July 15, 2022
Do we really know anything in this life?
Sometimes it seems that we leave this world as clueless as when we came into it, that when the final moment comes, our last thought might very well be, “Now what was that all about?” A tale told by an idiot, perhaps.
And yet, do we truly need to know? After all, Keats, in a famous passage in his letters, spoke of “Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” We have to be careful, however, to grasp what that endlessly quoted definition is actually defining. Negative capability does not, presumably, mean that we are left with radical skepticism. If that were the case, Keats’s Grecian urn in his famous ode could not assert its equally famous definition that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty; that is all / Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.” So it appears that Keats feels that we do know truth, but we know it through beauty rather than through fact and reason, which means we know it through imaginative vision, as beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But this implies that truth is created by a human faculty, and a human creation does not promise the kind of certainty that some people very much feel they need.
Those who seek certainty therefore look to the area of religion, which the non-religious Keats did not concern himself with. God is the bedrock upon which religious assurance is founded. But how do we know God? There are two ways, the first being at second hand, through trust in some source of authority—Scripture, a Church, a charismatic leader. The problem is that faith in God then tends to become faith in the authority, and by slow degrees religion thus becomes a matter of power and obedience. For some, the need for security is so great that obedience to authority can become an acceptable price to pay. However, it is even more true in religion than in politics that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and it is possible that institutional Christianity will not survive the consequences of what is increasingly obvious has been a 2000-year deal with the devil.
The other path to religious assurance is a spiritual revelation of one’s own, a gnosis. For reasons of self-interest, the Church has always done its best to suppress private spiritual experience, starting with Gnosticism, the rival to orthodox Christianity in its first two centuries. It was so successful that the idea of a personal spiritual experience is baffling to many people, who equate religion with belief and belonging to a church. But that may be changing as the moribund orthodoxy of the mainstream churches and the toxic quality of right-wing Christian nationalism have started to drive the real seekers to look elsewhere.
If any merely human discipline is necessarily true, it might seem to be mathematics. Facts, even those validated by scientific testing, can be mistaken, but surely mathematical proofs are necessarily true. And yet, although mathematical principles are no doubt inherent in the fabric of the universe, mathematics itself is a human construct, and, by the 20th century, had run up against its limits, as described by Morris Kline in Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty (1980). I am not, mind you, the person to be asking for detailed explanation in this context. But a representative example of the loss that Kline is talking about is Principia Mathematica (1910-13), the monumental, three-volume attempt by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead to prove the validity of mathematics by showing that it can be reduced to formal logic. Unfortunately, Kurt Gödel proved in a short book that no total system such as that sought in the Principia can be definitive because it must at the start assume certain axioms and principles that lie outside the system itself and thus remain unproved.
The whole argument of The Productions of Time is about epistemology, the theory of knowledge. To condense the gist of a 450-page book into a few paragraphs, what ordinarily passes for knowledge is what we infer from our experience as subjects perceiving, through our senses, an environment outside ourselves, objective to ourselves. We wake up in the morning, and there is the world, like it or not. Science accepts this ordinary subject-object mode of perception but demands proof that our perceptions are not misinterpretations or deceptions. However, the subject-object perspective is inherently alienated. The ego, or “I,” confronts a vast environment that is largely unknown and possibly threatening, including the possible threat from other human beings. This alienation and doubt give rise to an inherent anxiety, not a situational fear due to actual circumstances but a permanent anxiety born of the ego’s perception of its vulnerable situation. This is Kierkegaard’s “dread,” the “angst” of Heidegger and the existentialists, an inescapable part of the human condition. In times of social stress, such inborn, goes-with-the-territory anxiety acts as a catalyst on human biochemistry and produces the epidemic of clinical depression and panic attacks characteristic of our time, especially among young people.
Moreover, in the 18th century Kant pointed out that the sense data by means of which we know the outside world is not reality as it is in itself but an interpretation of sense data by the mind according to the mind’s basic categories of time, space, causality, and others. In a watershed moment of modern thought, Kant said that we never know reality directly, what he called the “thing-in-itself” or the “noumenal.” We only know the phenomenal appearance of reality, which is always pre-structured by the mind’s software, so to speak. This means that real reality, so to speak, is totally unknown. All we know, even by scientific methods of proving, is what is true within the limits of the mind’s categories. In a word, we don’t know reality and never can. All we can know is the phenomenal world, experience as it is structured by our minds. What this did was add paranoia to anxiety as part of the “modern temper.”
We should not give modern thought too much credit. The imagination has always known of the alienation of the subject-object perspective but has expressed it mythically rather than theoretically. Why was the tree with the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden called the “tree of knowledge of good and evil”? What kind of knowledge did Adam and Eve gain through their defiance of God’s warning? What they “gained” was in fact the knowledge of the subject-object perspective. The Fall is the fall into that perspective, which Blake called the “cloven fiction,” a pun: knowledge of the world as cloven into alienated halves, knowledge that is cloven like the devil’s hoof. This makes God’s interdiction more than the stupid and malicious obedience test that it seems to be on the surface. In falling into the subject-object world, humanity fell into illusion, an illusion in which we are trapped and cannot simply will ourselves out of.
Such an explanation makes sense not just of the Eden story but of the ongoing theme of “forbidden knowledge” that stems from it. The idea that “there are things humanity was not meant to know” has a suspicious ring to it in our time. We are well aware that “forbidden knowledge” often means knowledge that the authorities do not want us to have so that there will be no questioning. Right now most Russians support the invasion of Ukraine because the evil of that war is forbidden knowledge. It is knowledge that people are not allowed to know even when they really know it, much like the knowledge that Trump really did lose the 2020 election. You cannot know that and still belong to the tribe, even if, deep down, some part of you really does know.
But the real forbidden knowledge is the subject-object condition itself—forbidden too late, for we already have it, or, rather, it has us. The subject-object condition elicits feelings of possible threat—the feeling that one is living in a permanently threatening, unstable world. The passive response to that feeling of threat is anxiety, but a more active response is the will to power: the threat has to be pre-emptively neutralized by control or outright violence. The Social Darwinist view that the world is a harsh, dog-eat-dog arena of the survival of the fittest, in which “fittest” means most aggressive or most dishonestly cunning, breeds the nastiness we see all around us: the racism, the sexism, the xenophobia, the fascism. All of this is a will to power marshalled to dominate, to rule, to control—because if you don’t you will be dominated, ruled, controlled, or even “replaced,” as in “replacement theory.” There is a fear of extinction that has made a third of the country into vicious, cornered animals, animals who are now running in packs. Why should we care about the subject-object problem in epistemology? Because it has given birth to an irrational, aggressive will that could end all life on earth.
But any knowledge acquired by a society in the grip of the “cloven fiction” is going to become forbidden knowledge in a secondary sense, meaning that it will be used to serve the purposes of the will to power. It will be weaponized, monetized, or both. Isn’t it wonderful that science has increased human comfort and convenience, dramatically lengthened human life span, discovered vaccines for viruses? But science has also given us an increasingly science fictional arsenal of weapons, including nuclear weapons, has given us technology that results in global warming. It has, in addition, given us mass global communications, including social media, that have been as destructive as most weapons—science has made possible wildfire mental epidemics like QAnon. It has also given us electronic surveillance, an extension of one of the primary tools of domination, what has been called “the Gaze.” We all know that being stared at is a horrible experience: eyes can be offensive weapons. All women understand the aggression of the male Gaze, but a wider application of it is Big Brother style total surveillance, now being used by Jeff Bezos to make sure you get your package the very next day. As an obedient servant of the nihilism bred by the cloven fiction, science itself becomes malignant. If you survey the history of science fiction, the number of stories in which scientific knowledge saves the human race is probably about equal to the number of stories in which it destroys it.
The most famous story of forbidden knowledge outside of the Bible is that of Faust, an intellectual who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for it. The Faust legend comes out of the Middle Ages, in which the forbidden knowledge was of black magic. But the greatest retelling of the legend, Goethe’s Faust, updates Faust’s methods into thoroughly modern versions of black magic. Faust and Mephistopheles invent paper money, for instance--that is, they invent a form of wealth that has value only so long as people believe it does. Eventually the confidence game will collapse, as the stock market did in 2008, as the cryptocurrency scam is doing now. The diabolical duo fight the Emperor’s wars, and Faust ends at the age of 100 as a capitalist entrepreneur with an engineering project of reclaiming real estate from the sea, which results in the deaths of an aged couple who refuse to sell the property that Faust needs, or, really, just wants. Even as they were just coming into being, Goethe understood the ways of damning oneself through the most enlightened modern methods while calling it “progress.” There is also Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein, who gives up on the old magical and alchemical forbidden knowledge and switches to the new scientific variety. Victor, like Goethe’s Faust, fails to realize that his idealism is really a mask for a narcissistic power drive. He creates his “monster” out of a desire for public acclaim and comes to hate it when it fails to serve that purpose, rejecting the creature’s claim to be a fellow creature of intellect and feeling rather than the mere instrument of his creator’s greatness.
Against the false knowledge of the subject-object perspective, the imagination has deployed various subversive, decreative techniques that are as old as philosophy itself. Socrates claimed that he knew only one thing—namely, that he knew nothing, which put him one up on the smart people who thought they knew something but really knew nothing. In a few of Plato’s early texts, the Socratic dialogue dead ends in an aporia, a moment of undecidability, often a paradox. One wonders whether these moments are not a more faithful reflection of Socrates’ actual method, whereas in the later dialogues Plato’s own need for certainty led him to the doctrine of the Forms, which are real knowledge beyond this lower realm of illusory opinion.
In the Middle Ages, a remarkable line of thought grew up called apophatic or negative theology, whose premise was that knowledge of God was ultimately impossible because the finite human mind cannot understand an infinite being. The only way of attaining some conception of God is by negation, by saying what God is not. It is something of a tribute to the Middle Ages that this via negativa, or negative way, flourished as widely as it did without being too often cracked down upon by the Church for fostering doubt—which was, after all, the fate of Socrates. They may not be household words today, but the proponents of the negative way included some of the most brilliant and original thinkers in the history of Western thought: Pseudo-Dionysus, John Scotus Erigena, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, Nicholas of Cusa, whose Of Learned Ignorance was mentioned in the previous newsletter. Negative theology always ends in paradox, where reason reaches its boundaries. There are parallels in Eastern thought, such as the famous phrase from the Upanishads, neti neti, “not this, not that.” But negative theology does not end only in paradox, because, when reason finally fails and falls silent, a mystical experience may potentially take place. This in fact happened to Nicholas of Cusa.
That is decidedly not true of modern modes of philosophy that proceed through negation. These too end in paradox and undecidability, but the conclusion drawn is rather of a radical skepticism. That is true of the most famous of them, Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction. Deconstruction has been compared to negative theology—indeed it has inspired a school of “deconstructive theology” associated with the names of Mark C. Taylor and Thomas J.J.Altizer—but Derrida himself denies the comparison. Negative theology always reaches a limit, at which point negation has to give way to faith or vision. Deconstruction has no limit: reason plunges into an abyss to which there is no bottom, because even a negative conclusion is still a conclusion and has to be deconstructed in its turn. The necessary vehicle of thought is language, and it is an illusion—though, Derrida admits, an indispensable one for practical purposes—that language ever arrives at meaning, let alone truth. We can only define or give meaning to any signifier by using other signifiers, which in their turn have to be defined or delimited by still other signifiers, and so on in an infinite regress. This expands into a textuality, a webwork of signifiers, that is a labyrinth with no egress. At the point of exhaustion, we draw a figurative line in the sand and conclude, “It means this”—which even Derrida has to do or he could never write a book. But the illusion of meaning is always still an illusion.
The radical skepticism of modern philosophy and literary theory seems motivated by a disillusionment with Western civilization, maybe with human civilization altogether. That has local, sociopolitical reasons: we are at a moment of crisis. But the present crisis is the latest aftershock of a seismic event in the 17th and 18th centuries, culminating in the Romantic movement and its theory of the imagination. To put it simply enough to fit into a newsletter, an old order based on an authority located upward—in the heavens, at the top of the political and religious hierarchy—for complex reasons lost credibility. When the traditional superstructure of divine and elite human authority crumbled slowly away, what was left was simply ordinary experience, the subject-object world, a secular and democratic world in which humanity was responsible for its own destiny. But, as we have seen, the world of the cloven fiction is one of pervasive alienation and anxiety. Hence our troubled time, marked by cultism and fascism, in which millions of people are swept up into collective movements because they have nothing to ground them. The present hysteria reflects a crisis of knowledge.
Talk about the theory of knowledge sounds very philosophical; however, I am not talking about ideas that people have about life, but rather about the moods and psychological crises that descend upon them for reasons that they cannot put their finger on. When I was 18, I had a psychological crisis precipitated by reading a science fiction story called “They” by Robert Heinlein. Years before The Matrix or The Truman Show, it was about a man who discovers one day by accident that his entire reality is an illusion fabricated by an alien. It destabilized me for some time: what it taught me was radical doubt. Reality cannot be trusted: the façade may suddenly be ripped away at any moment. Okay, being 18 may have had something to do with it, and growing up in an unstable, melodramatically dysfunctional family might have had even more to do with it. Those would be the causal factors a therapist would deal with, not that anybody had a therapist in that day and age. But the experience itself was my version of the moment in which modern thought was born, the moment in which Descartes said he was going to doubt everything until he found something that could not be doubted, because reality could be an illusion maintained by some imp or demon.
I am not sure how long I walked around in a weird, rather unhinged mood, but what brought me out of it was reading another story, “To Here and the Easel,” a fantasy by Theodore Sturgeon in which a painter with painter’s block, or whatever you get when you can’t paint, has episodes in which he is yanked into the world of Ariosto’s epic romance Orlando Furioso. Suddenly he is a knight imprisoned by a magician: in other words, he is transported into the world of the imagination. To foreshorten the plot, he escapes and breaks his artist’s block by changing his attitude, choosing affirmation rather than constant paralyzing doubt. Negation is always possible, always tempting, always seemingly justified—but past a point we may decide to reject that voice within us that Blake called the Idiot Questioner, who is always questioning but never capable of answering. In a poem significantly titled Auguries of Innocence, Blake has an aphorism—Blake has an aphorism for everything—“If the Sun and Moon should doubt / They’d immediately Go out.” There are people who choose to go out. However, we may choose otherwise, may choose to trust the imagination, to have faith in radical possibility, not as an alternative to radical doubt but as its Contrary. In the same poem, not as often quoted, is another couplet: “A Riddle or the Cricket’s Cry / Is to Doubt a fit Reply.” What riddle? We are not told. However, one version of it is: “What kind of knowledge unites subject and object?” In myth and folktale, from Oedipus the King to The Hobbit, riddles are contests, and the stakes are usually life and death.
When faith seeks to put an end to doubt and rest in certainty, it becomes dogmatic, and betrays itself. That is what Keats meant when he recommended negative capability. But skepticism gone rogue, as it has in our time, broken loose from its place in a larger visionary system, also becomes dogmatic. It is easy enough to counter such dogmatism logically with a move that is commonly taught in introductory philosophy courses, by pointing out that the claim that knowledge and truth are impossible is still a claim, an assertion that we are to accept as true—which invalidates the statement that truth is impossible. But logic games are not enough, because skepticism is an addictive drug, a depressive one spiraling towards nihilism. It takes the form of an emotional conviction that has nothing to do with logic, the feeling that the most reductive and negative conclusion is likely to be the ugly truth hidden under all the affirmative and hopeful appearances. In Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, Leontes is seized with the certainty that his wife is having an affair with his best friend. He has no evidence for this whatsoever and does not have the excuse of an Iago planting vicious lies in his subconscious. He just has the unshakeable feeling that it must be true because it is the worst possibility he can imagine. And he clings to it fanatically out of a desire not to be fooled. In an amazing metaphor, he compares his circumstance to that of a man who was fine so long as he did not realize that the glass of wine he drank had a drowned spider in it. But when the man realizes he has swallowed a spider, he retches. I have swallowed the spider, he says. But the thing is—Leontes hasn’t. He has only chosen to believe that he has. Sixteen years pass in the middle of the play, and at the end of it, Leontes is reunited with the wife he thinks he has killed through his false accusations. In what to me has always been one of the most moving scenes in all literature, his wife, who has been pretending to be a sculpture, “comes to life,” the dead returned, grief comforted, guilt forgiven. The character orchestrating this scene says to him, “It is required you do awake your faith.”
William James espoused the philosophy of pragmatism, which says that, certainty being impossible, we choose to believe pragmatically in “what works,” adding that it is often our belief that makes it work. In The Will to Believe, he uses the example of a man who has to make a dangerous leap from one side of a crevasse to the other. He is more likely to succeed if he has the confident belief that he will succeed. There is an immediate and obvious difficulty here, one articulated in Yeats’s famous lines, “The best lack all conviction while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” But that does not refute James’s conclusion. In the first place, the passionate intensity of evil people is mostly an illusion: the fanatical confidence of the fascists and the religious right is actually like Leontes’ conviction that he has been betrayed—it is an expression of secret doubt, not faith, and it is fanatical because it is doubt. Focusing on certain groups of “different” people gives concrete form to an otherwise vague feeling that the world is an unknown and dangerous place full of possible threats against which we must always be vigilant. It is an expression of fear and doubt, not faith. How do we know the difference between real faith and irrational obsession? Jesus’s criterion is no different from James’s: by their fruits shall ye know them.
Imaginative knowledge, which unites subject with object, self with the world and with others, produces the vision of a recreated life, of life as it could be. Here, the role of the humanities is central. I am all for teaching “critical thinking” that sees through the lies and illusions of our society, but what we do not sufficiently provide for our students is a vision of what we could do, what we could build. The heritage of the “theory wars” in this regard is more reductive skepticism: any positive vision will be attacked as a power play. “Whose good does this serve, at whose expense?” it will be immediately asked. “What coercion is not being admitted? Who will be marginalized for the sake of whose privilege?” It is not that such questions should not be raised. But they should not shut the conversation down, and they fact that they have so effectively done so for half a century has handicapped attempts at positive social change. It is not that we should stop talking about systemic racism and sexism and the like, but such skepticism needs a more positive complement.
There is absolutely nothing to stop us from creating utopia—real utopia, not someone’s regimenting system, but rather life’s abundance, a vision of fulfilled primary concerns in which all of Abraham Maslow’s basic needs are met. It will no doubt entail a vision, like Maslow’s, of “the farther reaches of human nature.” It will further entail, as Maslow also said in books such as The Psychology of Science, a critique of the scientific attitude. The famous opening line of Aristotle’s Metaphysics is that all people desire by nature to know. However, within the alienated subject-object context, the desire to know is reduced to a fearful insurance against threat. In The Known and the Unknown, science fiction critic Gary Wolfe says, “In science fiction it is less important to conquer the villain than the conquer the unknown, and the importance of this conquest is what the ideological structure of many science-fiction narratives teaches” (15).
Against this aggressive conquering we may juxtapose the famous statement of Isaac Newton: “To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me.” Northrop Frye quotes this statement several times in his writings on religion, and one time adds a striking sentence: “But the ocean has no wish to remain undiscovered” (366). In what Maslow called “love knowledge,” the Other unfolds itself to perception insofar as it is loved, with the opposite of scientific detachment. In Sturgeon’s “To Here and the Easel,” Giles learns to paint again by looking with empathy (Sturgeon’s great theme) rather than through some abstract objective standard of beauty, and thereby decides to paint his ordinary-looking assistant—because she is beautiful. We are back to Keats on beauty and truth again, this time understanding that the perception of beauty expands into what The Productions of Time calls a vision of love and the perception of truth into a vision of order. This kind of knowledge is not a product of the cloven fiction but instead of the imagination, which teaches us, Frye says, that “whatever we perceive is a part of us and forms an identity with us” (184).
Right now, there is little to rally around. And yet creating a much better world is perfectly possible, not quixotic at all. Or rather, it is imperfectly possible: we are not talking about perfection. That is another reductive ploy used to shut hopeful conversation down. Yes, perfection is impossible, and we do not even want it—the good life is not the same as a perfect life. The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein has a phrase, “the good enough mother.” What we want is a good enough community, a good enough life for everyone. What we want is a good enough utopia.
How do we begin giving birth to it? Well, first, it is required we do awaken our faith. It strikes me that that is exactly the attitude necessary for a writer faced with a blank screen or piece of paper. You do not start with knowledge, with “something to say.” Rather, you are staring into nothingness—but receptively, inviting whatever may come to call. If something is offered from the other side, whatever that means, you then must decide whether you commit to it. It's all a venture, with no guarantees. But in the process, you just might learn something.
References
Frye, Northrop. Northrop Frye on Religion, edited by Alvin A. Lee and Jean O’Grady. Volume 4 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2000.
Wolfe, Gary K. The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction. Kent State University Press, 1979.