On Skepticism

ramblings

Epistemic status: this post is its own epistemic status

I got the idea to finish the year by writing for 24h and then it seemed too good to pass up. Initially I planned to write stream-of-consciousness but eventually decided to produce something actually coherent. This is the first piece of philosophy writing I have ever done so please don’t be too harsh, it was only written in a day >.> I ended up writing for a lot less than 24h but I did stay up for the whole period (about 35h total) so hopefully my sleep deprivation has fuelled my creativity.

Sceptical Paralysis

How can I know anything about the world? Any attempt to answer this question can be met with “why?”, and any answer to that can also be met with “why?”, and so on ad infinitum. Without having some set of beliefs that you just take to be true you cannot establish anything whatsoever. There is a great clip of Richard Feynman discussing this topic1.

I first read a book on Hume about a year ago (although it feels like it should be a lot longer!) and his exposition of these ideas really resonated with me. For example, something like causality seems so fundamentally ingrained into my nature that I had never thought to doubt it, yet his problem of induction illustrates how inescapably illogical this blind faith is. Hume’s scepticism led him to a point where he could say nothing of external objects and he was forced to just waive the issue aside:

Hume sensibly (pun intended) thought that any claim to knowledge we may have must be based on experience derived from the senses, yet any possible justification for this would itself have to be derived from the senses, drowning in circularity and so again we just have to go along with it:

By applying the ruthless blade of scepticism we may reach the conclusion of the radical sceptic, that all knowledge is impossible, but this in and of itself is a claim to knowledge and is self refuting. The sceptical argument we are considering has its own presuppositions, which it claims to know. It starts with the idea that there is such a thing as reality, and that knowledge is some kind of instrument or medium by which we grasp reality. In so doing, it presupposes a distinction between ourselves and reality. It takes for granted that our knowledge and reality are cut off from one another, but at the same time still treats our knowledge as something real, that is, a part of reality. It assumes that in using arguments of reason, reason itself is reliable and not somehow deeply flawed. This meta-scepticism leaves us in a greater paralysis than even the conclusion that Hume reached.2

Russell wrote in Human Knowledge, “scepticism, while logically impeccable, is psychologically impossible, and there is an element of frivolous insincerity in any philosophy which pretends to accept it”.

Why bother?

I’ve read a lot of philosophy this year and yet I find it kind of hard to say concretely what I’ve taken away from it all. Kurt Gödel wrote “Engaging in philosophy is salutary in any case, even when no positive results emerge from it (and I remain perplexed). It has the effect that 'the colors brighten', that is, reality appears more clearly as such.” It answers the question quite well I think.

On the other hand Mark Twain wrote "Education is the pathway from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty" and I can’t say I disagree with that either.

Boundaries

Episode 26 of the original Neon Genesis Evangelion series has a beautiful scene (go watch it!3) portraying the self–other dichotomy, “if nothing exists outside of yourself, you can't determine your own shape... you visualise your own self by seeing the wall between ‘self’ and ‘other’.” The show borrows this fairly directly from Freud, and while the topic has been discussed by many I really loved this artistic depiction of it.

Husserl wrote about “the paradox of subjectivity: being a subject for the world and at the same time being an object in the world.” This juxtaposition of internal and external world necessitates a boundary between the two.

With reference to myself, other people are locked behind two such boundaries - one between my internal experience and the external world, another between the external world and their internal world. We have very limited ways of crossing these boundaries, like language, a slow serial method of data transfer. Other people seem so distant when thinking this way. I’m not a solopsist but these boundaries still feel so isolating… Solzhenitsyn wrote "The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art." Well, in light of recent discoveries, art and anything else that may stimulate our mirror neurons.

The boundary between life and death also gives both so much of their meaning. Lacan says of life “if we couldn’t totally rely on the certainty that it will end, how could you bear all this?” (he discusses the topic further in his 1972 lecture4).

Dream worlds

I imagine lying in a field, a road nearby with a few trees along it, the sun shining overhead, white noise of grass in the wind, or perhaps a few cicadas. There is serenity, tranquillity and peace here. I don’t remember ever visiting such a field but this fantasy has been with me for as long as I can remember and thinking about it makes me immediately emotional. There is a wonderful portugese word ‘saudade’, and it describes perfectly how dream worlds like this field make me feel.

There is something profoundly melancholic about the experience of (non-lucid) dreaming - when I am in a dream and don’t realise it, I also fail to realise that soon the dream world will cease to exist and the only thing left of it will be fleeting images. Dreams are usually timeless and lack feelings of reflection - if I meet someone in a dream, I will only realise that our time together may come to an end once it is too late, and I can only appreciate their existence once it is over. Imagine falling in love in a dream?

The boundary between my internal experience and the external world feels experientially the same as the boundary between me and these dream worlds, so even if one exists within the other I can’t help but think of them as distinct worlds that could be, or rather as worlds that were.

Dissolving boundaries

I read a book on Hegel on an 8 hour plane journey - the book reached the climax of Hegelian idealism as I looked out my window to see the sun rising over the clouds. I was brought to the verge of tears! How romantic it was to slash down the boundary and feel my mind and the external world become one. Even the notion of “external world” felt ugly with all its associated dualist imagery - my mind and the world was one singular “it”, whatever “it” was, and how absurd it was to ever think otherwise. Below is what I noted down in my book, accompanied by a picture of the view from my plane window.

My year was full of similar philosophical moments of elation that seem silly and endearing in retrospect. The colours do brighten. It feels as if for the first time you are seeing the world for what it really is.

Reconstructing meaning

I doubt that it is possible to reasonably construct a worldview or framework of personal meaning/purpose from “first principles” (lack of consensus within the field attests to this5, and even if we could explain the world or solved ontology the is-ought problem persists), as many past philosophers building metanarratives (especially in early modern philosophy) have tried to do. Even the premise that the workings of a world may be grasped within a single mind contained within said world is quite substantial and not necessarily justified (although I’m reserving judgement on its possibility either way).

We are subject to the human condition, our being able to ask philosophical questions at all is predicated on being alive and thus “there is only one really serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy. All other questions follow from that” [Camus]. The earlier discussed sceptical paralysis leads to confrontation with a metaphysical absurd, “the epistemic inability of reason to penetrate and understand reality”, and in such an absurd world making justifications about life and death (or anything at all) is challenging.

Eventually I came to terms with the idea that I was free to create my own meaning, have confidence in my epistemic grounds. Make this meaning as arbitrarily important as I wish it to be. I am satisfied to leave scepticism and the cogito dragging each other down into the epistemic quagmire. We inevitably climb the existentialist ladder out of the void of the absurd, both metaphysical and teleological6.

Camus’ abusrd depicts our inevitable failure to find meaning in a meaningless world. Lacan’s notion of the “Real” is precisely the meaninglessness of the universe and all things within it. It is precisely that which escapes or resists meaning. It is that indescribable “thing” left over when radical scepticism has struck down all that we may speak of or reason about. With time we begin to build up a symbolic and imaginary order which taken together form the framework with which we come to make sense of reality. An existential crisis or traumatic experience may break down this framework and result in a direct experience of the Real. I have only provided the most basic outline here and although some of his ideas appear mystical or arbitrary they are nonetheless an original approach to unifying existentialist philosophy with the psychoanalytic approach.

Notes