Embrace the uncertainty. What else is there? [2/14/17: More Kierkegaard]

 Last class thrilled me.  Almost forgot.

           As we move into discussing Kierkegaard’s modes of existence, I think it’s important to return to the epistemic necessity that all models are wrong, but some are useful.  That is:  no finite, limited categorization or means of understanding the universe (as all human endeavors necessarily are) can successfully integrate the nigh-infinite amount of information necessary to describe the universe with perfect accuracy.  Human ignorance is infinite.  We can learn more (provisionally, contingently), but cannot know all.

            I’d like to unpack a few Kierkegaard statements that I find central to the entire argument.  “Truth is,” he says, “. . . is the daring venture of choosing the objective uncertainty with the passion of the infinite” (Solomon, 21).  What, precisely, does this mean?  We’ve discussed objective uncertainty a fair bit, but haven’t bothered to really define it.  What does it mean?  It means what I outlined in my first paragraph:  that human knowledge is, inevitably, contingent, provisional, and dubitable; that repeated interrogation of a claim and its constituent claims must lead, eventually, to presuppositions unjustifiable by reasoned appeal to nature; that, in short, everything is uncertain.  Furthermore, reason and the interrogation of the natural world provide no prescription; reason provides many claims about what is, but none about what should be.  Prescription, that is, the should, must be introduced, arbitrarily, without “reasonable” justification.  Thus, reason can (contingently, provisionally) shed light on what is, and what options in life are available to us, and what might result from those options; but it fundamentally cannot tell us what we should do.  So then, how do we know what to do?

            Well, we don’t.  We don’t know what to do.  We can’t point at some ironclad line of logic beginning from demonstrable descriptive appeals to natural law and say, “This proves that x or y course of action is inherently right.”  No, we choose what to do, and in that choice is Kierkegaard’s truth.  Choice is faith; if not in God, then in one’s own senses, in the idea that one is not living in a pointless hallucination, that the sun will continue to come up tomorrow (though it cannot be logically demonstrated), and that it makes sense to do anything at all in a world that has no logically demonstrable meaning.  “If I can grasp God objectively, I do not,” says Kierkegaard, and moreover, he cannot, need not, “have faith.”  God is unknowable.  The world is unknowable.  Faith is continuing to engage, with God, with reality, with one’s next-door neighbor, in light and in spite of indefatigable uncertainty.  Truth is deciding to take one of the myriad, objectively valueless paths in life, in making meaning of the meaningless.  And, as I’ve said before, I think that’s a thing of beauty.