Whaddya Know?

I mean really. What do we know? What can we know with absolute certitude?

Hmm. The title of this post smells familiar. Haven't we belabored this point before?

Yes. It's been eight years though, and perhaps in the meantime human nature has undergone a fundamental change, such that there are permanent truths we can know today that we couldn't know then. I'd better skim the post. You needn't bother -- if I find anything worthwhile, I'll drag it up. Be right back...

It seems to me that everything hinges upon whether or not man may know. If we cannot know, then our whole pretentious house of cards collapses, and we are reduced to competing forms of nihilism, or survival of the frivolous. But if we can know, then...

To approach this question is truly to begin at the beginning, because no other questions can be answered until we establish the fact that questions are answerable -- i.e., that man may possess true knowledge of himself and of the world.

Indeed, some thinkers believe we must go even further back, and first establish the existence of the world. For example, this is what Kant does, and concludes that it doesn't exist. That being the case, we cannot know anything about it. The end.

That's an exaggeration, but only an uncharitable one. The point is that Kant placed a dark line between What Is and What We May Know About It, which ultimately results in an unbridgeable chasm between being and knowing.

Right. You can't know a little bit about the unknowable -- even that it's unknowable. I mean, that's a yuge claim. And more than a little presumptuous, for it is saying a great deal to say that ultimate truth consists in not knowing it. Well, you may be lost at sea, but that doesn't prove dry land doesn't exist, does it?

Our dry land consists of self-evident truths. How do we know when we've found one? I would say when denial of it entails absurd or monstrous consequences. It reminds me of something Chesterton said of the "thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped."

One such thought is that our thoughts do not disclose reality and that truth is therefore inaccessible to human beings: come for the absurdity, stay for the monstrosity. Literally, because once you enter such an epistemological hellworld, there is no rational exit: mandatory stupidity, no exceptions.

Since truth is the conformity of mind to reality, the very notion of truth is poisoned at the root. Thought and Thing go through an ugly divorce, and Thing gets to keep all the real properties to herself, since you Kant take 'em with you. Man becomes closed upon himself, and tenure takes care of the rest.

The whole thing can be boiled down even further, which is why I developed my irritating system of unsaturated pneumaticons. For truly, it all comes down to O and/or Ø, does it not?

Speaking of boiling things down further... I'm tempted to go off on an important tangent that would derail this post. I'll try to be brief. I'm reading an interesting book called America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding, in which the author doesn't just trace the intellectual roots of the founding, but drills all the way down to the very foundation of the cosmos, similar (but different) to what we do around here.

Who else uses "cosmos" and "America" in the same sentence? Well, the founders did so implicitly in justifying our existence on the basis of its conformity with the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God. This makes their efforts "cosmic in scope. It is a drama across time" (Arnn, in Reilly). It is transhistorical before it is historical, because it begins at the end: with universal truths and immutable human nature.

Speaking of beginnings,

"Every metaphysics that is not measured by the mystery of what is, but by the state of positive science at such and such an instant, is false from the beginning" (Maritain)....

Let us stipulate that man may know. But what does this mean, to know? What is happening when we know something? The answer isn't obvious -- at least not anymore -- but for Maritain it is an irreducibly spiritual event through and through. For

"There is a vigorous correspondance between knowledge and immateriality. A being is known to being to the extent that it is immaterial."

And with that we're back to where this post started, in an essay by Josef Pieper called On the Desire for Certainty.

Certainty is good. But is there something better -- or at least prior to it? Yes. Call it trust. Or faith. One way or the other(s), there's no way to avoid this leap. Of course, faith in oneself is wholly unwarranted, but nor is faith in God warranted if we can't trust our faith in his faith in us. It's a spiral, or spiration.

I suppose the bottom line for today is that either we are enclosed in the circle or there is an exit from it. The rest is commentary, more than half of which is absurd. And eventually monstrous.