Choice & the Paradox of Uncertainty
All of philosophy (and science by extension, for philosophy underpins science, even if science would prefer this not to be the case), is predicated on certain irreducible assumptions, without which, philosophy and science would be self-defeating. Philosophy and science must begin with the belief that the world is meaningful (in that it is both possible and beneficial to know something about the world), that enacting change is possible, and that we are endowed with agency or the ability to act. Without this basic faith in the world, in the meaningfulness of reality, in the assumption of truth and agency, all our theorizing and science is rendered pointless. Science and philosophy would make no sense in a senseless universe.
While science and parts of philosophy seem quite able to get on without having to defend or even acknowledge these assumptions, there has long been a snake in the garden, lurking there, attempting to gnaw away at this foundation, threatening to undo all that philosophy and science has worked towards. If we cannot trust our knowing, then whatever we think we know, including our uncontested assumptions, is at risk of invalidation. Skepticism drives a wedge between truth and our ability to access it and in this way attempts to deny us the capacity for true knowledge. Radical skepticism, in denying the notion of truth itself, arrives at solipsism and, finally, nihilism — the tearing down of all truths except one: “namely, that ultimately Nothingness prevails and the world is meaningless”. (Thielicke, 1969)
Skepticism challenges our notions that the universe is comprehensible, that it is possible and beneficial to know, that we can act upon the world, and therefore, if philosophy is to take itself seriously, it must contend with skepticism and meaningfully respond to it, though not so much because it poses any great intellectual challenge. Skepticism is the great bulwark against knowledge and a reasonable universe that arises out of epistemology, but its true roots go down much deeper to an emotional or pre-rational universe. Before we reason, we feel. There is an emotionality that underpins our rationality, and it is here that skepticism is most potent.
Absurdity & the Origins of Skepticism
Somehow, we have knowledge of what ought to be, and yet what we confront in the world leaves us mortally dissatisfied. Our innocence shatters in this inevitable confrontation between what we long for and what we encounter in the world and in ourselves. That things are not the way they ought to be saddles us with an inconsolable melancholy, and a crippling dread that there may be no way to reach the ideal that we long for, or even worse, that this ideal may have no real or possible existence.
It is from the terror of this encounter that humanity awakens into a thinking being. Aristotle says that “all men by nature desire to know” but this desire stems not just from a childlike curiosity, but we are compelled to know. We are confronted by this paradox of knowledge, and we must find a way out. This is the paradox: life furnishes us with a beautiful promise and yet death with a gnawing terror, a fear that for all our self-willed agency, in the grand scheme of things, we are utterly powerless, that underneath our overarching social world we are utterly alone, that despite our aptitude for meaning it is all utterly meaningless.
This gap between what is and what ought to be finds expression in the concept of the absurd — originating with Kierkegaard and later becoming the philosophical focus of Camus. But whereas for Kierkegaard this gap can be bridged, and therefore, absurdity is not in any true sense the fundamental condition of the world, for Camus, along with Sartre and Nietzsche, absurdity (or nihilism) is the real state of affairs. Camus claims that absurdity is established in the “impossibility of knowledge” which we respond to with “everlasting nothingness” and “irremediable despair” (Camus, 1955). But he is too quick to buy into its impossibility. He does attempt a disclaimer: “I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it” (Camus, 1955). This phrase ‘just now’, is of particular importance. This gap may ‘just now’ be unable to be bridged, but if we describe absurdity as simply a transient condition, that would render the ‘everlasting nothingness’ and ‘irremediable despair’ unwarranted. We do not yet know enough about life to be certain of anything, including absurdity. One ought to be skeptical even of skepticism. We do not even know enough about ourselves to make the claim that we ‘do not know that meaning’, for somehow, we have knowledge of what ought to be (coming to us perhaps by way of that Platonic anamnesis) and so it seems that we might be sitting on more knowledge than we seem to be aware of. Embracing absurdity, rather than being a rejection of escapism as Camus claims, seems to be simply another form of escapism.
It is the case that we are filled with terror in this ontological encounter, and yet if we are to pause long enough without fleeing from this nihilistic dread, we would notice a second sensation that in fact precedes the first. We may call this hope. Camus regards hope as philosophical suicide, but even doubt rests only an a priori commitment to the impossibility of knowledge — hope is simply the a priori commitment to its possibility. One is not any more rational than the other, and if anything, it is hope that is a more fundamental proposition than doubt. If we fear anything it is only because we first have a desire for its opposite; if what we encounter in the world dissatisfies us, it is only because we somehow have knowledge of what ought to be.
The transcendence that Camus, and Sartre, deride in their hopeful counterparts is nonetheless implicit in their philosophy of freedom. It is because man is free that transcendence is possible. Though we long for meaning, the world responds to us in silence. But we are part of life, and we can speak! We find ourselves confronting a great chasm between what is and what ought to be, but there are tools in our hands, and we can build bridges. Why should we resign ourselves to the impossibility of knowledge; what if we are life in the process of bridging the gap? Camus concludes, as do Sartre and Nietzsche, that even though the world is meaningless, we can create our own meaning. But if we can create meaning, and we are part of the world, then we cannot say that the world has no meaning. Life can yet be meaningful, even if the meaning exists in potentiality, waiting for consciousness to breathe sense into a senseless universe.
For Camus, our need for meaning, and the responding silence of the world, condemns us to absurdity. But this is a hasty misunderstanding of our paradoxical condition. In realizing that the world does not satisfy us, we realize that we want something, and this terrifies us, for only those who desire nothing do not suffer. In desiring something, we open ourselves up to the possibility of eternal suffering. In this encounter we come to realize that we long for meaning and that meaning seems to elude us, and this confronts us with two seemingly competing impulses: hope tells us that meaning is eventually reachable because the world is meaningful, and fear tells us that meaning will eternally elude us because the world is meaningless. Reason cannot tell us if it is hope or fear that is more reasonable. Yes, it can argue that the silence of the world in the face of our desire for meaning is evidence of a meaningless universe, or, on the other hand, that our capacity for meaning is evidence of its existence, as the emergence of hands in our world is evidence of things that can be grasped. But reason cannot tell us which one to choose, because meaning and meaninglessness are pre-rational propositions. Reason is only valid in a reasonable universe.
What makes our condition paradoxical is that we are confronted both by the meaningful and meaningless. There is a gap between what we desire and what we encounter in the world, and the human condition balances both an existential dread that this gap is unbridgeable and an existential hope that it is possible to transcend it. Here it might seem that we have not yet made much of a case against skepticism, but we have contained it in its proper proportions. To assume, as Camus and Sartre do, that the world really is meaningless, is to allow skepticism to overstep itself. Skepticism does not get to decide the human condition. The real state of affairs is paradoxical, but the paradox is not one of absurdity, but uncertainty.
Choice & Transcending Uncertainty
Uncertainty is the real human condition. Life speaks to us of a meaningful universe and death of an ultimate meaninglessness. We have built our philosophy predicated on the world being meaningful, but how can we justify the meaningful foundation of philosophy in the face of skepticism? We assume the world is meaningful, but why should we assume that (leaving aside the small fact that our philosophy and science require this assumption)? What real justification do we have for holding on to hope instead of giving in to fear? A meaningful world is of course better than a meaningless one (at least that is how it is to us, given that meaning is what we long for), so if we face a limitation of knowledge, why not just assume the better option? But skepticism does not let us off that easy, it demands a reason for why we should believe one over the other. We find ourselves agreeing with the skeptic; arbitrariness does not satisfy us. We feel compelled to answer the question: which one is actually real? But would we really want to risk the answer to this? If we are to look into the abyss, what might we find staring back at us?
Imagine for a moment this paradox: you are in a dark room and there is a light switch that can turn on the lights, but the light will either reveal the room to be a dreamed-of paradise or a torturous hell, and there is no information indicating which outcome is more likely. So long as you remain in the dark, neither potentiality will materialize. Do you remain in the uncertainty, or do you turn on the light? Reason tells us to remain in the dark — however unpleasant the anxiety is, uncertainty nonetheless harbors the promise of paradise that would be extinguished if it would be hell that materialized. Uncertainty is torturous but not unbearable.
For the skeptic, being caught between either staying in the crippling anxiety of unknowing or risking it all to know puts us already in an absurd situation. But what if it is possible to transcend this paradox? Kierkegaard proposed a way to transcend the gap between unknowing and knowing by taking what was later coined as a leap of faith (originally as a qualitative leap to faith and by faith). (Kierkegaard, 1941). Choice, I am proposing, is that transcendental leap. In voluntarily choosing to turn on the lights, we are privileging the hope of paradise over the fear of hell, and this tips the scales. The paradox can be transcended because choice is an act of creation. Choice — made possible precisely because of uncertainty, in the equal possibility of outcome — is an orientation, and the choice that orients towards paradise, solidifies paradise out of the field of potential.
This might seem like quite the leap, but only if we fail to account for agency. Agency is a fundamental feature of the universe. And it resides in us. Existence is not an unalterable, deterministic, objectivity; neither is it simply a subjective, mental construct; rather, the cognizing subject, the participating agent, is part of the design. To say that we have agency is to say that we have the capacity for self-generated cause. Being is an unmoved mover. Agency, the capacity for choice, interlaces the fabric of reality. Choice, quite literally, alters reality, and in this way, choice is a truly creative act, a co-creation between the agent and the world, the chooser and the chosen.
In accepting our own agency, the paradox is transcended. Skepticism began by driving a wedge between truth and our ability to access it, and thus denying us knowledge, but there is no sharply delineated line between the mind and the word — we are intertwined with existence. We do not just discover, but we alter, and are altered by, what we uncover. Knowledge is what truth and agency create together. We are partners with truth, and there is no great ontological divide. What ought to be is not forever out of our reach, for agency is what can turn what is into what could be. We can choose to turn on the lights, because in choosing the meaningful, this solidifies the meaningful out of the field of potential.
Bibliography
Aristotle. Aristotle’s Metaphysics. W.D. Ross. Clarendon Press 1981.
Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. 1955
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Ed. by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. 1999
Kierkegaard, Soren. Concluding Unscientific Postscript. [Hong translation, 1941]
Kierkegaard, Søren. The Concept of Anxiety. 1844. [Trans. by Alastair Hannay, 2014]
Nietzsche, Friedrich W. The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche. [Trans by H. B. Samuel in Peoples and Countries, 1910]
Sartre, J.-P. “Existentialism and Humanism”. [In The Continental Philosophy Reader by Richard Kearney and Mara Rainwater. 1996. 65–76]
Thielicke, Helmut. Nihilism: Its Origin and Nature, with a Christian Answer. 1969
