematic, not as a sign of disease but from overflowing health, “from overflowing well-being, from living existence to the full”—“a tempting courage of the keenest sight that demands what is terrible, like an enemy—a worthy enemy—in order to test its strength.”
Dark Clouds
Skepticism, cynicism, pessimism—thinking about these ideas helps to navigate the waters of doubt. The figure of Socrates contains and originates all three—Socrates the inquirer, Socrates the self-sufficient man, Socrates who received his calling from the Oracle at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. Yet Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, as well as modern thinkers such as Descartes and Kant, are all considered ‘optimistic’ thinkers because they are committed to inquiry and define it as human excellence, as ascent, as progress or science.
Most of us associate doubt with dark clouds rather than sunshine—doubt that raises the specter of pessimism rather than doubt that fires a commitment to inquiry. Doubt often unnerves people and depresses their spirits; but Socrates appears to find a kind of composure and confidence in doubt. This Socratic heritage underlies one of the main goals of education, i.e., to develop students’ healthy skepticism.
There is such a thing as reasonable doubt, such as people talk about in law courts, which implies that some doubts are unreasonable or irrational. Doubt that passes from reason to unreason, e.g. doubting simple inferences or well-established historical facts, causes confusion (if I doubt that I know that 2+2=4 or that I know my own name, then what can I count on?). More dramatically, doubt that threatens people’s cherished beliefs or long-held convictions, e.g. self-doubts or religious doubts, is frightening, and this kind of doubt is behind the idea that doubt is unnerving and dark.
I want to explore the relation between doubt and concepts like assumption, evidence, and rationality; and after this to get to a related point—the relation between doubt and creativity. Just as we associate doubt with darkness, we associate darkness with creativity, e.g., in the idea that art emerges from struggle. I am attempting to raise some issues about doubt—with an inkling that doubt plays some role in creativity.
Belief
Digging deeper into the matter of doubt, we want to get at the act of doubt itself; we want to see if we can understand the idea of reasonable doubt; we want to explore the paradoxes of total doubt; and we want to raise some questions about the relation between doubt and creativity.
From a logical point of view, words like belief, thought, assertion, opinion, statement, affirmation, judgment, proposition, and claim all mean the same thing. These words indicate the idea of a declarative sentence that asserts some fact. Such a sentence is either true or false. To doubt a person is to doubt what he or she says; and to doubt a statement is to doubt whether it is true.
J.L. Austin’s studies show that a statement like ‘I believe’ invites my hearers to accept what I am uttering (e.g. How To Do Things With Words, 1962). Yet it happens that people sometimes believe false propositions. Thus it would be useful to know when I should believe and when I should wait and see.
Knowledge is often defined as true, justified belief. Thus my belief cannot count as knowledge unless I have a good reason for holding it (even if it is true). A lucky guess is not a basis for knowledge; nor is mere conviction (‘faith’) or hearsay. I have a good reason for holding a belief—alternatively, I am justified in holding my belief—if I have good grounds or proof or evidence for it.
Of course, there are many degrees of belief. These might range from hypothesizing that X, or suspecting that X, or holding an opinion that X, or being practically sure that X, or being absolutely certain that X.
Combining the definition of knowledge with the recognition that there are degrees of belief, it is possible to state a fairly good general rule for the direction of the mind: i.e., to assert belief to the same degree for which there is supporting evidence.
The English philosopher John Locke defined the love of truth as “the not entertaining of any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.” Locke observes that people who tyrannize over their own minds by accepting beliefs without evidence also assume an authority to dictate beliefs to others: “he is ready to impose on another’s belief, who has already imposed on his own.”
By this reasoning, not loving truth, but instead entertaining beliefs beyond the evidence that supports them—‘faith’—appears to be a kind of cynicism.
Radical Doubt
Philosophers have proposed various strategies for practicing doubt, seeking evidence, and limiting themselves to what they actually know.
Socrates was a gadfly, an embarrassment and irritant even to his friends, who challenged unacknowledged assumptions and uncritically accepted beliefs. He exposed myths and prejudices. He taught that “the unexamined life is not worth living” (Malcolm X once added: “the examined life is painful”). His strategy for doubting and seeking evidence was to attack the obvious—what was taken for granted or assumed as given—especially widely held ideas and guiding moral values of the community, such as justice and courage and wisdom. You could say that his method was ad hoc: if a belief came up that interested him, he would examine it; and typically he would end up without any good answers to his questions. He thought it was better to be confused but free of bias than to have strong beliefs without good grounds for holding them.
Descartes took the different tack of applying his doubt to all beliefs without exception; and he hoped to find one indubitable belief that would be the foundation and Archimedean point for all knowledge (Archimedes said “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I will move the world”). Descartes imagined that a perverse demon had tricked him into all his convictions, including even the most obvious or innocuous. But he reasoned that even if he was tricked and believed all sorts of nonsense, nevertheless he was conscious, he was thinking, and so he must actually exist—he reasons that he cannot both think and not exist. And so he takes the fact that he exists as the fixed point, at the center of the world system, at the origin of a system of coordinates, and reasons his way to concepts of being, number, and duration, which are valid for any thought content; to concepts of extension, form, and motion, which are valid for all material things; and to the concept of thought, which is valid for the ‘thing that thinks’ or ‘mind.’ At the end of his reasonings he claims to have rediscovered in these prototypes (such as being and number and duration) the whole of empirical reality, all the variety of physical bodies, and all the diversity of psychological processes.
Descartes thus invented a new kind of doubt—Cartesian doubt or radical doubt—that is often cited as the first step in Modern philosophy. He imagines that it is possible to hold up the whole process of believing; to doubt all beliefs, without exception; and then to arrive at sound convictions. This is an extremely interesting idea and merits close study.
Contexts
I have had the chance, on and off for over thirty years, to introduce Descartes’ Meditations to new students of philosophy. Over time, students’ comments about this important work have been surprisingly consistent. One comment is that Descartes talks about doubt but actually appears to be extremely confident—even arrogant. Another is that he proposes to suspend his beliefs but does not stay in this position very long—also that after practicing doubt he returns to the very same beliefs he held before he began doubting. This makes his doubt look like a sham. Real doubt is upsetting and brings about change whether one looks for it or not.
Descartes’ step forward (and invention of radical doubt) is gigantic against the background of the Age of Faith and the spirit of his times. This fact, together with contemporary reactions to the Meditations, suggests that doubt has a context. For example, most Americans describe themselves as believers, whereas most French people describe themselves as atheists; the majority of people in the United States do not accept the Theory of Evolution, whereas the overwhelming majority of Europeans do. This suggests that religious doubts and doubts about scientific theories may be supported or opposed by widely held views in society. Doubt normally has the sense of going against the grain; yet it appears that doubt may be the result of socialization as well as the result of unpopular or even ‘fringe’ thinking. People talk about the difference between reasonable doubt and unreasonable doubt, but it seems fair to ask, reasonable to whom? To the Americans, who by-and-large believe in God and reject Darwin, or to the French, who by-and-large believe in Darwin and reject superstition? This problem is sometimes referred to under the heading ‘relativism.’
Kant and Hegel and Wittgenstein—among many other important thinkers—all wrestled with this problem and moved the conversation along; over the course of a few decades, students in my philosophy classes have made very similar observations; I conclude that this is a basic problem or predicament of thought, a landmark in question-space, one that nearly every thinker will come to after sufficient consideration and time. Kant’s contribution to this problem was to see that in order to think about anything at all (for example, to doubt something), the mind imposes a framework of rationality (involving concepts like space, time, and causality); this framework provides a background for doubt but cannot itself be doubted; this has to be the case, because in the process of testing this claim and examining the power of examination, reasoning quickly falls into nonsense. Hegel’s contribution was to see that, unexpectedly, what seem like fixed ideas about space and time and causality actually change. He noted that the ‘rational background’ changes through history and alters with culture, geography, language—and much else. Thus he brought a new depth of skepticism to the project of radical doubt: radical doubt proposes to take nothing for granted save questioning itself, yet Hegel observed that mind must traverse a very long history before it is capable of questioning; it is the beneficiary of a very long process of self-formation. Wittgenstein carries the line of thought still further: he held that certain beliefs are exempt from doubt and appear to make doubt possible—as Kant held—he also showed that beliefs exempt from doubt appear to vary with culture and time—as Hegel claimed—but even further he showed that framing beliefs or foundational beliefs, the bases of certainty, vary even for different people, or for the same person in different passages of life.
The inquirer gets another view on this problem by looking into the distinction between doubt in a context and doubt about a context. For example, there are questions within religious belief, such as believers sometimes have, which prophets or preachers are expected to answer—such as ‘Why did God create the world?’ or ‘Why has God abandoned us?’ But there are also questions about religious belief, such as historians and sociologists and psychologists and students of comparative religion sometimes ask. The first kind of questions are those from within the context of belief—call them ‘internal’ questions. The second kind are ‘external’ questions and don’t assume that the questioner is part of the group. Note that debate and doubt of the first kind strengthens the very tradition it is questioning: it reinforces the framework of reference. Debate of the second kind comes from outside and may actually weaken a tradition, e.g., Copernicus’ doubts about his contemporaries’ belief that the earth stood in the center of the universe.
Drawing these conclusions together, it appears that Descartes’ idea of doubting absolutely everything (and therefore relying on absolutely nothing) is incoherent—it cannot survive skeptical questioning—because doubt presupposes belief; belief precedes doubt and makes it possible. Any belief can be doubted; but if any belief actually is doubted, some further belief is taken as certain.
Tainted Reason
Locke thinks that he surpasses Descartes’ position because Descartes only assumes that mind has a certain character, whereas Locke thinks he discovers the real character of mind by actually observing it. Descartes conceives reason as a mathematical framework, whereas Locke conceives rationality to be a kind of attention. It’s as if he were saying: look very carefully at the workings of things and—finally—you will see the reason inherent in them.
Ernst Cassirer makes the point that Locke successfully attacked Descartes’ notions about innate ideas, but permitted a similar prejudice regarding innate operations of the mind to survive. “Locke did not see that—just like seeing and hearing—actions like observing, understanding and other powers of cognition aren’t simply indivisible qualities, but instead they are late developments that people acquire through experience and learning.”
Locke may be charged with other mistakes: for example, he did not successfully grasp the significance of his own social standing. He enjoyed his social standing without thinking about the distinction between different groups in society. This lack of reflection comes out in his politics, as well as his epistemology. He says for example that “the great” have the ability to learn and “to love truth,” whereas “day-laborers and tradesmen, spinsters and dairymaids” must be told what to believe. “The greatest part cannot know and therefore they must believe.”
Locke is sometimes considered a father of modern psychology, for example because of his distinction between primary and secondary qualities. He had enough intuition to see that people who clamp down on their own minds also tend to tyrannize over others’—he saw that there is some kind of compensatory relation here (perhaps we would call this process ‘unconscious’)—but he was not psychologically sophisticated (or honest) enough to see that he himself was guilty of the vice he observed in prejudiced and bigoted people.
It’s as if he imagined a very noble ideal and then, almost immediately, he betrayed this ideal because he unthinkingly restricted its application to people of his own class, sex, circumstances—to people exactly like himself. He failed to apply his doubts to himself.
Is self-doubt a weakness or a strength? There are circumstances in which people undermine themselves with fanatical self-doubt. Locke made an opposite mistake. By sparing himself his own doubts, he made people suspect that reasoning itself is tainted—that we all put our own spin on things—that we are all trying to sell our version of reality to anyone who will buy it.
The Reality Principle
Hume took a skeptical position regarding Locke’s achievement. Hume thought that custom (alternatively habit or convention or tradition) was far more powerful than Locke suspected in accounting for what people believe. Hume also tended to be skeptical about the possibility of getting away from mere custom or social convention, as if by magic, and thus arriving at very clear-headed, bias-free ideas, by rational processes. He thought that forces like forgetfulness and ignorance and fatigue were more important factors in human belief than reason has ever been (or is likely to be). He sometimes expresses his skepticism by the disjunction: “a false reason or none at all.”
Hume is in some moments more hopeful and ventures to say that human beings make some headway in cultivating themselves and in refining social practice, urged by experience and observation and by slow processes of trial and error.
These chapters from Western philosophical history, from Descartes to Locke to Hume, help to set the scene for questioning about doubt and about the possibility of getting past one’s cultural biases (which one almost never sees) to genuine truths (that are less dependent on one’s special circumstances of geography, culture and history). On one end is the optimist who believes in the infinite power of reason. In the middle is the empiricist who thinks that by closely observing things including ourselves we can get past mere assumptions and arrive at something like objective truth. And at the opposite end is the skeptic who is not hopeful that we can get very far in the process of digging into ourselves or into our own time and place (ultimately he rejects all claims to knowledge that refer to experience; so that the few truths we possess are no more than definitions and tautologies, e.g. mathematical truths).
Further and important chapters in Western philosophy on this question include Kant’s doctrine of the categories (supposedly ahistorical and acultural bases of thinking), Hegel’s discovery of history (his idea that there are infinite numbers of categories that change with culture and time), Marx’s redirection towards action (it doesn’t matter what you believe or think or whether you have surpassed mere prejudice and arrived at knowledge, what matters is that you act), Wittgenstein’s (initial) idea that understanding is pretty much co-extensive with science and that there is no objective way of getting at human truth or the realm of value (so that the things that really matter to people and are the main subject of doubt and questioning are ultimately vanishing and incommunicable), and Heidegger's (initial) idea that it is precisely one’s prejudices and biases that make understanding possible, not one’s objective reasoning or approximation to an ahistoric truth (because understanding is inherently historical and perspectival and, like human existence itself, is radically ‘situated’).
Another powerful thinker on the subject of digging into oneself, into one’s personality and culture, to get at the truth, is Sigmund Freud.
One way to characterize the result of a Freudian perspective on the issue is to say that there are two processes at work: one in which ideas are put forward that attempt to interpret and explain; another in which these ideas are tested and criticized. In different words: the ego is a work in progress (“The reality principle is a provisional and incomplete improvisation whose transitory coherence is always challenged by new experience”).
The conclusion at this juncture, overcoming the construction that we are all attempting to ‘sell’ our version of reality, is that the ‘version of reality’ is itself a fantasy—a pretense of stability quickly dispelled by observation.
The skeptical point of view grasps itself as a problem; likewise it is other-directed (since truth-directed); it’s about ‘getting things right.’ In turns, trying to ‘get things right,’ skepticism or inquiry assumes wildly different forms and is in turns subjective, objective, intersubjective, relatively fixed, relatively unstable, evolving in fits and starts, blind to itself (resting on undoubted principles) falling backwards (examining its own foundations), awakening and starting again.
Living in Doubt
Doubt examines belief; doubt rests on belief. Thinking can change its assumptions but cannot rid itself of assumptions. Ultimately I actually have to think certain thoughts in order to examine others.
Reasoning drives on to the result that total doubt imperils itself (since conviction underlies doubt) and so must pull up short of the goal; thinking surmounts this drawback by treating its assumptions as hypotheses. The scientific process is an endless series of conjectures and refutations, which (it is often said) approximate or gradually approach the truth; yet the claim that the inquirer is making progress begs the question, whether this claim is knowledge or merely opinion. The honest thinker acknowledges enormous setbacks and finally confesses that he is merely inquiring and cannot bring the search to an end; he also tries to appreciate the obvious and not miss the hand in front of his face.
Thus the answer to the question about the relation between doubt and education comes out in the Socratic quest instilled and practiced as healthy skepticism.
Doubt: that is, skepticism or inquiry; cynicism or disdain; pessimism or negation; questioning without the assurance that one’s questions will be answered; which in some minds or spirits is a kind of gloom or despair; in others, irony or comedy or mockery; and for still others, doubt is a kind of endurance that survives its questions by continually asking them.
Normally the expression ‘living in doubt’ is taken to be a hardship; it is a burden to go on doubting all the time. The thinker is ‘plagued’ with doubt, ‘crippled’ with doubt, ‘weighed down’ by doubt. Clearly the thinker can get stuck in doubt—but this does not imply that he can simply dismiss doubt and believe. The point is to enter into doubt, to risk this and undergo it. But he does not raise doubt for its own sake. He raises doubt in order to surpass doubt and arrive at truth (in order to get things right).
This reasoning seems to justify the proposition that ‘living in doubt’ is a hardship. It is the consequence of seeking and not finding; thus doubt is a middle state between naïve acceptance and comprehensive knowledge. Combined with the pessimistic conception of philosophy—the idea that philosophy merely seeks and cannot find wisdom—the inquiry into doubt seems to lead to the dual conclusion that thinking must risk doubt and also that thinking cannot attain certainty.
Seeking vs. Finding
These are the two poles—living in doubt or overcoming doubt—the opposite positions of Socrates and Gautama.
Socrates ventures into doubt—thus he gets stuck in doubt—he cannot get unstuck—he cannot ‘go on’ but has to remain in doubt.
Gautama ventures into doubt—he never forbids doubt or enforces a conclusion—but he also claims that he reaches the end (“A vision of truth arose in me; my heart’s deliverance is unassailable; this is the last birth; now there is no more becoming,” The Setting in Motion of the Wheel of Truth, last line).
These thinkers share a commitment to beginning doubt; both could affirm Descartes’ proposition, “if you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things”—i.e., both could affirm the spirit of this endeavor, though not literally, since investigation demonstrates the incoherence of total doubt.
But the two thinkers fall apart over the result. Socrates remains in the position of the seeker and takes an ironic position vis-à-vis every pretender to wisdom. Gautama claims to have arrived at a completion—Gautama is more than a learner; he becomes the teacher.
But learning and teaching, moods of anxiousness and calm, are like a fated pair—lover and beloved—the romance of youth and experience.
The elenchus (Greek: destructive cross-examination, skeptical questioning, critical interrogation, ‘scrutiny’) is a completion, an end or termination or fulfillment, in that it is a place the thinker tries to inhabit, to embody, a vigilant intellectual conscience applied to all things. The vipassana (Sanskrit: meditation, mental culture, the observant consciousness, the inner eye, ‘insight’ meditation) is a tremendously difficult concentration and inwardness, an articulate wakefulness or attentiveness, a vigilant inward contemplation taking into itself every single moment in mental history.
Digging deeper, the opposite positions of scrutiny and insight, articulating and contemplating, or interrogation and observation share a plausible or potential fundamental unity. Socrates is the quintessential seeker and is called gadfly, corrupter, satyr, demon. Gautama is the quintessential finder and is called awake, enlightened, savior, deity. But the teacher and the learner both agree and affirm that each one of us is his own refuge; that every one of us must do his own work; and that there is no end-point of questioning or attention: no last question, no last thing to pay attention to; there is always something to do.
Improvisation
Nietzsche emphasized the cruelty of the doubting and wakeful spirit, especially towards itself. He thought that mind advances by disciplining itself, which is a painful and extremely difficult thing to do. He said this because he did not believe in anything fixed and final; he explained that people get caught in a picture, a ‘truth’ that has gotten stuck, become frozen, coagulated, that has stopped growing or evolving; a single moment gets mistaken as an eternal reality. Nietzsche saw truth itself as the problem—‘truth’ understood as the hypostatization of the coagulated mind—the world keeps changing but “truth is unconditional on one point” (The Genealogy of Morals, III, § 24).
Nietzsche tries to get away from the position of ‘getting stuck’ and tries to get into the position of ‘going on.’ He defends a sensibility that allows itself to be affected in as many ways as possible. Rather than “insist on one point” only, he tries to develop a position that “insists on every point.”
Nietzsche conceives that the process by which belief gets exalted into fixed truth must be superseded and replaced with a still more fundamental process, that of always moving forward, never stopping, of endlessly bountiful creativity—something he also calls “juggling” and “dancing” and “improvising one’s life.”
Nietzsche’s concept of endlessly bountiful creativity (like its ancient prototypes) binds art-speech to passionate, violent emotions that overturn fixed ideas and social conventions. This is the source of the idea that creative work emerges out of a place where good and evil are still indistinct and have not yet separated themselves. Freud develops all these themes.
Freud expressed the notion that ego strength is a capacity to integrate in speaking of the function of ego mechanisms in mediating between the demands of the id, the commands of the superego, and the constraints of reality. The ‘strong’ ego resists the compulsion to resolve tension through repression, and the synthesis it enacts gradually loses its forced or coercive character.
Buried in the mass of this jargon is a profound idea and conclusion drawing out of the entire history recorded in this inquiry into doubt: the idea of the non-coercive synthesis; the idea of the attempt to hold oneself together without violence; the idea of fluid identity or of owning change.
Great art integrates, it brings about balance or synthesis, and thus offers a release from felt tension. Freud reaches the insight that the development of individual character—its maturation and growing sophistication in dealing with unresolved wishes and frustrations—parallels the development of great art—demonstrating the identical capacity to weave opposing elements together within a coherent whole.
Some implications at the end of this reasoning are: that the synthesis is temporary; almost at the moment of its creation, it begins to unravel; the whole point of ‘getting unstuck’ and ‘going on’ by artful living, ‘dancing’ and ‘juggling’ and ‘weaving’, is to forego eternal truths. There is no domesticated form of truth. There is no metric or vocabulary or narrative of truth, but only of conjectures—followed by the critical process of empiricism. In the case that the thinker surpasses doubt and settles on the truth, this truth instantly becomes a fetish—truth itself becomes the problem—truth becomes a stand-in for the failure to adapt. The issue is about waking up and thus having to reawaken over and over again. The issue is not about truth, but about the thought that fits the moment. It only lasts that long.
Improvisation: the essential thing is not predetermined in advance, but has to be made up on the spot, fabricated out of what is at hand.
Points of Origin
Hume and Nietzsche and Freud apply new doubts to sovereign reason—so does Heidegger’s great Nietzsche-study The Will to Power as Art—Cornel West’s concept of “philosophical jazz” builds on these foundations—the broad tendency of nearly all recent philosophy is to take issue with strict rationalism. Reason is not master in its own house. The attempt to ‘get things right’ is an improvisation that has to take many considerations into account.
The scientific ideal is to “insist on one point.” Later thinkers try to insist on many points and even to “insist on every point.” This is no less an ideal—a paradigm for thinking—i.e. not a realistic goal. Yet it seems certain that the thinker cannot disown his thoughts. Insisting on one point or insisting on every point is any case insisting. Thus every example consideration stakes out a position.
The commitment to inquiry is a position; the commitment to wakefulness is a position; the commitment to growth is a position. Each of these different positions and commitments is itself complex and evolving, changing—each is plural and unstable; but at every juncture, staking out a position is an assertion, an hypothesis, a proposition.
What is the significance that “juggling” or “dancing” or “improvising” is a position? A simple one, but exactly opposite to the standpoint of doubt. The import is that in every case we lay down what is so. Thus despite the express intention not to lay down what is so, but instead to keep to the position of questioning, the thinker takes a stand in his intention. Insisting on every point is a version of insisting on one point.
Philosophic history is an ascending realization of doubt in which the demand for total satisfaction comes finally to undo itself. It is as if the will to truth made itself its own object and so discovered its own core will to truth, which it then rejects for being a will to truth instead of perfect indifference.
But further: because she discovers herself at the origin of his thinking, the thinker has an enduring reason for doubt. Thus the intention to keep questioning overtakes the simple fact that it is an intention. Every new improvisation is a new pretender and point of origin.
—Looking back over the whole inquiry and summarizing the course of a meandering and complex history—beginning from mere doubt and arriving at total doubt—grasping the incoherence of total doubt yet resisting any naïve acceptance—we reach the opposites of seeking and observing, teaching and learning—whether we live in doubt or finally get unstuck—in every case thoughts thought by a thinker, who authors and owns them—reaching the bedrock that each of us must face and work through our own doubts.
