Better thinking (Tryals past)
Preliminary
Philosophy is a way of thinking and inquiring about the world around us. It is an organized form of curiosity. It does not require that the inquirer already know what truth is, or what truth might look like when it is found, or even whether the truth that one hopes to find can be found. In fact, philosophy requires that the inquirer suspend certainty. Philosophy is a winding road with an unknown destination. It does require a few skills to keep to the road, but all of these can be learned. To begin, however, it requires only an openness of mind—the willingness of the inquirer to admit that they do not know everything, perhaps not much of anything, and that there is much more to be known than is already know. It asks the thinker to become comfortable with uncertainty.
To be done well, philosophy requires some rules and procedures, so that we can talk to one another more precisely and effectively. That’s what this conversation is about. These rules are not meant to inhibit inquiry or creativity but to make the process of discovery as productive as possible. Philosophy requires care, patience, and a great deal of humility. Philosophy is not about broadcasting one’s opinions, or dominating others in debate, or defending opinions that the inquirer might already hold, even ones that are dear. It is about examining those very opinions.
Philosophy is for curious people. It is not the property of specialists. It is not reserved for academics. It is for anyone who wants to take part. It is for those who genuinely want to work out which opinions are most worthy of their belief. All beliefs are liable to critical evaluation. None will be held exempt. Many of those beliefs will not survive, at least not in their present form. Philosophy is an activity. Philosophers need not be professionals to do philosophy. They only need to be courageous enough to change their minds and give up unworthy beliefs.
So check your opinions at the door. Philosophy is for those who want to try out new thoughts and improve the quality of their thinking.
A cheery beginning
Whatever else you do, you are going to die. So too will everyone you know and love. And every thing that you value will be lost and forgotten, or at best taken by another, repurposed and called their own. Your country, your people, your community, your values—all these things that are precious to you will be lost in time. You will not be the exception. No human being who has lived before you has ever managed to exceed a human lifetime. Every king you can think of, every conqueror, every conquest—all gone. All their achievements, however impressive they may have seemed in the moment, are temporary. We still brood upon their glorious titles, stumble across their desperately-placed monuments. The Roman forum, the pyramid of Cheops, the Benin bronzes, the Great Wall of China. We marvel at these souvenirs, at what they must have cost the people who built or gathered them. But we do not really honor their accomplishments. We do not now pay respect to the boundaries of Alexander the Great’s empire, just as he failed to honor the sovereign borders of the Persian empire, which he had fleetingly overrun. We do not wander the gilded halls of Versailles with much thought for the divine right of the glorious sun-king Louis XIV. We do not approach the ancient pyramids at Giza with reverence and awe for the god-kings who called them into being. In fact, we do not value any of the accomplishments of an Egyptian pharaoh as such a pharaoh himself would have wished them to be valued. We place fragments of their accomplishments and the dried husks of their bodies into museums to satisfy our fleeting curiosity, but pay no mind to their intentions, their notions of justice, or their own estimation of their legacies. Their bodies, their possessions, their works belong to us. We do with them as we please, and with impunity. As such, there is perhaps little to distinguish a tomb-robber from an archeologist. Would a pharaoh or an Egyptian nobleman feel that they were being appropriately revered in a museum, their crumbling carcasses glanced over by a million gum-chewing tourists? Do we who gawk over their remains care one whit for their god-like dignity? Would we bend our efforts to preserving their values as they would have wished them to be preserved, at the cost of what we value? Of course not. Neither did they for those who came before them or whom they crushed beneath their feet to satisfy their own sense of self-importance. We value them no more than they valued their own slaves. In a few centuries or less, the same will be done to us. No one will value your business accomplishments or remember your name, perhaps not even your tribe or nation. There is no reasonable prospect that any of this will change in the foreseeable future. We live much longer than did our ancestors, but we do not come any closer to defeating death once and for all. We merely delay it, with much anxiety, at great cost, and with mixed results. No matter what you do, virtually everything that matters to you will be lost. All of your striving will make no difference to this outcome. Neither you nor I are likely to prove the exception. If you are an exception, you are welcome to gloat and destroy all copies of these words, if any remain.
It seems likely then that striving is for nothing, all ambitions equally useless. Indeed, much of our striving comes to very little. Yet the striving matters a great deal to us right now, while we are still here, in this life, now. And some kinds of striving matter much more than others in our present, and even to the near future. So we must value what we do in a very local and limited perspective. Still, our looming extinction may have some influence on our present choices and priorities. We can learn to strive better. As individuals we do not live forever. Neither do our collective identities last a great deal longer. They are not much worth dying for. Your country is not much likelier than you to remain forever. Your political loyalties and ideological commitments, so important to you now, will seem quaint or repugnant to future generations. Some of your genetic descendants may well be around in a thousand years, but they will not remember anything about you. Still, it would be worthy of you to leave them a world worth inheriting. You are, after all, not just an individual person but the temporary bodily expression of a genome descended from life-forms that have called this planet home for billions of years. Genes are the truest immortals. Some of your distant relations are likely to survive and reproduce, but they may turn out to be the distant cousins you now call pests and infections. You cannot reliably impose your present values and sense of worth onto the future. Other, unanticipated values will emerge and survive in their place, and they too will be displaced.
So here is our first important lesson. We must make peace with our unimportance. Our life matters only to us now and to those nearest us, if we are lucky. That will have to be enough. Whatever you choose to do with your brief time on earth will have to matter to this present. The future will not obey. When you die, even those who remember you will do so in their way.
This is actually the good news. It means that we don’t have to take ourselves and our legacies quite so seriously. We need not impose relentless striving upon ourselves. We need not impose it on others. There is already far too much present suffering for the sake of an uncooperative future. So ask yourself: Are there things you enjoy now that do not depend on the good opinion of future generations? Are there things you wish to accomplish that can be worthy and satisfying within the scope of your limited lifetime? Do you strive to be good at something that can reasonably be achieved within a single span of life? Are there people you cherish now with whom you can enjoy this present? Here, then, is your life’s purpose. You don’t need to be given a purpose by some mis-imagined future or some unseen and unpleasable father. Any future glory is not worth the cost of the present, yours or anyone else’s.
So let us agree on what is already the case. My life, your life, and everything that our lives mean and represent is for our present lifetime, no more. You cannot compel anyone else in our present or in any time to come to value your life as you do. Your lifetime is all you have. It is all that any sentient being has ever had. Many of them have managed to find great pleasure, create remarkable art, discover quiet meaning and comfort in the small portion available to them. Think what Mozart managed to do in a scant 36 years, Schubert in 31, Hendrix in 27. Merely to play or hear one of their works brings joy to the present moment. And we would all be grateful if you would add a few small treasures to what they have left us, as long as you find joy in the making. These things are worth doing, and may well survive and bring joy much longer than the beings who created them. They are what matter. And though short, our existence offers these and a great many other possibilities, some we haven’t yet thought of. So let’s further agree to make the most of this very short life we have. This does not necessarily mean succeeding at everything (which we cannot control) but rather trying (which we mostly can). Life, if it is anything, is a tryal. Or rather, a series of tryals, because we are bound to fail at many. We can’t control much about our life except the trying. But we can learn to better choose and improve our tryals. This would seem to require a modicum of wisdom. Those who pursue this limited sort of wisdom in a patient and thoughtful fashion, for the sake of a life worth living, are called philosophers.
A philosopher must be wise, right?
In truth, wise is the one thing a philosopher cannot be. Wise women and wise men are generally considered to be so because they seem to know things with gentle firmness and conviction, at least with modest certainty. Philosophers, on the other hand, do not claim to know things with any great certainty, certainly not with conviction or finality. Wise folk, to gain such revered status, must have overcome some of the major life-challenges they have faced, and so earned the authority to instruct others to succeed likewise. But philosophers struggle to see their problems very clearly, or to speak about them coherently and decisively. They are people who would very much like to be wise but have mostly failed to become so.
Consider Marcus Aurelius, a Roman gentleman who happened to be emperor during the later second century of our calendar. He is one of the most enduring voices from the ancient world, a great philosopher if ever there was one. Even Christian moralists have regarded him as among the wisest and most virtuous of pagan writers—unusually thoughtful, supremely self-controlled. Surely, to write as profoundly as he did demanded a wisdom as near to perfection as mortal man can hope to possess, acquired in some mysterious process that has eluded the rest of us. He must have been quite unlike the ordinary run of human beings. The last part may be true, but not for the reasons we usually think. Marcus Aurelius was emperor less by aspiration than vocation. He was trained specifically for that job, to regard it as merely a duty, an onerous public service. And he had problems, a great many problems, more than most of his fellow Romans knew, more than he could comfortably manage. His Meditations, as the posthumous title of his little book reminds us, was a work of self-reflection rather than of a manual of advice for lesser men. It is a book of reminders. Its audience is identical to its author. The emperor Marcus Aurelius was reminding himself, day by day, that he played a modest role in a great and wise universe, that time was short, that death was close, that seemingly urgent things were of little consequence. He reminded his reader that nothing could harm him but his own false opinions (though the repetition of the advice suggests that he had trouble accepting it), that everything turned out as the wise Logos required. Life was fleeting and unpredictable (at least to temporary creatures), social ranks and honors of little duration. So—he said to himself—learn to expect nothing from others. Master only yourself. If opinions are the problem, then manage your opinions rather than the world at large. Change is the only changeless reality, even as the reason of nature endures. He repeated over and again that death was of no account, as if resisting this truth the first few times. He cajoled his reader that anger must be managed, implying that anger was a persistent obstacle to the reader. Perhaps he learned in time to believe his own advice. Give up fear, surrender to the wise purpose of Nature. This was nearly the entirety of his philosophy (as it has been preserved), bereft of detailed exposition, suitable to a feeble human life.
Marcus Aurelius was not a philosopher. Rather, he was a man who practiced philosophy. He reminds us that philosophy is an activity, not a profession. Philosophy is for amateurs.
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The ones we call professional philosophers—the academics residing in their ivory towers—have occasionally put their thoughts into better order, passing their mature years naming and cataloguing the symptoms of their chosen problem. They have posed and pondered, read books, taken notes, stared at ceilings, read more books, attended seminars, taught courses, stared again at ceilings, planned books, occasionally written them, haunted salons and cafés, all in pursuit of a firmer grasp of their favorite acre of ignorance. Yet they never seem to come away fully satisfied, are never quite finished. They continue to struggle with their same familiar problem, and will likely not have reached the end of it before they collapse dead on their biscotti. Surely if they were properly wise women and men, they would have been finished by now. They would have closed up shop, taken up gardening, moved on with their lives. But philosophers never seem to move on with their lives, never arrive at the end of their self-inflicted task.
To all appearances then, philosophers seem to be just a few more of the decaying bodies among the flawed and confused tribe of human beings, tragic only in their futile dedication to their calling. And they must be flawed, imperfect in knowledge, or they would have no call to be philosophers. A philosopher is not someone with the distinction of having achieved wisdom but rather someone in desperate search of it. A philosopher is a human being more likely to have failed to attain wisdom than reached the pinnacle of understanding.
Now, does philosophy seem so very far beyond your reach?
It turns out that the starting point of philosophy is closer at hand than we might think. Philosophy begins in uncertainty. Its requirements are easily attainable—a crisis of confidence, a loss of assurance, an extended moment of self-doubt. We all have such moments from time to time. The philosophers are the ones who make a lifestyle of them. They have learned to make pleasant company of their doubt. The philosophers are the ones who have decided not to be satisfied with the status quo, the common answers, the accepted wisdom, the comfortable bromides of cat posters. They have stared into the dark chasm of ignorance and not turned away. Instead they have resolved to push into it, guided only by a few basic principles, many of them in defiance of our usual competitive social instincts:
Don’t pretend to know more than you do.
Cleverness is no substitute for slow, deliberate thinking.
Better to ask questions than assert opinions. Declaring your prejudices in public does not make you a philosopher, merely a human being.
Being sure of yourself is not the same as being right. Merely possessing a strong feeling is not the same as having a convincing argument. Raising your voice does not make you more persuasive.
And it may turn out that you know a few things. But you do not yet know which of the things you think you know are nearer to truth than the rest.
What you do know is much much less than what remains to be known.
You may never end up finding a satisfying answer, let alone the one you expected.
If you have not changed your mind, then you have not learned a thing.
Finally (so philosophers tell themselves), do not imagine that you know where your journey of philosophy is going to take you. If you already know what you will find (that is, what you wish to be true), then philosophy is entirely redundant, a waste of time. Defending your preferred opinions is nothing other than rationalizing. So if you are really going to do philosophy, then give up any certainty that you know where and how your journey will end. Your task, for now, is to learn to live with your uncertainty, to greet it comfortably every morning, with no promise that you will ever see the other side of it or that you will much like the truth if you do find it. Philosophy and certainty are incompatible. To find certainty is to cease being a philosopher, though it may not have made you a wiser person.
It does not take much courage to pretend to know things, but it does take a great deal to admit what you do not know, and to cling to uncertainty in the face of social opposition. The world insists that you should be sure of yourself, mostly because it is not.
Human beings are fragile, temporary creatures. Most of them have very little time and opportunity to get their thinking in order. They deserve pity, tolerance, compassion, forgiveness—not least from themselves. Philosophy is for such as them. It is for you as well if you admit that you are one of these poor creatures.
It starts when you realize all that you don’t know, and recognize that what you have remaining is very little. But it also means that everything else that can be known is waiting.
Who gets to be called a philosopher?
Once there were no professional philosophers, in fact no philosophers at all.
Then, just over two and half thousand years ago, in what was once known as Ionia—now the west coast of Turkey—a few Greeks with a bit of time on their hands began asking questions of themselves, and then of one another. What is the world around us made of? Are these things we observe with our senses really as they seem or is there some hidden reality behind the transient appearance of events? What makes living things different from nonliving things? Why are things always changing? Is anything permanent? Does nature tell us how we ought to behave? Where should we begin to look for answers?
These questions were not entirely new. They are perhaps the common property of curious children in all times and places. What was new here was the grown-up seriousness of the questions, and the nature of the answers the askers would not accept. They would not accept an answer merely because it was the first that came to mind. Good answers required a little more effort than that. They would not accept an answer just because it came from a person who held social or religious authority. This had been the traditional way of knowledge. Knowledge usually came from the gods and was handed down to the masses through men of power and social rank. Once these men of standing delivered a public answer, that was the end of questioning. To inquire further was both impious and socially hazardous. But these Ionian Greeks were not quite satisfied with that model of knowledge, though they had no immediate thought of political or social rebellion. They merely determined that they would have to be their own authorities. They would not give in to familiar or convenient answers. The answers they looked for would be discovered by way of the physical senses or the scrutiny of reason. And even then they realized they were liable to get some things wrong. So they decided that no answer they came to would be the final answer. In fact, it was no mark of disrespect to disagree with or challenge your friend’s interpretation, even your teacher’s. These Greeks made their antisocial pursuit of knowledge into a social activity, as they would do with their politics.
With such self-created freedoms—the freedom to speak without fear, the freedom to disagree, the freedom to get things wrong, the freedom to change one’s mind—they began to try out various new explanations for the observed events of the natural world around them. Perhaps the cosmos (an orderly arrangement, it seems!) is made of water, which may have the capacity to change its form—as we already observe ice changing to liquid, liquid to vapor—to produce all of these natural events we observe. So said Thales. Or perhaps it is air, sometimes compressed, sometimes rarified, replied one of his later students. Or maybe there is some unseen something, proposed Anaximander, that is underlying these observable elements, which causes change to happen in an orderly and predictable way. It may be that our senses are only partly to be trusted, perhaps not much at all. We have all seen a stick plunged into water, suddenly appearing to be bent or broken, then magically whole again when withdrawn. Perhaps all the world of appearances is like that—illusory—so that we had better trust in reasoning alone.
What these ancient Greeks were doing was pursuing a love of wisdom—philo sophia—which we would eventually call philosophy, but which we also call science and critical thinking. The novelty was in the method, in the patience, in the quiet disregard of social rank and religious authority. These philosophers had no authoritative credentials, no formal training, perhaps no unusual intelligence. They reveled in their amateur status—as Greek soldiers and democratic politicians also did. All they had were child-like questions, simple rules of procedure, forbearance, and no limit of time in finding their answers. But they would ask their questions with good humor and treat their opponents with tolerance even when they were silly or wrong. And they would change their minds when the evidence gathered by their senses or their orderly procedures of reasoning seemed to demand it. That was all that was required to be a philosopher then—no social rank, no degree, no license, no authority. It still is.
Philosophy, like science (though perhaps unlike wisdom), is not an authority. It is not something that you have. It is something that you do. It is an activity that has no obvious end. It begins with questions. These beget more questions and those ones still more. Where all this questioning will eventually come to, we are still waiting to discover.
Philosophy is not an obvious thing for a human being to do. Asking questions may be a natural and instinctive human behavior, but doing so in a systematic, open-ended and cooperative manner is not. What philosophy exactly is will take a bit of time to work out. What it is not can be made clearer at the outset. Philosophy is not merely declaring an opinion, or defending one, or justifying one. A philosophy is not a set of opinions, certainly not a body of beliefs. Philosophy is an activity, an open-ended inquiry. It cannot know what it will discover. It cannot even know that it will discover anything that looks very much like Truth. Therefore, a philosopher cannot justifiably hold opinions about the matters under discussion before she has carried out her inquiries. Philosophy cannot claim to know true things in advance. Its reasoning process is meant to discover and interrogate knowledge-claims, not to defend a preferred position. This is the difference between reasoning and rationalizing. Reasoning does not pretend to know what it will find at the end of the reasoning process. Reasoning is what philosophers do. Rationalizing, on the other hand, is what ordinary and impatient human beings do every day—including sincere and intelligent people. They tend to think they already possess knowledge—even Truth—and have no intention of changing their opinions or beliefs, whatever they may find. They merely use the appearance of reasoning to justify what they have already determined to believe. That is not what philosophers do.
Where do we begin? (The baggage room)
We have to begin somewhere. This may seem too obvious to mention, but nevertheless deserves a few words. Whoever we are or think we are, we always find ourselves in some particular place, some specific context, some precise date and time. We are not in all of them, nor can we see more than a few at any one time. So we must remind ourselves that each of us has a very limited and highly specific perspective. Human beings are not wide-ranging thinkers by nature—in fact, nature seems to prefer that we focus on the here and now, the useful over the true. We not only fail to see all things as once but will probably fail to see most things in the course of a lifetime. Therefore, we must surrender any confident claim we might make about objectivity, at least of the expansive variety. And we not only fail to see all the possibilities from where we are currently situated, we cannot even recognize what we are missing. It’s probably more than we can imagine. By the time you have thought to start at the beginning, it is already too late. You’re entrenched in your local version of normal. And each version seems equally normal to its holder. No matter what your particular version of normal is, the other possible normals greatly outnumber it. You cannot begin at the beginning because it is impossible to know what the beginning is. And so you cannot be sure what reasonably follows from the beginning. This does not mean that you cannot know anything, but it does mean you should be cautious about claiming that you begin from a position of neutrality, let alone of certainty.
It is difficult to start any journey or project without making some assumptions, however well or poorly founded they may turn out to be. Yet assumptions (sometimes known as prejudices) are the very things we wish to avoid if we are to discover anything new or durable. We begin, then, in the thick of a dilemma. As we survey our surroundings, we find the landscape strewn with clutter—things we grew up with, things we think we know very well because they’ve always been there. Let’s call this familiar landscape—the things we already have in our view—the baggage room. The baggage consists of all our familiar and comfortable beliefs and assumptions, the things we take for granted. These things have been lying around longer than we can remember. We’re not sure how most of the stuff got here, but we find it comforting and so are reluctant to throw any of it away.
So when we begin philosophy, as anything else, we find our brains already crammed full of stuff—all manner of things. We might label much of it excess baggage if only we had a way of working out which bits would turn out to be necessary and which superfluous. It’s impossible to throw out everything (or we wouldn’t even remember that we had tried to do something like philosophy in the first place), and difficult to know in advance which things can be safely discarded. After all, that task would seem to belong to a later part of the philosophical journey. So how do we begin when we already have far too much stuff, and find ourselves sentimentally attached to our curious collection, not yet knowing what of it we can afford to lose?
We might boldly attempt what Descartes once tried—a garage sale of the mind. Nothing held back! Everything must go! All the inherited wisdom of the ancient world, all the Aristotelian terminology, all the incomprehensible and irresolvable disputes over abstract theological concepts. What an ambitious notion that was, as admirable as it was foolhardy. But it wasn’t entirely convincing when Descartes tried it. He probably gave up much less than he imagined he did. But at least he gave us the revolutionary notion of tossing out the familiar authorities and starting again. A true philosophical project could not allow itself to venerate the great names of the past or to assume any of the things that people were already fighting to the death over. His was an age of religious war, the height of the European witch hunts (quite literally), and the beginning of the Scientific Revolution. Little wonder that skepticism once more got its foot in.
We might look instead to Descartes’ predecessor, Michel de Montaigne, a bourgeois citoyen of Bordeaux in southern France greatly troubled by the wars of faith raging around him—unspeakable acts of violence and inhumanity done in the name of truth and charity. He had stumbled upon a mostly-forgotten school of ancient philosophy—Pyrrhonian skepticism—which doubted that human beings had the capacity for any certain knowledge, and so ridiculed all knowledge claims with equal vigor. Its medical practitioners suggested, moreover, that the pursuit of certainty produced only quarrels, violence, anxiety and illness. Better that we resolve to abandon all dogmatic assertions—seeing that most beliefs are easily shown to be unjustified (whether or not true) and most disputes irresolvable—and pursue instead the goal of ataraxia—calmness of mind. Montaigne suggested that claims of certain knowledge were arrogant and dangerous, that the worthiest sort of knowledge was self-knowledge, that (undogmatic) custom was a useful if temporary resting position, that the best stance concerning questions one could not avoid was one of moderation, and that a quiet and tolerant sort of faith was perfectly acceptable. Skepticism at least allowed one to enjoy the company of good-natured friends, whatever their personal beliefs. There was no call to force one’s private opinions into the public realm. (Montaigne helped give public respectability to the notion of a private life.) But perhaps his most enduring legacy was the innovative style in which he chose to write—inquisitive, cautious, tentative, wide-ranging, inconclusive, brief. He called his small attempts to wrestle with curious problems essais—akin to tryals—very unlike the assertive, confident and exhaustive (or exhausting) treatises that university scholars were expected to produce. There was perhaps no other style of writing than the essay less like prevailing notions of knowledge and truth, and no style better suited to cure anxious readers of their ill-advised quest for certainty. The very style of the essay style suggested that knowledge need not lead inexorably to certainty, let alone truth.
Perhaps we ought to pack a small bag for our modest journey and leave the rest behind. Think of this knowledge quest as an open-ended camping trip. Camping is a wonderful exercise in deciding what really matters—we will have to carry on our backs everything we are likely to need, but can only manage the essentials. The rest will be left safely behind in a storage locker. We’re not getting rid of those things, at least not yet, but we can afford to put them away for now. The storage locker will be our “maybe” pile. Maybe we’ll return and decide to keep some of the old stuff. Maybe we’ll toss most of it away. Maybe we’ll never return at all, never bother to think of those left-behind inheritances again, as tends to happen when we store things away in attics and garages.
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Let’s lay out a few starting principles in the hope of transparency:
Whatever assumptions we begin with now may be questioned again later, perhaps tossed aside. There are no irrevocable decisions. In fact, we should make a point of never allowing ourselves to leave our assumptions in peace.
As imperfect people, we should understand from the beginning that we are bound to make mistakes. We have probably already done so. We may have to retrace our steps, rethink things that we thought had been settled. We will disagree often, with others and with ourselves. We may never reach a place of security and confidence.
But we can also strive to be forgiving of our errors, and those made by others. Compassion is essential to good thinking. Forgiveness is as relevant to philosophy as to the human condition in general. With that in mind we will strive, however imperfectly, to be considerate and generous towards others. We’ve probably already failed in this today, so we will resolve to do better tomorrow. The best and most sincere apology is a change in behavior.
We will give ourselves permission to change our minds. We will remind ourselves of this every day.
Finally, we cannot pretend to know what we will discover at the end of this journey of inquiry. If we already knew the destination, the road of philosophy would hardly be worth taking. Even a day’s travel need not have a fixed destination. The journey is the process. And the process is all that philosophy ever claims to be.
Those who are already perfect have no need for any of this. Philosophy is not made for wise or perfect people, certainly not for those who already have Truth. For those who believe they already know everything of importance, philosophy is the last thing they should do. It’s more likely to harm than to help their self-confidence. Philosophy is for imperfect people. It is for the unwise, the ignorant, the fallible. I am claiming to be one of these people, which is why I do this. And there’s comfort in this. Lack of understanding, knowledge, wisdom, perhaps even skill, will never be a barrier to doing philosophy.
And one more thing—about getting things wrong. It will happen. Some of the things I say will turn out to be wrong. I don’t know which ones yet. I am reasonably confident that you will likewise make claims that prove to be rash or unsupportable. It is too much to expect that ideas entering the public realm will already be fully formed and vetted. In fact, we need to bring them into the public realm to accomplish these very tasks. So we’re going to have to try out a great many ideas, get some of them wrong, perhaps quite a few of them. But we need to try them out anyhow, without fear of reproach, threat or violence. So, let us agree to be tolerant of errors, yours and mine. We can fix many of our mistakes, or at least acknowledge when we have claimed too much. But we have to make our mistakes first. We need to try out various positions in order to discover the better and the worst of them. So perhaps we can agree that not everything we say here will be our final position. Opinions ought to be temporary. We will try and test various ideas, then confirm or retract as needed. It is unreasonable to expect that we will get everything right the first time. It is our job to make mistakes, to make them together, then to make new ones, and finally to improve the quality of our errors over time. Does that sound like something within our collective capacity?
Things that matter, things that don’t
Think of the most passionate person you know, the one most fully committed to a specific cause, ideology or belief. This person may even be yourself. What exactly is the belief, the ambition, the loyalty that excites such passion? What is the ideal or obsession that is worthy of such intense devotion? Do you envy this person for having such a clear and defining purpose? If that person is yourself, can you imagine carrying on your life without this organizing passion?
Now let us suppose that this person was indeed yourself, and that you had devoted your life to some great purpose, a defining cause, and that you were willing to pay with your life to preserve it. Now that’s commitment—a purpose-driven life! What kind of person would not desire such a meaningful existence? But now imagine that you, the guardian of this intense devotion, were born into an entirely different time and place that knew nothing whatsoever of this beloved thing, the object of your passion—whether a belief, an ideology, an identity, a deity, a person, a nation or a tribe. You grew up in a situation having never heard of this thing that presently consumes your love and attention. You would have no means of being exposed to it or even of learning about it. What would you do in such an other life? You would not have the thing that makes your present life comprehensible and worthwhile, but you would also have no inkling whatever that you were missing it. You would be tragically—perhaps blissfully—unaware of your beloved. Maybe there would be something else in that other culture roughly equivalent to the thing that excites your passion now—another belief, another ideology, another god, another person, another tribe—and maybe you would be as devoted to that thing in your other life as you are to your favorite thing in this one. Or maybe you are quite confident that no other object of affection in any other conceivable existence could possibly come close to the thing that you love in this life. Your other life would be merely sad and pointless. And this would mean, of course, that the lives of most other human beings—who don’t know or care about the thing that you love—would be pathetic and meaningless too. Perhaps that is what you already think of them. You may believe that the things they are passionate about—so hopelessly committed to—are ridiculous, laughable, tragic wastes of potential. Their education and upbringing seem like a cruel joke to you. Of course, they may also think the same of you, since you don’t recognize and love the incomparable things that they love.
Such is the case with most tribal loyalties, religious faiths, ideological commitments, individual passions and beliefs. They are all as ridiculous to other people and cultures as their passions are to you. Almost every great devotion, faith, commitment or love will look like a cruel joke to someone who doesn’t belong to it. Even conquering them, forcing them by threat and violence to give loyalty to your beloved thing, or killing them outright would not change their minds. It would still be a joke, only a more mean-spirited one.
Whatever your passion or belief happens to be, it simply does not matter to most other people. It wouldn’t matter much even if they were aware of it. And it probably wouldn’t matter to you either if you happened to be born into a different time or place that did not contain the thing that you love.
But there may be a few things that matter wherever you might go—in whatever time, place and culture you happen to be born into. Every human culture that we know of strives to meet a few basic needs—food, clean water, shelter, health, security, companionship. Every culture seems to care about begetting and raising children, belonging to a safe and familiar community, and finding a place and purpose for each individual member within that community. Every individual human being values (so some degree) their own personal freedom and self-determination. They also value other people, or at least a few, and desire to connect with them, discover intimacy, love and acceptance. And so they give up some of their own preferences in order to spend time with others. Every human being wants to be good at something and to do something that matters, both to themselves and to others. They want to respect themselves and to be respected by others. And, to various degrees, they want to indulge their curiosity, to know something about the universe they inhabit, and to understand their place within and relationship to it. Are there any societies now or in the human past that have not valued all of these goals and ambitions in some significant and self-conscious way?
So perhaps these are the things that matter. The rest—beliefs, ideologies, loyalties, tribal affinities and preferences—are transient, of no lasting importance. They are at best local symptoms of the fundamental and universal values that make us all part of the human species. Perhaps we can better learn to select and defend our own personally-held beliefs if we appeal to the criteria recognized and shared by all our many human tribes and communities. And perhaps we can teach ourselves to direct a greater share of our passion to the things we all share together than to the narrow obsessions that divide us.
Human nature
As far as we can observe, human beings are the only beings who have any notion of truth or any concern to discover it. Most animals (which is to say, terrestrial species other than homo sapiens) don’t make claims about knowledge or think much about thinking. They just get on with the daily business of interacting with the world around them, keeping themselves alive, making more beings like themselves. We do all of these things too, of course, but we also think about ourselves doing these things while we’re doing them, sometimes before, sometimes after. That seems to make homo sapiens somewhat unique. There may be other such self-reflective beings beyond our terrestrial sphere, but we don’t have any specific evidence or direct knowledge of them. We can only speculate about them—which is another of our apparently unique capacities. There may also be non-observable (perhaps non-material) beings that think about their own behaviors and states of mind, though we can’t seem to agree among ourselves which of those conceivable beings might really exist or what demands they might make of us. And since, by definition, we can’t observe them, we cannot make evidence-supported claims about such imagined beings. So we’re left with us—just us. The only beings that we can broadly agree engage in the practice of thinking about thinking are human beings.
Until such time as we engage directly and demonstrably with other self-reflecting beings, we will have to assume that such reflexive thinking—or reasoning—belongs exclusively to the species called homo sapiens. Reasoning, as far as we presently know—and until we have better reasons to conclude otherwise—is entirely a human activity. Reasoning may turn out to be a form of activity that transcends human behavior, but at present our understanding of reason is confined to the experience and behavior of our own species. So it seems to be an activity specific to the natural constitution of human beings. To understand reason, then—as well as the specific kinds of knowledge or truth we may gain by it—it appears that we will have to understand something about the nature of the beings that use this tool. We will have to understand human nature—that is, ourselves—if we are to understand the origins and uses of reasoning. Philosophy begins with anthropology.
Fortunately, we human beings have the capacity not only to observe and think about the universe in which we live but to observe and think about ourselves as part of that natural universe. And we can use the same tools and procedures to observe ourselves as we do to observe the phenomena of the world existing (presumably) outside of ourselves. And so biology, genetics, neurology and paleontology seem likely to be called upon in our philosophical journey. The behavioral sciences and humanities will also be engaged. We will deliberately engage in the behavior of observing our own behavior. We will measure, count, record and describe the observable phenomena of our behavior. We will form various hypotheses to explain these behaviors and test them as thoroughly and often as we are able. We may even come to some surprising conclusions about our species, that is, our selves. And we will have to recognize that whatever we conclude about the members of our species at large will likely prove true of ourselves as specific reasoning individuals. If we discover behaviors and tendencies of thought in human beings generally, we will have to assume that they also affect our own individual behaviors and beliefs. We cannot reasonably exempt our internal selves from critical scrutiny.
We may already be able to recognize some tendencies in others that we are equally likely to find in ourselves. For example, we often note that other human beings tend to confuse their internal perceptions and feelings with an objective state of affairs in the observable world at large—that is with the external reality beyond their feelings. We observe that human beings, like other animals, don’t quite perceive the universe as it really is—as it would appear to an imagined omni-cognizant and disinterested being—but as they need to perceive it in order to survive and reproduce. Humans don’t, for example, see the entire range of the radiation spectrum but only the spectrum of visible light—which is to say, the portion that they happen to be able to perceive. Human beings hear a different range of sounds than do other animals, and tend to gather much less information by way of scent. These senses are largely implanted before these sensitive beings begin to use them. Such senses can be trained to a degree (as with bomb- and drug-sniffing dogs) but they cannot operate beyond their natural capacities. And we just don’t know what lies beyond our senses and awareness. We have trouble seeing our blind spots.
Yet we often insist that we see things as they really are. We frequently say things like I’m an excellent judge of character, without bothering to test the claim by way of controlled, double-blind experiments. We say things like I just know it’s true! when we should more honestly say, This is the world as I wish to see it, the imagined reality that most closely matches my preferences. We have heard others say such things as I had a profound experience of the Holy Spirit! and we are sometimes caught up in their enthusiasm, unwilling to take the time to investigate more carefully, perhaps to point out that they are making two very distinct claims. The first claim is that they had a memorable internal experience and the second is that it was caused by a (presumably external) Holy Spirit. The first claim is unobjectionable, insofar as the claimant likely did have a powerful emotive experience. Such an event would be well within the realm of observed and recorded human experience. Only the individual is qualified to speak about the specific feelings involved, since those feelings are entirely within their own conscious sphere and inaccessible to others (though perhaps measurable by fMRI and other brain scans). And we might be tempted to find analogues in our own experience—memorable internal events that changed the way we perceived the reality around us. But it is entirely another matter to claim that this powerful internal experience was caused by an external and objectively-existing agent such as an immaterial spirit. The testifier is not just making a claim about their own internal and subjective feelings but about an objective reality—an agent or power in the universe that they think should be as real to other perceiving agents as it feels to themself. They are no longer making a claim about what they think happened within their own private realm of perception but about an objective state of authority that they think has as much claim upon your reality as on their own. They are making a demand of you—that you share and assent to their interpretation of the external cause of their profound internal feeling. Yet they offer no more evidence for the objective reality of this external agent than the private feeling itself. They just know it’s true. You, however, have no reason to accept their interpretation of the external reality, or to accept any such claim of authority over your own sovereign thinking, even if you are perfectly willing to credit their description of the internal state of their mind—that is, their account of their private feelings. The authority of others can extend no farther than the realm of their own internal perceptions. They do not see external reality any better than you do. And you do not have to accept their testimony about the external reality that supposedly caused their internal feelings.
This is your most important freedom—the freedom and responsibility to establish authority over your own beliefs concerning the reality that lies beyond your private feelings. You are not bound to the feelings of others. But just as you must be careful not to accept the authority of others over your sovereign reasoning process, you must also be careful about the claims you make upon the beliefs of others. Your internal feelings and perceptions are evidence only of the state of your own feelings and perceptions. They have no privileged access to a reality beyond. You must use other means to make such claims. That is the role of evidence. Your feelings are not evidence for anything beyond the state of your feelings. If you want to make claims about reality, you must produce evidence that is as accessible to others as it is to yourself. This is the meaning of objective evidence. Human beings cannot claim to perceive objective truth in the way that an omni-cognitive being might do (were there such a being), but can only appeal to evidence that is equally available to other perceptive beings like themselves. They can observe and measure things as well as you. They can reason about probable causes. They can hold you to account when you confuse your internal feelings with external realities. And so we hold one another to account in order that we may together creep a little closer to objective reality. This is as close as limited beings like ourselves will get to truth.
Truth is obvious, isn’t it?
Truth is pretty easy to spot. After all, everyone knows that a printed page filled with true statements shines with a reassuring blue light. And we all know that scurrilous publications packed with falsehoods glow with a menacing red hue. We know this perfectly well from birth, wherever on this earth we happen to live, which makes finding truth in the printed word easy and dependable. True claims look immediately and obviously different from false ones.
Truth in the spoken realm may be a little trickier, but with a modicum of effort and attention we can assure ourselves that a truthful person always possesses a transparently honest face. A liar will smile deceptively, may even take us in for a moment. But as soon as his nose begins to grow or his moustache to twirl we can be confident that he is trying to hoodwink us honest folk. A liar always has an obvious tell, just as an evil-minded world-destroyer will necessarily betray himself with a well-appointed volcano fortress, a sinister laugh and a self-indulgent explanation of his master plan. He will always confess his overblown scheme to the hero just before receiving his well-deserved comeuppance. (Boom!) Well, maybe we saw the moustache thing in a movie, but we’re pretty sure it’s based on something real. After all, we need a world in which the good guys and the truth are easy to spot.
If only. The sad reality is that true claims in print fail to glow with self-evident verity. Likewise, false claims seldom advertise their own unworthiness. False claims on the face of them tend to look suspiciously like true claims. And liars sometimes have honest faces, whereas sketchy-looking people often tell the truth. And since nearly every claim in print is believed to be true by someone (often by many), we may have to turn to other criteria in order to discover which claims are reliable and which ones false. We may even discover (to our horror!) that many or most printed works contain a tangled mess of partial truths, near falsehoods and somewhat iffy claims. They are not one thing or the other, neither perfectly true nor completely false. They are neither entirely dependable nor completely fraudulent. They may contain many of those things at once, but they are not one of those things to the exclusion of the rest.
And worse yet, even specific and verifiable claims or reliable facts may not necessarily amount to a larger truth. A reputable newspaper may be chock-full of citable information and evidentially-supported claims, yet not tell us much that is true and useful about the world. What do newspapers report? Disasters, crimes, scandals, political corruption. Such stories appear frequently because they sell papers. Stories about ordinary law-abiding behavior and upright politicians are of little interest to the public. Honest and faithful service is boring. One might thus be forgiven for reading reputable newspapers and coming to the conclusion that the world is descending inexorably into anarchy and violence, and that politicians are dishonest and corrupt in all times and places. And yet the measurable trends of the past several decades have shown declining rates of violence as well as better life outcomes. How often do front-page stories report that no planes crashed today and no trains were derailed, not killing dozens?
The news is not the same as truth. Banner headlines are generally at odds with underlying trends. Truth has many temporary resting places, no permanent address.
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Walk into any bookstore and you will see thousands of books making many and conflicting claims about the world. Scientific breakthroughs, medical marvels, religious pronouncements, historical discoveries, biographical exposés, astrological forecasts, political prognostications, dream interpretations, and how-to-make-a-million-dollars-guaranteed. Any of the specific claims contained in any of these books might conceivably be true, but they probably can’t all be true at the same time. Yet all of the books have a number of features in common. They all have pages made of paper, spattered with patterns of ink, bound together between cardboard or cloth covers. They are all written in human languages, all with publishers’ imprints, all bearing human street addresses, most with named authors on the title-page, all produced by machines designed and manufactured by human firms, packed and delivered from warehouses by human laborers. In fact, they all bear precisely the same external marks of human manufacture. Even the ones that claim to be of divine origin bear the imprint of some terrestrial publishing house. As physical objects, there is nothing to set these ones apart from the rest. We can therefore conclude beyond any reasonable disagreement that they are all manifestly human creations. They are that at least. Whether they are anything other than human is less obvious. Such a distinction could not be determined by physical appearance. If you were assured most strenuously that one of these thousands of books is uniquely divine, you would not be able to tell which one merely by looking at the physical object. So how would you distinguish it from the rest? You could reasonably assume that even if one of these books might conceivably be of divine origin—a handful at most—it is unlikely that more than a few of them could be so, or that the majority of them could be anything other than human creations. There are just too many incompatible claims. Upon selecting a book at random, your default assumption would be that this particular volume is unlikely to be the singular divine volume. Very, very unlikely. There are thousands of others in sight. The same likelihood would apply to the next one you tried. The odds would be overwhelmingly against that particular book being different from all the others. And the same would continue to be true of any of the other volumes in the bookstore—the odds being overwhelmingly against whichever book happened to be in your hand at the moment. They could not all be uniquely divine. Even believers in the existence of a divine book would probably agree to that much. Most of the books, then, would be merely human. So we can agree, then, that it is overwhelmingly unlikely that they could all be divine. We can further agree that it is highly unlikely—nearly inconceivable—that most of them would qualify as divine. At best, only one or a few would qualify. Yet it is also possible that none of them would. The odds are strongly against any particular one of them being divine. But that in no way makes it more likely that any of the others would turn out to be so.
But if we agreed instead to view the many and various claims made in these human-manufactured books as (provisionally) human claims, then we would be able to take a much more flexible view of their contents. Any individual human being will make a variety of claims over the course of a lifetime—some careful and considered, some careless and offhand, some moderately reliable, but each specific claim more or less accurate when compared to the rest. Some will be verifiable and mostly dependable, some patently mistaken or false. No human being is always reliable or always unreliable. No human book is all of one kind or the other. No human book is entirely and in-every-way free from all conceivable error. Human beings make mistakes, even those who try hardest to avoid them. No human being knows everything that can be known and none can be sure that a specific statement will never be improved by further experience and knowledge. Likewise, no human book is entirely and in all ways false. The claims found in human books fall on a spectrum, somewhere between completely reliable and maliciously false. That leaves plenty of latitude to compare the veracity of any particular book to the rest, but it does not allow us to label a specific volume as true or false. The more useful answer to the question of whether a particular book is reliable or not is: Well, it depends. Our human task is to consider the various claims made within them one by one and to evaluate each against a collection of criteria—a set of standards—that we can (hopefully) agree upon together. This will take time and negotiation.
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So any book—any printed work we might encounter—should best be regarded as a collection—that is, as a bundle of claims. Each of these claims may be inquired into on its individual merits. (Of course this will have to be done selectively, since we won’t have time to examine every one of the claims in every volume. This selection process can be managed, if imperfectly, with a careful set of standards.) The claims may be reasonably testable, or not, but they will never be entirely of one kind or another—true or false. Such purity eludes the human species. We will need some criteria other than truth or falsehood to determine the value of those claims, either individually or added together. We do not have good reason yet to grant exemptions to particular written collections or spoken claims. This rule applies to any work we might put our hands on. They are all human claims until we have compelling reason to think otherwise.
And though any claim in any work may prove to be reasonably well-founded, we have no obligation to accept any of them as true until they are so demonstrated. No claim should be taken as true merely by default. This does not necessarily mean the claim is false, merely unverified. Belief with regard to unverified claims should be suspended, and remain so indefinitely or until adequate evidence is discovered. We will likely find it easier to show that specific claims are false or unreliable than that any are unimpeachably true.
Scientific procedures will help us sort out and eliminate some of those claims. This is not because science is infallible or knows the truth or constitutes some venerable authority. Science does not know anything. Science is not an authority. It is not a person at all. It is a set of procedures coordinating the methodical activities of many investigators. It proposes testable questions. It measures things. It contains transparent procedures for checking its results and correcting its own errors. And it doesn’t so much identify the truth as winnow out the flawed and unsupported contenders for truth. What is left gets us closer to truth. But not quite there. We get a little closer, then test again. Science never reaches a final conclusion.
Data in themselves do not constitute facts. Facts in isolation do not amount to evidence. Quantities of evidence gathered together do not inevitably add up to truth. And truth is never reached once and for all. At best, we are moving toward it—slowly, fitfully, imperfectly. But take courage. At least we’re moving.
The inner light
Imagine a courtroom, a criminal trial in progress. The defense attorney is cross-examining the key witness for the prosecution. The witness knows about the scene where the crime took place—he was there that day—and also about the accused. Known him for years, worked together. Knew the victim too. Oh, not well, but, you know, she’d been there a while. Definitely a vibe in the air. Yeah, something like this was gonna happen. Surprised it took this long. I told ‘em. The defense attorney ignores this, asks when the witness last saw the victim alive. Oh, I seen her all right, wearing that provocative low-cut dress. I can see it now. The attorney checks his notes, remarks that the victim was found wearing a bulky sweater and a long skirt. Oh, sure, maybe she was wearing a sweater that day. The attorney pauses, then asks whether the witness saw the victim on the day of the incident. I was in, early. Felt kinda sick that day, just came to get some stuff to bring home. The defense attorney changes stance, asks again if the witness saw the victim on the day of the alleged crime, saw the specific events that led up to the incident. Well, not directly, you know. I went home early, see. But I know exactly what happened. I warned em’. The attorney asks once more how the witness thinks he knows what happened at the crime scene. Oh, believe me, I knew what was going on. Kinda obvious. He did it all right. I just know it!
Such an exchange would never happen in a well-run courtroom. The prosecutor’s case would have been thrown out before the trial began. No matter how much the testifier insists that he knows what really happened, he is not a genuine witness, at least concerning the specific events in question. Even his testimony referring to events prior to the incident would be considered suspect. And yet we might acknowledge that the witness himself genuinely believes everything he says—as far as he is concerned, he saw the whole thing unfold before his eyes. He might be entirely convinced that the events transpired exactly as he imagined them. He just knows that it was so. Without a doubt in his mind. His feelings are sure.
Most of us understand that such testimony could never be permitted inside a court room. If it were, justice would be much more arbitrary. As absolutely sure as a witness might claim to be, his testimony does not constitute evidence about the specific events in question. A strong internal feeling is not at all the same as evidence about the reality of the external world. Yet every day, in ordinary life, we allow such claims to pass without objection. Someone asks you how you know something to be true and you blurt out, I just know! You may even think this is a perfectly acceptable answer. But it’s no better than that of the witness in the courtroom. A judge must be scrupulously impartial, allowing no place for personal feelings or intuitions. A prosecutor must stick to the facts of the case. A jury-member will not share the same feelings as the witness—could not be admitted to the jury if she claimed to—and the internal feeling of certainty can have no weight in any deliberation about fact. A witness’s testimony cannot be accepted merely on their personal authority. At best a jury-member may be persuaded that this was the witness’s state of mind, but this does not mean that the state of mind corresponds to any objective state of affairs. The jury-member would be much more convinced by testimony in the form of “I heard …” and “then I saw …”. And even then, without the corroboration of other witnesses or physical evidence (blood samples, fingerprints, security-camera footage), it would not be sufficient to reach a verdict. Evidence, to be properly about an external state of affairs (that is, about the real world)—and to be convincing to other minds with their own feelings—must be equally available to all case-observers, to investigators and judges and jury-members alike. It must reside in the public realm. Private revelations and assurances will simply not do.
And yet we routinely bring such revelations and assurances into our daily lives. Sure, everyday life is not exactly like a criminal trial—there’s usually less at stake in our daily interactions and affairs. But sometimes there’s a great deal more at stake—such as when we choose our lawmakers, leaders and representatives. Or when we defend our values and beliefs in the public forum. Or when we assemble our world-views. Let me give you my own personal testimony, an earnest young man in a tie and white shirt says to us. And sometimes we do, though they know no more of objective reality than we do. Look, I’ll tell you what really happened, a friend might say of a public event or scandal. And we might then accept this in preference to doing more critical investigation for ourselves. You can trust me, says a charismatic politician at a rally, I have your interests at heart. And we choose to believe that magnetic person, though they are only giving us their word about the reliability of their word.
But human beings—as individuals—tend to view reality subjectively—that is, from within themselves. They can’t help it. There really is no other way. We human beings cannot see the universe as it objectively exists—that is, from anything other than a subjective perspective. And we don’t have good reason to think that any other conscious being can see the universe as it really is. We generally assume that our personal view of reality matches closely to reality itself, though we don’t always give the same confidence to others who claim to see things as they really are. So we pick and choose whom we believe. Occasionally, we recognize our limits, console ourselves that we humans are all in the same boat together. Then we try to find as much agreement as possible among the people around us concerning what we are actually seeing and experiencing. Occasionally we succeed. We understand that we are social beings. We survive not on our solitary islands but in social communities. We must trust others if we are to prosper, even survive, and so we agree about the fundamental elements of external reality, even when we don’t. We have various social mechanisms for working through our differences, including criminal trials. But we’re still stuck with a conundrum. Can we accept the earnest claims of others about the nature of things that don’t conform to our own view of reality? Can we expect others to accept our claims about reality, when many of our claims are founded on our internal feelings—what appears to us to represent the true state of things, or what simply feels right? Can our feelings about the world be authoritative to other people, who presumably have their own internal feelings? Should others accept our internal revelations as authoritative?
We human beings are engaged in an ongoing conversation. That’s what society is. It’s a discussion, an endless negotiation about how we choose to navigate the reality that we share in common, but which none of us can see directly. If we accept that we are all equally deserving of taking part in this conversation, then we must agree to rules about how we speak to one another—things like acceptable language and naming conventions, what makes an argument convincing, what sorts of evidence we will accept and what sorts not. Without rules, there are no conversations. All conversations implicitly agree to some basic rules of speech—beginning with the use of a common language. Courtrooms formalize these rules, so as to make the discussions and the verdicts (the formal conclusions of judicial conversations) as consistent and fair as possible. We have less rigorous rules in ordinary public life, but we still hold one another to account.
But what of our private lives? Within our minds, we have only ourselves to answer to. And we tend to go rather easy on our familiar selves, compared to how we treat others who say things disagreeable to our internal feelings. We are quite aware that others say strange things about reality, things we know can’t be right. But we still prefer to imagine that what we perceive from within ourselves is a mostly accurate view of reality as it really is, that our internal feelings correspond closely to the external facts of the universe. We do not grant such automatic privileges to the feelings of others. But maybe we shouldn’t be so easy on ourselves. After all, there is potentially much at stake if we get reality wrong. And no one else can interrogate our internal feelings for us. In that, we are on our own. (Though a trained therapist can help.)
So truth—if we are interested—begins within ourselves. We begin by recognizing that our internal selves are as likely to be fallible as any other perceiving creature. And so we must learn to hold our internal beliefs to a standard as rigorous as that which we apply to the beliefs of others. We sometimes use a set of explicit rules for testing the claims of others—insisting that they provide objectively-available evidence for their claims before they are provisionally considered and accepted. What we need to do is turn these same rules on ourselves. Even our most sincere and long-held beliefs deserve the same scrutiny that we would apply to the claims of strangers. We may even choose to be more demanding of our own beliefs. (After all, we have to live with the consequences.) This does not mean that all our present beliefs must be immediately tagged as suspect. We will have to be selective, proceed slowly. But we can learn to cross-examine our beliefs, as we would witnesses in a court of law. We can get into the habit of testing our own perceptions and beliefs against external evidences—that is, evidences equally available to other minds. We can try to imagine what an impartial judge or a disinterested jury-member might think of our purported reasons for our beliefs. We can learn to remind ourselves that feelings are not the same as truth, that strength of feeling does not correspond to degree of certainty. Greater degrees of certainty should be assigned to beliefs that can be more rigorously verified by external evidences—the kind that can be communicated to and understood by other minds. If we can make a plausible case to others, then we have better reason to accept the validity of our own beliefs. And we can give ourselves permission to suspend any belief when evidence does not warrant a clear determination. Suspending does not necessarily mean rejecting. It may include holding beliefs provisionally (for example, the effectiveness of a proposed medical treatment) until better evidence and more accurate beliefs become available.
We live within ourselves. And we are stuck, in our human condition, with our particular feelings. But the universe that exists outside of ourselves does not care about our feelings. Nor does objective truth—it has no stake in itself. Only we can care about truth. Only we can desire to approach it more closely. The universe will go on its merry way regardless of the accuracy or inaccuracy of our beliefs (which are really a subset of our feelings). Reality does not need us to think correctly about it. But it may be in our interest to do so. Reality will not shift for our sake. But our feelings can shift, and we can learn to shift them.
Just the facts
Our solar system contains planets, as we all know, but how many exactly? How many really? When we visited the planetarium all those years ago, my school-chums and I knew the answer. Nine planets! We shouted it exuberantly. Exactly nine—no more, no fewer. Nine was the correct answer. It was a fact! We could even name them, in order. And we were pretty smug in our righteousness—sure that it was, had always had been, and would always be the correct answer. Since then Pluto has been discharged (honorably or dishonorably, according to your affection for it) and is now a Kuiper object—a minor planet or a dwarf planet—so that we are left with only eight proper planets. But worse than the dashing of our youthful and exuberant know-it-allism, was the realization of how recent-born this eternal truth had been. In the classical world, the Greeks acknowledged five planets (and planet was their word, so they ought to have known—though they excluded the sun, the moon, and the earth of course), and these five planets did not look or act very much like the ones featured in the full-color posters on our classroom walls. And it turns out that Pluto had only be discovered as recently as 1930, not so long after Neptune (1846) and Uranus (1781). So what is the true number of planets? Well, that depends on what a planet is. And how many moons does Pluto (whatever it is) actually have? Five at the latest count. But it really depends on what might turn up next week.
Try another claim: The sun rose this morning at 6:53 a.m. It is the sort of credible truth-claim you might hear any day of the week. In fact, you remember hearing something very like it on the television this morning. But is it true? It certainly sounds plausible, even truthy, especially if it happened to be April in a northerly-mid-latitude country. That charming weather-personality with the honest face made the claim just before you left the house for work. Besides, that weather-person is a meteorologist and has access to a large quantity of data, both local and national. Surely, then, this would be the sort of claim that you might take as a plain fact. Besides, you were already awake at that time and saw sunlight breaking through your window—it sounds like something that ought to be true.
But then you hesitate, something weighing against your belief meter, holding back your full consent. Well, sure, strictly speaking the sun didn’t rise at all—more accurately, you say to yourself, the Earth turned on its axis and brought the place on the surface of the earth where you happen to live into a position where it would seem as if the sun were rising above the horizon. Okay then, the claim is not strictly true, but it still sounds perfectly agreeable to common sense. And that’s a kind of truth, right? It’s a statement that is at least anecdotally true, locally useful, if only from a certain point-of-view. But that is a very constrained notion of truth. A sunrise will always depend on a strictly local perspective. And to communicate such useful information to others, we would need to agree on a certain way of reckoning time before we could affirm that the statement was true even in that particular location. And if you happened not to live in that particular place on the surface of the planet Earth or had never agreed to recognize that particular time-measuring system or if you did not recognize how to interpret a certain colloquial way of speaking, then it might not be accepted as true. So from any way of speaking that happened not to be locally agreed upon, the statement was not very true, accurate or sensible after all. Now it turns out that all of us who live around here had gone to the same sort of school and learned that the earth rotates on its axis, that it tilts at approximately 23.5 degrees, and that it moves elliptically around the sun. But we learned these things at the same time that we were assured there were exactly nine planets. What other so-called facts did we not get quite right?
And now we are discovering that the realm of public information is much more complicated and contested than we had ever learned in school. We are hearing of rival or alternative facts—where accepted evidence depends on one’s location and especially loyalties. Objectively-verifiable information seems to have become politically contestable. Perhaps it was always so, and we are just misremembering a happier world where people agreed on basic information before they began arguing over interpretations and values. So anything goes now? One set of facts as good as another? Not quite. Facts are never absolute—regardless of how objective and non-political you are trying to be. Saying that facts are facts communicates nothing of real value other than that the speaker probably does not agree with your version of them. But facts are not arbitrary either. So let’s get our facts straight about facts. The first will be quite unsettling: a fact is not something that is objectively true. For a human being to make such a claim about anything would require unlimited knowledge and an utterly objective (that is, nonspecific) point of view. We would have to be gods, at least. We are not, it seems, and so a fact must be a more modest sort of claim. At best, a fact is a specific and verifiable claim about a reality available equally to the others who participate in your conversation. For limited creatures, a fact must be something that any other person can check and verify. But we can only verify the specific claim if we agree together on the rules and procedures of verification. And so, for a human inquirer, a fact must be a socially-constructed concept. It requires agreement on a particular set of knowledge-verification procedures and dispute-resolving authorities before it can be agreeably communicated from one person to another. If the other in the conversation refuses to accept your method or your authority, they will dismiss your claim of fact. In that sense, there really are such things as alternative facts, if one upholds an alternative conception of knowledge and social authority.
So facts are never just facts. They are socially-constructed claims about reality and about how best to understand that reality. They are fundamentally claims about social authority, of which knowledge is only one aspect. Facts are foundational to what we call evidence. And evidence, to be counted as such, must be situated within a specific context. Yes, these facts must generally specify where and when and how much and by whom. But that’s only part of it. Even when the facts are individually verifiable and agreed upon, we still have to ask which ones matter? Which are the right facts for this occasion? (That’s what court procedures are often about.) When we make responsible claims about reality, we choose a set of facts and implicitly leave out other possible facts. Most of them, in fact. This is not merely to mislead and confuse our opponents but to save time. We mortal beings have so little of it. There are always more things that could be said than there is time to say them. The facts we leave out or overlook for want of time might have been relevant, perhaps more so than the ones we have included. Imagine, for example, that you have a medical complaint. Your physician examines you, takes a few measurements, and forms a provisional diagnosis, then explains it to you in the space of two or three minutes and makes a recommendation for follow up. She does not tell you everything—such would require at least that you hold a medical degree—and she does not know everything that might be relevant to your case. But you trust your physician, and so accept her experience, accuracy and authority. Your trust is usually well placed. But the next professional you see—an oncologist—is more likely to seem cool and detached, suspiciously cagey, in offering a clear prognosis. Frustratingly, he will not directly answer your questions about how bad, how long, what sort of chances? Yet this expert has seen hundreds of comparable cases, studied the statistics of many thousands more. He can say with authority (and percentages) what most frequently happens to patients who have something comparable to what you appear to have. But he cannot and will not say what will happen to you. He cannot even say what will prove the most effective treatment, merely recommend a starting treatment and see how it goes, then maybe try another course and hope for the best. Some expert! What’s the point of an expert who can’t tell you exactly what is happening to you and how to fix it? Yet he remains your best bet. This oncologist does not know everything about your case (though he may publish a paper about you some day—something you definitely did not want to hear!), but he has more relevant context than anyone else you might talk to. More than your family doctor, more than your psychiatrist, more than a smiling faith-healer. Whatever knowledge can be known by mere mortals about this problem, he knows. For human beings, useful and applicable knowledge is made up primarily of context. What facts should we bring into this case and where do they fit? That’s why forensic experts testify at trials, even when they did not witness the alleged crime, even when they do not know the accused or all the facts about the case. What they have is context—the ability to situate a particular bundle of events relative to other comparable case-bundles. That’s why they are called to testify and why amateur armchair sleuths with clever theories are not.
We do not make perfect choices even when we have useful context. But at least we make better ones. Should you purchase a lottery ticket or not? What you really want to know is whether this ticket behind the counter is the winning ticket. That would be a very useful thing to know and would require little additional information. But we don’t have such a fact available—even the vendor doesn’t know, however much you promise to share the proceedings. What do you have instead? You might watch the relevant television commercial and feel the buoyant music—dream big about what you would do with all those winnings (you would choose so much better than those silly TV actors!). You can even read an article in a reputable lifestyle magazine about someone who really did win the last jackpot and how it changed their life! Forever! Yes, they won! That’s a fact! Their life was changed forever. Another solid fact! And you have as much chance of winning as they did. True again. The facts just keep adding up. It sounds like buying this ticket would definitely be a Good Idea. After all, you can’t win if you don’t play! Better buy a whole bunch of them then. It’s indisputable that doing so would increase your chances. But you have an annoying brother-in-law, a notorious party-pooper, who points out that the magazine did not include any articles about the ticket-buyers who did not win the last jackpot. If there was an article for every person who bought a ticket for that lottery, how many articles would there be? He gets annoyingly specific. If the prize is fifty million, and each ticket cost five dollars, then the lottery would have to sell ten million tickets merely to cover the cost of the payout—not including the lottery company’s administrative burdens and hoped-for profits. That’s at least ten million magazine articles—9,999,999 more than the number of articles you actually perused. Tales of woe and heartbreak, no doubt. Your annoying brother-in-law annoyingly points out that you are about 2000 times more likely to be hit by lightning in your lifetime. Thanks, Fred. Thanks for spoiling my perfectly good facts with your annoying context. But you buy the ticket anyhow and give Fred no credit whatsoever when neither you nor anyone else you know wins the next jackpot. Some anonymous-looking middle-aged medical tech in a different part of the country. Indeed, someone was going to win it. That’s a fact. But just one fact among at least ten million.
Truth is not one big thing. It is all the many little things, every one of the losing lottery tickets just as much as the winning one. And all the little things together—or as many as we can get in view or count and remember and record—make up the context. This context, imperfect as it is, corresponds pretty closely to the scope of human truth. At least as close to Truth as we are likely to get. And we can’t get very close to it by ourselves, since no one person can gather all of the facts needed to qualify as an expert in even one of the fields that demands expertise. We need professional associations and universities and libraries and databases and record offices to manage all those facts. So even our very imperfect human notion of Truth is mostly inaccessible to individual human beings—it can only be approached by knowledge collectives, thousands and millions of individuals working together and communicating their findings. Knowledge is a social activity, and could not exist for any of us without social context and structure.
Without social agreement, there are no useful facts. Without facts, no evidence. Without evidence, no knowledge. Without knowledge, nothing remotely like Truth. So the problem—at least as far as big-brained mammals are concerned—is that truth can never be a sure thing. It can never stand alone, unsituated or uncontested. There are no claims that are inherently true, only ones that are more or less verifiable. There is no individual claim that can be verified as true in and of itself, without reference to a body of comparable claims. No truth-claim can be understood and evaluated in isolation. No truth without context. We can’t even reliably declare what time it is without having an established system of time measurement. We can’t know whether a date in a history textbook is correct unless we have agreed among ourselves on an authoritative system of dating. We can’t know what the current temperature is without a common scale. We can’t know the relevance of an instrument’s reading without past records. If we want to know whether something is bigger or smaller, higher or lower, we must have worked out between us a means of measuring. Measuring is just another means of establishing context. Likewise, any statement likely to merit a claim of truth must be made in the context of a specific language that is used and accepted by a great many other people. (Jurists and lawyers have worked out such a language for use in courtrooms, just as medical experts have their own professional language.) Wisdom is perhaps just another word for experience, and experience is nothing but a long familiarity with context. If this were to happen, then that is likely to follow. Medical competence is based almost entirely on such experience. Medical doctors are experts by virtue of having more context for evaluating health and disease than the rest of us. Truth is not only inseparable from context, but may be the very thing itself. Some like to insist that truth cannot be relative—which is to say, that it cannot depend on other things. Truth, they insist, must stand alone. But in this human life, truth can only be relative. As far as we are concerned, it cannot have any meaning without all the other things.
The wrong question
The species called homo sapiens is very much like other species in most critical ways—metabolic processes, respiration, digestion, reproduction, perception—yet unique in a few notable capacities. Yes, the individual representatives of homo sapiens are self-aware (in most cases), aware that they are self-aware (at least some of the time), and able to choose actions from among a range of prospective behaviors—including some that are contrary to their own immediate interests and desires. The members of homo sapiens not only improvise tools, build structures and store resources for future use (as many other species do), they can survive in extreme environments (beneath the water or beyond the atmosphere), which they could not do without sophisticated technologies. They can even ask whether such technologies are worth having or such activities worth doing. They are able to reflect on their past behaviors, feel pride or shame (even guilt, which is slightly more difficult), issue apologies or redouble upon their errors, and even think about whether they have lived a worthy existence. No other species behaves in such ways, as far as we know. To indulge in such reflections requires that the members of our species assign degrees of value to various activities, behaviors and states of being—not only to what they do but to what they might have done and what they might yet do. All these activities require a flexible and capacious imagination.
Imagination is really the most distinctive capacity of our species. It is our glory and our curse. It allows us to conceive of new technologies and skills to solve specific problems, then adapt these acquired capacities to new problems. Such imaginative abilities have permitted us to expand our domain and our numbers, but also to undermine the very environment that we have conquered and occupied. This same faculty of imagination allows us to ask the Big Questions—Who are we? Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? What should we do next? But something in our nature also compels us to answer these Big Questions. Here we get into trouble. We are smart enough to ask the Big Questions (which seem not to trouble other species), but not quite smart enough to realize that we owe the answers to none but the imagination that created the questions in the first place—that is, to ourselves.
And so we have expanded our capacity for anxiety—a state of mind not entirely unknown to other species, though we have shown a unique determination to cultivate and amplify it. Our civilized anxieties have little to do with the basic needs of survival—which we have tragically overmastered—but with questions of identity and especially of purpose. Our defining anxiety is that we think we need one—a defining purpose, that is. The imperial successes of our species have depended on our unrivaled social and cooperative skills, but such organizational capacity has compelled us to become acutely sensitive to the behavior of others and to try to manage their activities when we can. This requires that we share common behavioral standards and cultivate means of suppressing our individual desires in order to work effectively with others. But this pervasive social compulsion has become harder to meet as we have left behind our intimate tribal groups to live in complex urban environments. And so we have invented purpose to make up the difference. We have learned to think about and negotiate this purpose directly. But we are still new to our self-awareness. Our human species has not been around for very long. We do not yet feel comfortable or confident in defining and being responsible for our own purpose. It seems too great a burden for the lonely individual to bear. So we direct our imagination to offload the burden. We reassign responsibility for creating purpose to our tribes (now graduated to peoples and nations), or to fate, or to fortune, or to history, or to the gods. All so that we do not have to face the terrifying demands of our own imaginations.
So we fancy that we do not marry merely for convenience or progeny, or that we choose a specific partner because we have limited options, but rather because we have found our soul-mate, the one we were always meant to be with. We do not take a job or pursue a career because it suits our relative skills and pays the bills, but because it is our calling. We do not make art just because it helps us pass the time or burn off creative energy, but because we are inspired by some sacred muse. And we do not justify our sense of morality because it lets us live more easily and productively with others but because it embodies an eternal law that has been handed down by a divine law-giver. We make all of these activities much more complicated than they need to be because we believe they are simply too consequential not to have a great purpose—one that existed before we did.
None of this is strictly necessary, except that we make it so. We desperately want our actions to have meaning beyond the course of our humble lives. But let’s be clear. We create the requirement. We impose purpose on ourselves. Yet we somehow can’t bear to tell ourselves that we have done so. We have convinced ourselves that outcomes are illegitimate unless they were premeditated, anticipated by a great wise matchmaker, intended by some sovereign purpose-giver. We think that any true and authentic course of life must have a purpose greater than ourselves, that it have some cosmic preintention. (Yes, the term is redundant, but at least draws attention to the elephant in the room.) We think that we cannot have a worthy purpose unless some other mind assigned it to us before we had any choice about it. Some transcendent entity came up with the purpose that guides and shapes our personal existence—we have only to listen and accept. Yes, and then of course we have to fulfill our purpose. It will be hard, but we can do it! Phew! As long as we don’t have to actually come up with a purpose for ourselves. Much too terrifying! After all, we don’t want to get our lives entirely wrong.
This obligation we have placed upon ourselves—to seek out our one true purpose—external, preintended, non-negotiable—has given shape to the sort of questions we tend to ask of our lives and our surroundings. Why was I born? What’s it all for? Where are we going? How do we get there? How should I think and behave in the mean time?
These are all familiar questions. Some insist that they are the most important questions of all. But in trying to answer them, we often forget who asked them in the first place. Who did? We did. No one else but the individual members of the species homo sapiens, as far as we can observe. We’ve been asking these questions for a long time—at least since we’ve been writing and living in cities, probably longer. We have no reason to think that any other sort of being feels compelled to ask such things. (The only other Big-Question-asking beings we might point to are the ones in our imaginations, as far as we can demonstrate.) So we must be clear with ourselves that we are asking the questions. We ask, then wait for answers. But we have no evidence that we owe answers to anyone but ourselves. So let’s take a breath, slow down, rethink our questions. Some of them may still be worth answering. Some perhaps not.
How do we tell the difference? A worthwhile question is a useful question. A useful question is one to which we do not yet know the answer but which can nevertheless be investigated by means within the scope of our finite powers. In other words, we must be able to propose a means of answering the question that is within our human capacity. A question whose answer is beyond human capacity is by definition unanswerable and therefore unworthy of our time (unless we develop a hitherto unimagined means of investigation). Such a question is a badly-posed question. Another poorly-posed sort of question is one for which we think we already know the answer. Such a question can only be rhetorical—useful for signaling loyalty or enforcing identity. But it cannot generate new and useful knowledge about ourselves or about the world we live in.
So we are better off conserving our attention for questions that have more than one potential answer and which may conceivably be answered by a careful method of investigation. (Some questions which we thought ought to be answerable may prove otherwise.) Further, our method of investigation must be able to gather evidence, pose possible solutions and sift competing arguments—all within the public realm. This means that the procedures used and the evidence cited must be equally available to other investigators as to our selves. We cannot claim private insights, personal revelations or mystical experiences and expect others to accept them as authoritative. Such claims of inner authority are usually made about questions for which we have already selected our preferred answers. And finally, we should ask our questions in the most useful order, beginning with the ones most immediately accessible to our senses. This may mean putting off the questions that are furthest beyond the range of our known powers.
All this means that why questions are generally the wrong sort of questions with which to begin useful investigations. They often prove too big for human capacities. “Why did this happen to me?” for example. What this usually means is: “Who intended this to happen to me and for purpose?”, a return to the preintention quirk in human thinking. So along with why questions (which implicitly ask about preintentions), we will put off asking who questions. Some of course will vehemently disagree that why and who questions are mostly useless ways to begin getting toward truth. But at the very least, we should agree to put them aside until the more manageable questions are explored and answered as fully as possible. It will take courage to put aside these Big Questions, especially when they are the ones we want most desperately to have answered. But it does not really take much courage to ask the Big Questions—it takes much more to delay or ignore such questions in favor of ones more appropriate to our condition.
Better to start (and continue) with questions more readily within our capacity. Begin with phenomena—things that we may all observe equally with our natural senses. Phenomena keeps us focused on what and how much questions. We have the ability to answer these with fairly direct means. First, observe what happens. Measure and count. Compile lists of things identified, measured and counted—which can then be checked and verified again. Reliable and agreed-upon answers to such questions are properly called facts.
When we have enough verifiable facts, or data, we can move on to how questions—what consistent patterns and processes can we reasonably infer from these established facts? How questions ask us to arrange the facts gathered from earlier what and how much questions. They ask us to work out the robust patterns that can be discovered from the data, and the likely processes behind the observable phenomena. We may be required to speculate a bit (which is called hypothesizing, though a hypothesis is only a possible answer rather than a tested and confirmed one), but we will only accept answers to how questions that can be reliably modelled and repeated, and then used to create more testable questions. These process questions are quite challenging but well within our human capacities. And the how questions can lead to very useful answers. Much of our modern technology—controlled combustion and electric motors and vaccines and cancer treatments—is the result of answers to how questions. And with how questions, we have no need to fall into the preintention trap. (The theory of natural selection used in all of modern biology has proved a very useful answer to a cluster of how questions. Unfortunately many still confuse this evolutionary theory with an attempt to answer a more transcendent why question, which it is not what it was ever designed or competent to do.)
Homo sapiens is a remarkable species. Human beings are the only animals, for example, that appear to have a notion of leisure, or that can deliberately waste time. Only they know how. This is because only they have a notion that time can be wasted. But since we have the notion, and can use it to make the most of our limited time and resources, we might as well put it to work helping us ask better questions—the kind that don’t waste our time. And we may find that there is so much to keep us busy answering these answerable questions that we have little time left to waste on the unanswerable kind. The pursuit of knowledge requires a little courage. So use your courage to ask the little questions.
The failed life
Every self-aware human being has known the feeling of disappointment. Few of us will pass through a long and experience-filled life getting all the thing we hoped for, or even most of them. As individuals, we will experience failure at least as often as success. And we are more likely to feel disappointment with regard to the cherished dreams and ambitions of our youth. Even successful people will typically pass through a great many failures before they arrive at their success. Many others will experience those same failures without ever achieving their hopes. So failure and disappointment are all but certain in this life. And uncertainty will dog us nearly every step of the way. Success is highly contingent, fleetingly rare. We may determine to strive, and hope to succeed, but we cannot control the outcome of our striving. And we may or may not realize the barest minimum of what we had intended to achieve. Even succeeding, we are more likely to fall short in some aspects than to achieve every one of our intentions. A failed life, then, is the most likely sort of life that a self-aware human being can reasonably expect to have. It may also be the best we can hope for.
If success is the fulfillment of ambition and striving—or perhaps the unexpected outcome of jettisoning one’s original ambitions for new ones—it is still built on a series of trials and disappointments. But in every case, and whatever the outcome, ambition requires awareness. Awareness is inseparable from expectation. Expectation is routinely disappointed. So, disappointment is the most likely and predictable cost of having ambition, that is, of engaging fully in the game of life. Failure is the nearly inevitable consequence of self-awareness. And depression is self-awareness’s ever-lurking shadow. We probably cannot be self-aware without enduring failures and experiencing depression or even despair. All these states of mind are the unavoidable price of being aware that we are alive.
So, three cheers for failure. More than success, it is well within the reach of any being who is fortunate enough to become aware of their own existence.