Philosophy is an extreme intellectual sport. We would like to believe that doing philosophy is only and always good, but doing philosophy can be extremely dangerous. Most obvious is the risk of death. Philosophy is littered with those who have been, quite literally, killed for the practice. Socrates, of course, was put to death by the state, but also Boethius, Descartes, and (allegedly) Walter Benjamin all were unalived for their philosophical practices. See my piece on The Death Of Philosophers to read more.

But there are fates worse than death.

Relativism. Heraclitus wrote that the way up and the way down are one and the same. The way down to town and the return is the same road, but whether one is going downtown or uptown is a matter of one’s own situation. This is just one example of the way in which what is lower-case true is relative to the subject.

After Heraclitus posits this relative truth, the hunt was on for capital-T Truth (the non-relative kind), giving rise to great fictions. All of these fictions run aground in skepticism.

Skepticism. The Papi-skeptic Protagoras argues that not only is there no certainty or truth, but even if there was we would not be able to comprehend it; and even if we were able to comprehend it, we would not be able to communicate it. Radical skepticism is where you end up if you go looking for Truth .

This lands us in one of two holes: nihilism or the incommunicability of meaning.

Nihilism is the belief that there is no meaning to be had in this world. Everything that happens just is, for no reason whatsoever. We humans need reasons, so we make up stories and perceive certain comforting patterns in an otherwise hostile and errant universe. We are the fools of this universe, a fact to which other animals could have alerted us were we not, well, such great fools.

Most days, I am not a nihilist. But I am oddly attached to the idea that what is knowable is not communicable. What we know is unique to our own singular experiences. Knowing something, whatever it is, is a lonely endeavor.

I can try to put myself in your shoes (through empathy) and feel what you feel or experience what I believe you experience, but this is based on whatever commonalities we already share. It is only in so far as we are similar that we can construct something like shared knowledge or common practices. Being able to do so is a product of power and politics.

What we call knowledge and truth is a political instrument build for the preservation and transmission of power across time and space.

—

We are like atoms in a void, each having their own reality and trying hard as we might to reach another who might understand us. We cannot comprehend another’s reality, but we can get in alignment with others, ironically often based on misunderstandings. What we call knowledge is really just convenient misunderstandings by which we come to be in social and political alignments in our trajectories through life.

Any hard truths that we manage to find become prisons in which we live, however we choose to decorate and redecorate them. So I do believe that there is meaning and something like knowledge, but it is not what we think. That is the tragedy and comedy of the human condition, that we should pretend to know so much based on so very little.

Convince me otherwise.

---