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I think I am having some kind of break-through.
I was reading recently, I cant even remember where, about how, for the ancients, philosophy begins in wonder, but for the post-moderns, philosophy ends in despair; the wonder of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle; the despair of Pascal and Kierkegaard and Sartre.
It suddenly hit me in a Yahoo religion room chat the other day when someone said, “Well, if there were some all powerful all knowing all loving God who created the world and us, then don’t you think such a God would make us aware of all this and believers without doubts if such awareness and belief is necessary?”
Well, I began to wonder about despair. I said, “Yes, of course! Precisely! Eureka!” Since it is an obvious fact that we do NOT know, we are NOT certain, well, perhaps that fact tells us a great deal. Perhaps there is some important reason for this absence. Perhaps the most obvious fact of science and religion is precisely that veil of uncertainty, seeing “through a glass darkly”, and not knowing even as we are known! Why is their Gödel’s incompleteness and Heisenberg’s uncertainty?
Heidegger said that this is the most important philosophical question: “why is there anything at all rather than simply nothing.” Why is there a universe and why do I find myself in that universe? Camus said the most important philosophical question is whether or not to commit suicide at any given moment. Perhaps these two questions are really two sides of the same coin. We really owe a lot to the ancient Jain religion for the concept of anekantavada, “many-pointed-ness,” that there is no one single point of view, that every attempt to put the truth into words is but a partial expression of the truth. Shankaracharya wrote a prayer which begins “O Thou, from whom all words recoil!”
Sometimes the strongest evidence is what we can never see and the soundest testimony is what we can never hear. Absurdity is in partnership with truth, at least in mathematics, in reduction ad absurdum. The fool DOES say in his heart “there is no God” during the first part of the theorem.
The world is transformed with words, one person at a time.
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