Mere Reality

Of what can we be certain? Or, can we only be certain of uncertainty? 

"Man's innate desire for knowledge," writes Owens, "tends not only toward knowing the truth about things, but likewise being certain that he knows it." However, many have been the times when our certitude turned out to be unjustified. Moreover, 

You continually meet people who are certain of views that you know to be wrong. Error is ubiquitous as a fact and poses troublesome problems for the epistemologist.  

And just because we are certain that someone else is wrong, this doesn't necessarily make us right. The question remains, 

Can any judgments be had..., that after thorough scrutiny show they exclude all possibility of correction? Is certitude ever justified?

Hmm. How about something exists. Am I sure about that? Sure I'm sure, since it cannot be explicitly denied without implicitly affirming it, because something that exists just denied it:

Try as you like, you cannot, while you are actually feeling or seeing the thing, shake in any seriousness your knowledge that something -- in the sense of an extended or bodily something-- exists in your cognition.... 

You know that something corporeal exists, and that try as you like you cannot correct or doubt that judgment.

Is that it? That doesn't seem like much to go on. 

Well, we have to start somewhere, and perhaps this is just the thin edge of a wedge of fledgling knowledge that will bust being wide open. For starters, the very existence of the little something we are judging to exist "excludes its own non-being. The real existence means that it is not non-existent in reality."

Thus, the non-existence of this something is impossible. This first judgment "is not open to doubt or correction. Existence reveals its own necessity" and "cannot be otherwise."

Well, good. In knowing that something exists, we also know, by extension, that we exist, for "While you are knowing in reflection that you exist, you cannot simultaneously be seeing that you do not exist."

So, we are certain that something is and that something -- someone -- is certain of it. Denying either of these primordial truths -- or affirming their non-existence -- is impossible. Therefore "It is impossible to be and to not be at the same time."

Thus we arrive at our first articulate principle, based on our first pre-articulate certitude, which "may be expressed in the judgment 'It is impossible to be and not be at the same time.'" 

No matter how much you try to deny it in words, you cannot deny it in thought. Any attempt to deny it involves its affirmation, for its denial is accepted as something that cannot be its affirmation.

In short, "A thing cannot be what it is not." Moreover, "A thing is one in itself and is different from other things." 

The investigation is closed. You are certain of your truth judgment. There is no "fear of error," in the sense that you have seen there is no possibility of error in the case. Being, consequently, is the criterion of certitude as well as the ground and norm of truth.

Being doesn't lie. Rather, it is, always is, and cannot not be what it is. 

Great. Now what? What goes on between our first certitude and all of the other truth claims built upon it? How is the "extension of human knowledge possible," whereby we pass "from what is already known to still further knowledge of things"? 

How is it possible to be wrong about what is? Well "In erroneous conclusions, opinions, and beliefs..., the assent is ultimately caused by the human will," and "not by the object." 

For example, we may, for the sake of expedience, make a hasty judgment about what is, that turns out to be incorrect -- like thinking the straight stick placed in water is bent, or the rope is a snake. 

Now, the will is free, so we are of course free to be wrong, even though there is no right to be wrong. 

Man's free direction of his own conduct is an anomaly in the physical world, and would appear to involve a supersensible cause.

Only a rational being can be free, and yet, we wouldn't be free if we weren't free to be irrational or wrong. If we had no such freedom to be wrong, we would be like computers and not men. But in any event, "the very process of reasoning itself could not take place" if it were not independent of the conditions imposed by matter.

That is to say, any knowledge is an abstraction from matter involving a universal that transcends time and space. Obviously math, for example, is of this nature. It is not located in space, nor is it subject to the changes of time. Except maybe our time, in which some folks claim it is just a result of white oppression. 

I apologize for the repetition, for it seems we keep arriving at the same bottom line: that being is, and that it is intelligible to the intellect that can freely know it, even while we are free to not know it, which reminds us of an aphorism or two:

Freedom is not an end, but a means. Whoever sees it as an end in itself does not know what to do with it when he gets it.

For freedom is ordered to the truth of being. It is not the goal of history but the material that it works with.  

Moreover, 

To admit the existence of errors is to confess the reality of free will.

But -- speaking of the relationship of will to error -- 

The free act is rebellion or obedience. Man establishes there his godlike pride or his creaturely humility. 

Which reminds me of Genesis 3, which amounts to an ontological rebellion against being that somehow keeps happening.