Eat Your Heart Out, Skepticism
Jaden’s skepticism
Was like a cannibalism
That learned to crave
The taste
Of it’s own flesh and blood
And could settle for nothing
Less
Then a connoisseur
Of embalming
Empty vein hopes
Of immortality
In some unremitting pâté
With every golden goose cooked
In a dish best served cold
A first course
Able to stave off
Most kind of appetites
With well-bread relish
Where one helping
Is too much
For the rank and file
Of such a prison
Making ciao of anyone’s best guest
Too have your cake
And not eat it
For what may be
Inside
And passably left
I am very skeptical of skepticism. Skepticism is most warranted when exploring empirical truths, those facts of the physical world, the realm of reductionistic science. Skepticism has diminishing returns, and can even become cannibalistic, when applied overzealously to metaphysical or subjective truths. While skepticism has its place, it can blind ourselves to subtler, higher truths, those of our subjective realm. Many of such truths in life can only be taken in with a measure of grace. Those refusing to risk being taken in are at risk for missing out of some of the best things in life. Hope, love, and faith will wither in the face of unrelenting skepticism. If your quest is for passable reasons to bypass hope, love, and faith you will almost certainly be rewarded with their loss. Reducing them to mundane forms of psychological or sociological constructs will strip them of their transcending power.
Unrelenting skepticism is perhaps most dangerous at home, in one’s inner life. Our own experience is the direct access we have to the world of subjectivity, a world mold-able to our free will. This direct personal evidence cannot be shared in a verifiable or provable manner with others, as the methods of reductionistic science follow. This does not mean that such realities experienced do not exist, or that subjectivity does not exist. It simply means that they fall outside the methods of reductionistic science to examine. Nonetheless, our experience, or consciousness, is at the center of our lives, not just some afterthought. Plus, it can offer insights into others, as experiencers of their own human subjectivity. Knowing thyself is the foundation for knowing others, the most important aspect of navigating the human world. Metaphysics deserves our attention.
Some committed cynics consider free will an epiphenomenon, a mere shadow, illusion, or ghost, in a deterministic world. Such determination is unwarranted, and cripples our abilities to perceive the world. Of course, most people, and most philosophers, recognize that metaphysical realities exist. To move from perceiving physical realities to perceiving metaphysical realities, one needs to move increasingly from skepticism (doubt) to openness (faith). Such a move is not blind; it is based on experience. Still, it requires a growing acceptance of uncertainty. This veil of uncertainty is somewhat analogous to the veil of uncertainty in reductionistic science. As our observations and experience grow, the veil moves. The key difference is that science moves to include knowledge that we can know with scientific certainty, whereas metaphysical knowledge always includes a much greater degree of uncertainty, and the metaphysical veil can never be fully lifted, since it represents an intrinsic limit to human knowledge. The metaphysical veil has a mysterious nature that becomes self-fulfilling in our approach to it. If we approach the veil with too much skepticism, our knowledge of higher truths will be stunted and the resulting ignorance will appear as justification for a too constricted veil. If we venture down the rabbit hole of such things as hope, love, and faith, we learn much more of such higher truths, and the territory once bounded by the veil will recede, even revealing vast expanses previously unimagined.
Fortunately, the payoffs of metaphysical knowledge are well worth the uncertainty and risk. As Saint Thomas Aquinas famously pointed out: “The slenderest knowledge that may be obtained of the highest things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge obtained of lesser things.” Exploring our own hearts, and risking relationships with others’ hearts requires courage, one of the highest things. Clinging only to dead stuff, inanimate matter, because it is the most certain is the height of human foolishness. Here the truth lies, in this grave of lifelessness. Wisdom resides elsewhere. Find it and you will find yourself, and a whole world as well.
