Iqra’i

I used to be a rationalist.

If only I knew enough — if only I thought hard enough — took enough classes, read enough books, had enough time — I was certain I could understand the world and find some kind of Truth. I envisioned it as a Platonic climb — not a ladder, but a pyramid. Every human discipline began at a different corner, but ultimately they all reached the same zenith. I think I came to this conclusion in 9th grade Physics class, when it seemed to me that all the equations we were memorizing led to just the same kind of knowledge about the world that English and History sought, too. Somewhere at the top, shining like a captured star, was Truth. This was probably God.

It took me a long time to get over that image.

It’s an intoxicating thought: I, a human being, so small in relation to the universe, can nevertheless understand it. I can grasp infinity. There is something great in me, because I can reason and understand. The only limit is time: if I were immortal, I could be omniscient.

This is not true, of course.

The first intimation that reason wasn’t going to get me to the deeper meaning I wanted came in an e-mail. I had said something along the lines of, “I’m sure if only I knew more things I would understand the world!” My correspondent, in what I considered at the time to be a patronizing one-liner, asked, “Haven’t you ever heard of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem?”

But I tried. I was so sure! I was beginning to doubt the things I’d thought, poking holes in the half-baked notions that were both product of and reaction to thirteen years of Quaker school, but I was certain that I was going to replace them with something better, something true. All I needed was a starting point, and then, like Archimedes, I could move the world.

I couldn’t find one. That, of course, is the problem with foundationalism: as long as you’re a rationalist, you’re stuck, like Descartes, at the cogito. “I exist.” And? So? Therefore?

“How,” Hannah Arendt asked, “should one be able to deduce laws and rights from a universe which apparently knows neither the one nor the other category?” I concluded that rationalism could establish no purpose for human life.

I was still too deeply steeped in the Enlightenment to accept that, though. If reason could establish no purpose for human life, there must not be one. Clearly, the only rational thing to do was become a nihilist.

But I didn’t want to be a nihilist. For one thing, I didn’t have an appropriate wardrobe; for another, asking myself every morning why I existed — since the universe at large was utterly indifferent to my existence, and there was no rational purpose for it — got old real fast.

And then I read Eliot.

Russell Kirk calls him a conservative; since I haven’t read Russell Kirk, and since this post really isn’t about political ideology so much as it is a masturbatory guided tour through the evolution of my (admittedly interesting, at least to me) personal philosophy, I merely reproduce the passage that struck me.

Then spoke the thunder
DA
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms

“An age of prudence” — an age of rationalism. There is no reason to be good; there is no reason to exist. But I am; but I do.

Eliot’s thunder tells us to give to others, to be compassionate, to control our impulses — but this is fundamentally nonsense. There is no great metaphysical reason to act like this (the Hindu context is theistic, but this simply moves the absurdity up one level — why believe in God or gods?), but we do it regardless. The willingness to accept absurdity, to live one’s life by something without considering it to be true: “the awful daring of a moment’s surrender.”

There are, I think, only three intellectually honest ways of looking at the world: belief, existentialism, and nihilism. All three know rationalism is doomed.

The believer accepts certain values on faith, knowing that they can never be rationally shown but believing them to be true nonetheless. I am not equipped for this. I don’t do faith. I sometimes wish I did: things would be much easier. People who believe possess a kind of certainty I never have.

The existentialist (or perhaps the absurdist — I like Camus, which is a digression for another self-indulgent blog post) chooses to believe in things like the importance of his or her own life, moral behavior, duty, participation in society, &c., while knowing that these things have are not true, have no objective value, and do not exist beyond the existentialist’s own mind. They are fundamentally absurd — there really is no good reason for me to exist, or for you — and that’s okay.

Shantih shantih shantih. ^[1]

^[1]Eliot’s note:

Shantih. Repeated as here, a formal ending to an Upanishad. ‘The Peace which passeth understanding’ is a feeble translation of the conduct of this word.