Certainty as the Way to Nihilism
3
Certainty as the
Way to Nihilism
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw a rapid devel- opment in the new science. Perhaps its supreme achievement was the mathematical physics of Isaac Newton. It is hard
to exaggerate the impact that Newton's work made on the mind
of Europe. It seemed that he had found the final answer to the
question: "How does the cosmos really work?" His model seemed
to provide a clue to the understanding of everything from the
movement of the stars to the fall of an apple. Descartes's vision
of a world ultimately understood in terms of the indubitable
certainties of mathematics seemed to be vindicated. The whole
universe could, it seemed, be understood with the clarity of
mathematics. Alexander Pope's famous lines expressed what was
widely felt among the intellectual leaders of Europe:
Here was a model of reality that did not depend on divine revelation or on faith. It was a model that any cultivated intelligence could understand. Here was the possibility of liberation from the ancient tyrannies of religion and superstition. The heavy weight of ecclesiastical authority, backed by the threat of supernatural sanctions, need no longer terrify Human reason, released from this bondage, could find the truth.
There was a further reason for a renunciation of the authority of religion. The seventeenth century saw the fabric of Western Christendom torn to pieces by the religious wars. For decades Christians soaked the soil of Europe with blood, warring over their rival interpretations of the Christian message. It is surely not surprising that this dazzling new vision of reality should have exerted such a powerful attraction. A new light was dawning, and a bloodstained past could be seen for what it was - the Dark Ages, or, as the light slowly began to penetrate, the Middle Ages, the period between the ancient glory of classical culture and the newly dawning age of reason. Skepticism about ultimate reality might not have been banished, but the new science opened up, to the immense benefit of the human race, a sufficiently exciting prospect of exploring the world of appearances.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, Europeans were speaking of their own age as the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment. And this new confidence had explosive power. Here was a new prospect for the whole human race. The light that had dawned in Europe now had to be spread throughout the world. The Dark Ages might have passed in Europe, but there were still dark continents where the light had not penetrated. Human reason was essentially the same everywhere, and all human beings, whatever their race or creed, could be taught to share the benefits of its unfettered use. Here was a task worthy of the supreme dedication of the peoples of Europe. Europe now had a mission to civilize the world.
First, however, Europe itself had to shake off its old chains. The French Revolution was the explosion awaking Europe to the fact that a force, unlike anything known in Europe's past, had been generated by the new way of thinking. The vision of liberation, of the right of every human being to justice and freedom, had to be translated into the realities of politics. "Liberty" and "equality" were the watchwords, with "fraternity" a somewhat muted third cry. France was the first place where the explosion took place, but the Napoleonic wars carried many of the new ideas into the rest of Europe. Nothing in Europe would ever be the same.
But this explosive force also triggered a reaction. In Germany, especially, but not exclusively, there was the reaction of the romantic movement. Mathematical reason could not do justice to the fullness of human experience. There are things in human life - art, music, architecture, ancient myths and sagas so full of another kind of wisdom, traditional ways of ordering social life - all of these were precious things which could not be exhaustively mapped on the grid of mathematics. This was the context in which the word hultur came into a new use, later to be transferred to England where the first use of the word "culture" in this sense occurs in 1867. "Culture" is, of course, originally concerned with such things as agriculture and horticulture. It now came to be used to speak of those things that a society holds in common and holds as precious for its continuing life as a community.
European culture (in this new sense) was sufficiently homogeneous for the rational and romantic elements to challenge each other in a way that was not destructive. A different situation arose when the explosive power of the Enlightenment drove Europeans to Asia, the Pacific Islands, and Africa, with each of these areas possessing cultures vastly different from Europe. Europeans had become aware of these widely differing cultures through reports by Jesuit missionaries from the early seventeenth century onward. These brought to the attention of Europe the existence of societies whose cultures were vastly different from that of Europe. But although the word "culture" came to be used in a sociological sense in the nineteenth century, it was not used in the plural. There was one "civilization" and the various peoples encountered in other continents were on lower or higher rungs of this one ladder. They did not have different "cultures" (until the present century) but were considered either less or more civilized. It was the task of the European peoples to bring the blessings of civilization to the rest of the world.
Inevitably this triggered a reaction comparable to the one that had occurred in Europe, but now on a much greater scale and of a much more radical kind. The peoples invaded by European civilization were roused to a passionate defense of those elements of their traditional cultures which were ignored or devalued in the calculus of European rationalism. There was now something much more radical than the intra-European tension between the rationalist and romantic forces: there was a radical repudiation of Europe's claim to have a mission to civilize the world.
This reaction did not gather strength until the second half of the twentieth century, after the devastation of Europe in the two world wars. In the earlier period of European invasion, there was much in the Western package that was attractive, especially to the underprivileged members of the societies being invaded. And the reaction is still qualified by the fact that these societies, perceiving the benefits accruing from the use of modern technology, are generally eager to share in these benefits. This places them in a painful dilemma: how far is it possible to take on board the technology of the West and the science undergirding it without eroding and eventually destroying precious elements in the traditional culture? The very sharpness of this unresolved dilemma also gives a sharpness to the repudiation of Western cultural imperialism.
This strong counterattack against the values of the European Enlightenment has come just at the time when, for the reasons already given, the confidence of Europe in its own culture is collapsing. The result of the conjunction of these two forces is the phenomenon of multiculturalism, an ideology that celebrates cultural diversity as an unqualified good in its own right. When this ideology takes over, value judgments claiming to discriminate between different cultural traditions in terms of their intrinsic worth are ruled out of order. Cultural diversity is an unqualified good; judgments of good or bad with respect to different cultures are condemned as cultural imperialism.
From the standpoint of the present essay, the important point to be made now is as follows: During the worldwide explosion of European political, commercial, and military power following the Enlightenment, Christian missions shared in this expansion. Christian missions were, in fact, among the main carriers of the ideas of the Enlightenment into the other continents. Through their schools, universities, hospitals, and training programs, they made widely available the new way of understanding the human situation. They were (in very many cases) quite happy to see their work as part of the civilizing mission of Europe. The churches of Europe and their cultural offshoots in the Americas had largely come to a kind of comfortable cohabitation with the Enlightenment, and there did not seem to be any contradiction in the combination of modern education, medicine, and technology with the proclamation of the gospel. It was almost inevitable that the collapse of confidence in the great project of the Enlightenment should carry with it a collapse of confidence in the validity of the church's worldwide missionary enterprise. Missionaries, often regarded as models of Christian devotion in the piety of the nineteenth century, are targets for ridicule or abuse in the public perception of the twentieth. They are (or were) the ignorant destroyers of precious native cultures and the bigoted agents of Christian churches, churches blind to the splendid diversity of human cultures and blinkered by their own dogma. It was therefore natural that multiculturalism should have, as one of its products, a multifaith ideology that rejoices in the multiplicity of religious beliefs and sees it as an opportunity for mutual edification, to the disparagement of the use of the critical faculty.
This collapse has been extraordinarily swift. Perhaps I may be allowed to speak here of my own personal experience. When my wife and I went to India as missionaries in 1936, we were part of the ruling race. In the month-long voyage from Liverpool to Madras, I expected to see and saw the evidence of British presence at every port of call. In India I was a sahib. Of course, as a good liberal, I believed in and actively wrote and spoke for the independence of India. But that did not alter the fact that I was part of the ruling and "civilizing" race. In the closing years of our missionary service in Madras, during the 1970s, we were accustomed to the sight of young people from Britain and other European countries wandering in the streets as beggars clothed in unwashed Indian clothes. They were sadly seeking for the light that would give meaning to their lives, which had become empty of meaning, of purpose, and of hope.
Such loss of any sense of meaning in a culture that so recently believed itself to be the bearer of civilization for the world has been dramatic in its suddenness. Its most visible symptom is the enormous demand for drugs among the young people of the "developed" world, a demand which now fuels a huge international criminal enterprise. Many writers within the academic scene have described this loss of any sense of meaning. For example, Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind is often quoted. He describes the total relativism into which his students have fallen. One does not speak of truth but of "what is true for me," or perhaps, "what is meaningful for me." The sense that there is a world beyond the self and that it is possible and also necessary to know this world beyond self becomes dim. Attention is concentrated on the self. Who am I? becomes an absorbing question, one that would never occur to a person who takes for granted the existence of a real world by which one can orient oneself. A small token of this is the reluctance to be known by anything beyond the given name - "Mary" or "John," for example. To give the family name, as has been customary in the past, would identify the individual by reference to a history and a society. But this is not acceptable. The self is an isolated monad which can only be understood from within itself. Thus the inward journey becomes much more fascinating than the exploration of an external world, and psychiatry becomes a dominant element in society.
This development must surely be recognized as a sign of impending death. Even the lowliest of animals survive only insofar as they are able to explore their environment and to discover where danger lies and where safety can be found. There is a real world to be explored and coped with, and one can be right or wrong about it. Survival depends on being right. Because, fortunately, human beings are not disembodied minds and we still have to live in the real world which we share with the rest of the animals, we cannot retreat into total subjectivity. If we are to survive, we are compelled to recognize that there is a difference between truth and falsehood in the statements we make about the world which is our environment. But our habits of thought do, in the long term, affect our ways of behaving, and this collapse into relativism and subjectivism must in the end disable us for survival. It is not surprising that we are now witnessing, in the form of religious fundamentalism, a worldwide reaction against this subjectivism. Precisely in those places where the most vigorous efforts have been made to implant the ideas and the practices of an enlightened secular society, there are strong movements of religious fundamentalism. Ever since the work of Max Weber on the subject, it has been widely believed that the progressive adoption by society of modern science, technology, and bureaucracy must necessarily lead to the progressive marginalization of religion and to its eventual extinction as a factor in international affairs. Secularization was regarded as an irreversible process and frequently, as in the 1960s, applauded as a movement of liberation. This is now seen to have been mistaken. Religious fundamentalism is now a powerful factor in public life, not least in the business of international politics. One may deplore this, but one cannot ignore it. It would seem that the human spirit cannot survive indefinitely without some kind of religion.
Looking back over the story told so far, it would seem that we have an example of the irony of human history. Modernity was born in a passion to seek and find absolute certainty. It saw science, in contrast to the generality of human knowledge, as an area of certainty But this quest for indubitable certainty has led us to what seems to be an abandonment of the claim to be able to know the truth. If we are to find a way out of this blind alley, we must first look further at some of the consequences of the method of Descartes, which set in motion developments we have been surveying.
Once again we have to recognize that everything depends upon the chosen starting point. The starting point for Descartes was his own existence as a thinking mind. This was self-evident and indubitable truth. One can point out that it would have been equally possible to start with the self as acting or feeling or loving, and the existence of this self would have been equally indubitable. Descartes's choice of the thinking self as the starting point had the effect of opening up the three dualisms to which I have already referred and which we must discuss more fully:
1. The first is the dualism between the thinking mind and the world of things extended in space, between what Descartes called res cogitans and res extensa. Descartes did not believe that there could be such a thing as empty space; all space was something extended. The thinking mind was not extended in space. It was, so to speak, a single point, an eye looking from outside into the cosmos extended in space. The mental world and the world of material things belong, as it were, to two quite different and separate realms of being. The material world is a closed entity. This has led to the popular idea that God, who belongs to the mental or spiritual world, cannot influence or interfere with the material world. The world of pure thought, as for example in mathematics, hovers above the "real" - that is, the material - world but is not part of it. This dualism is very similar to that which dominated classical thought, namely, the sharp distinction between a world of pure forms or ideas and the sensible world with which we are in contact through our five senses.
The early church had to overcome this dualism if it was to affirm as public truth the gospel's central statement that the logos was identical with the man Jesus of Nazareth. It could do so because the starting point of its thinking was in the Bible, where this dualism is absent. It formulated its rejection of the dualism in the statement that the one God was the creator of both the visible and invisible realities. So long as this dualism remains part of popular thought, as it still does, it is impossible for the gospel to be accepted as public truth; it can only be private opinion. The developments in physics and mathematics during the past one hundred years have been in the direction of overcoming this dualism. In quantum physics, the observer and the object of observation do not belong to separate worlds; they interact. But this and similar developments have not yet had time to penetrate and shape the way in which most people understand their world.
2. The second dualism, closely related to the first, is that dualism expressed by the words "objective" and "subjective." These words and the dichotomy that they describe have become so integral to our ways of speaking that it is very hard to think in a way that is not controlled by them. A little reflection, of course, will show that all human knowing involves both a knowing human subject and something that is the object of the subject's inquiry. These two poles, subject and object, constitute any knowing that takes place. But the method of Descartes has created a wide gulf between them, so that we have become accustomed to the idea that truth claims can be divided into those which communicate objective knowledge and those which express subjective experiences. Those who labored in the nineteenth century to propagate the opinion that science was the only avenue to objective truth and that it must therefore replace religion as the locus of public truth succeeded in implanting the objective-subjective dualism idea deep in the public mind. Claims to recognize beauty or goodness were treated as purely subjective: they expressed a feeling, an experience of the subject, but they did not give true information about a reality beyond the subject. On the other hand, the findings of science were offered (not by the leading scientists but by the popularizers of science) as objective facts that were universally true whatever the culture, the psychology, or the other contingent elements in the makeup of the human person. Once again, of course, this meant that the only possible locus of public truth was in the sciences. Religion could only he a matter of personal experience.
3. The third dualism was the dualism between theoria (theory) and praxis (practice). These two Greek words are absent from the Bible because they express a way of understanding things which is foreign to the Bible but which is now so deeply implanted in our culture that it is difficult to avoid using the two words. The words obviously belong to the dualistic worldview in which one first develops a mental picture of how things are and how they ought to be and then, as a second step, applies this picture to the "real" situation. There is a marked contrast between this way of thinking and that which we find in the Bible, where the way in which God makes himself known is not through vision but. through hearing. Because the ultimate reality in the Bible is personal, we are brought into conformity with this reality not by the two-step process of theory and practice, vision and action, but by a single action comprised of hearing, believing, and obeying. The operative contrast is not between theory and practice; it is between believing and obeying on the one hand and the refusal of belief and obedience on the other. Believing and obeying are not two separate moves. When Jesus says to Simon, "Follow me," the response is a single act of faith and obedience; there is no gap between a mental action of believing and a bodily action of following. The human person is not a mind attached to a body but a single psychosomatic being. The implication of this, of course, is that the gospel does not become public truth for a society by being propagated as a theory or as a worldview and certainly not as a religion. It can become public truth only insofar as it is embodied in a society (the church) which is both "abiding in" Christ and engaged in the life of the world.
The present essay is concerned with the possibility of certain knowledge and especially with the possibility of confident knowledge of God. All three of the dualisms which I have described are relevant to this discussion, but perhaps the most important is the second of the three, the dualism of objective and subjective. The debate about Christian certainty is often polarized between those who wish to affirm the objective truth of the Christian claim to knowledge of God and those who deny it. But if this dualism is a false one, the whole debate is misguided. I have briefly referred to developments in science which have tended to bypass these dualisms, and it will now be helpful to refer to the work of one scientist who has focused attention particularly on this dualism. I refer to the Hungarian scientist Michael Polanyi, who used the term "personal knowledge" with the precise intention of affirming that the objective-subjective dualism is false and that all knowing of reality involves the personal commitment of the knower as a whole person.
Polanyi was a working scientist who had made several important discoveries in the study of crystals. His was not the approach of the philosopher who asks, How can these truth claims be justified? but that of the research scientist who asks, How do we come to know, and how are discoveries made? Obviously, there are no rules for making new discoveries. Discovery means learning something new which was not known before. It involves a venture beyond what is known. How does it come about that discoveries in science are made? Polanyi's answer to this question involved, among other things, the following:
1. It involves apprenticeship to a tradition of knowledge. Learning is a skill which, like any other skill, cannot be acquired by the unaided mental processes of the student. It is acquired by working with and under the direction of' those who are already skilled. No significant advances are made in science without a long and often arduous apprenticeship in the tradition of scientific work.
2. Scientists work by "indwelling" this tradition. The assumptions, the assured findings of the past, and the methods of science become part of their own equipment on which they rely. All this functions like the lenses of our spectacles. While we are wearing our usual spectacles and exploring the world around us, we do not attend to the lenses; we attend through them to the things we are examining. They function as an extension of the lenses in our own eyes, and we indwell them just as we indwell our own eyes. Likewise when we have come to use a language freely, we indwell the language. We do not look at the language as an object over against us; we think through the language. By indwelling it we are able to make contact with the world around us. We are subsidiarily aware of the words we use, but we focus on the things to which they refer. In the same way, scientists are subsidiarily aware of the tradition to which they are apprenticed while, at the same time, they are focally attending to the object of their research. If their work is to make progress, they have to trust this tradition, just as we have to trust the lenses in our eyes or in our spectacles. This trust is a precondition for our exploration of the world. The whole scientific tradition functions, according to Polanyi, as a "fiduciary framework"; it is something which we have to trust in order to make advances in knowledge.
3. Advances in scientific knowledge are made by recognizing a problem and seeking a solution. It may be a problem which no one has recognized before. But what exactly is a problem? Is it something known or something unknown? If it is known, why is there a problem? If it is unknown, how would we recognize a solution when we found it? The answer that Polanyi proposes to this old conundrum is as follows: Recognition of a problem is an awareness, an intuition, that there is something - a pattern or a harmony waiting to he found - hidden in the apparent haphazardness of empirical reality. This cannot be more than an intuition. And it may prove to have been an illusion. There have been scientists who have spent years seeking solutions to problems which were illusory. One might refer to the centuries of effort devoted to the discovery of perpetual motion or of the "philosopher's stone," but there are plenty of modern examples. Scientific discovery involves such gifts as intuition, imagination to project possible patterns, prudence coupled with a willingness to take risks, and courage and patience in pursuing a long and arduous course of investigation. At every point along this course, there is need of personal judgment in deciding whether a pattern is significant or merely random. None of these things can be covered by formal rules. They all involve the personal commitment of the scientist, and it is absurd to pretend that the findings of science can be understood without taking into account all these subjective factors.
4. From what has been said already it is clear that, in the work of the scientist, the focal point of attention has around it a vast area of what Polanyi calls "tacit knowledge." There is a vast amount which we know, which in fact guides our thinking, but which we do not explicitly formulate. We know far more than we can express, and our formal and explicit knowledge depends upon a vast amount which is not formal and explicit. A boy of ten can ride a bicycle without being able to state explicitly the rules governing the relation between the turn he makes to keep his balance, the speed of the cycle, and the angle of disequilibrium. I can recognize my wife's face in a crowd of a thousand people, but I could not explicitly state the exact geometrical patterns of her features which enable me to do so. The explicit formulations of scientists rest upon this vast area of tacit knowledge which they share in greater or lesser degrees with all human beings.
S. That science will eventually enable us to understand everything in the visible world through the discovery of mass and energy laws governing the behavior of the smallest particles of matter, and that science will therefore enable us to eventually predict and control all events is an illusion. This idea, popularized in the nineteenth century, fails to recognize the hierarchical structure of the physical world. The movement of atomic particles sets limits to the possibilities of chemical combination, but the laws of chemistry cannot be limited to those of physics. The physical and chemical properties of the bones and muscles of an animal set limits on what it can do, but biology cannot be reduced to physics. So also, to come to a well-known example, the laws of mechanics set limits on what any machine can do, but they do not explain the purpose for which the machine was constructed. The exhaustive examination of the physical, chemical, and mechanical structure of the machine will not enable us to discover the purpose for which the machine was constructed. We have to be informed either by the designer of the machine or by someone who is accustomed to using it for its proper purpose. There is thus a hierarchy of levels of explanation, and this would naturally lead us further than Polanyi himself explic itly goes. But even at this stage it is worth noting that for an explanation of the purpose of the machine we depend upon a personal communication accepted in faith.
6. What, then, of the objectivity of our knowledge? It is obvious, for example, that when conservative Christians insist that their Christian faith refers to objective realities, they are (rightly) seeking to deny the opinion that these Christian beliefs are simply expressions of subjective feelings or experiences and to affirm that they make contact with a reality beyond the self. But it is also clear that it is futile to deny the subjective elements in the Christian's confession. How does Polanyi escape from the charge that his epistemology of science would reduce science to a matter of subjective experiences? Polanyi's answer is twofold: First, he says that, although all claims to know involve a personal commitment, the scientist makes them "with universal intent." He claims that they are true not just for himself but for everyone. For this reason he publishes them and invites all his colleagues to test and judge for themselves. Second, Polanyi says that the truth of the claim either will or will not be validated depending on whether or not it leads to further truth. A valid truth claim will lead to new discovery - often to discoveries undreamt of by the scientist themselves. The truth claims of scientists are thus not irreformable and indubitable claims to possess the truth; rather, they are claims to be on the way to the fullness of truth. There is thus no absolute dichotomy, such as Descartes has bequeathed to us, between knowing and believing. Ki.owing always involves the personal commitments of the knowers, for which they are prepared to risk their careers as scientists.
In one of the most concise statements of his position, Polanyi, after speaking of "the personal participation of the knower in all acts of understanding," goes on:
But this does not make our understanding subjective. Comprehension is neither an arbitrary act nor a passive experience, but a responsible act claiming universal validity. Such knowledge is indeed objective in the sense of establishing contact with a hidden reality, contact that is defined as the condition for anticipating an indeterminate range of as yet unknown (and perhaps yet inconceivable) true implications. It seems reasonable to describe this fusion of the personal and the objective as personal knowledge. (Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, pp. vii-viii)
Polanyi's concern was to alert the scientific community to a danger which, if not faced, would destroy it. But his thinking has obvious relevance to the subject of this essay. In the debate which goes on among religious people about the respective roles of faith and doubt in the search for certainty, Polanyi invites us to consider whether we are not operating with an entirely false and deceptive idea of certainty. It is the dominance in the public mind of this false and illusory ideal of certainty which hopelessly confuses the debate among Christians about the certainty of their faith.