Empiricist's Dreams

It occurs to me now that what we have seen is a shift from religious dogmatism to empiricism and nothing else. For thousands of years, other than small glitches, we have trended from certainty to doubt as two wholes. After the stimulating but dark (to us) Classical periods we sank into religion and stayed there for a thousand years. When man had had enough he rose out of that to skeptical empiricism.

In the 20th Century for those that care we saw the culmination of empiricism, explicitly and implicitly, by thinkers and leaders. This move from dogmatism to subjectivism and solipsism infused our cultural/moral order with its "wisdom" and we became these things not in part but wholly.

Other than glitches, like Nietzsche, we were unable to see that doubt and certainty are one. When we philosophize truly we are caught, not freed, we are bound by the irony that maintains both. Great thinkers like Bertrand Russell, though he seems "caught" by empiricism and demands the maintenance of pure doubt (not just for questions, which require it, but in epistemology), was unable to shake the irony. David Hume, the star of the empiricist show and the key legitimizer of its contradictions, admitted to himself that it didn't work. In the appendix to his treatise he wrote about the key element, identity and the fantasy of it, and admitted the empiricist position didn't work.

There is no doubt, however, that James' essay summed up this position and arranged it for us in this way: A real thinker can look back and take history as a complete pallette and construct nothing more than skepticism. His conclusion of course was faith. So, it is interesting that thinkers so far from the religious dogmatism of the dark ages, afraid of certainty for good reasons, that attempt to construct philosophy as one one-minded scientific enterprise, end up at faith.

There is one thinker who did not. There is one who challenged the trend of this cultural/moral subjectivism and that was Nietzsche. His position if nothing else was that irony was the fundamental that precedes certainty and doubt. When a philosopher reads the contradictions inherent in the empirical (religion?) canon, the faith and the impossibility of nihilism (if we dont have identity how are we writing this essay?) and when his trained eye catches the solipsism (that one man in an armchair is pronouncing the death of truth) he knows that the evolution is not progress, from religion to science, but stagnation.

Nietzsche understood this. To challenge the "real" foundation and to see into the irony and the convoluted nature of the one fundamental debate, knowing v not knowing, leads to madness and torture. Man wants to preserve his sanity at all costs and ultimately he chooses faith. Faith in God, science, authoritarianism and acceptance. This choice leads to real darkness and the choice to move ahead into the "abyss" opens man up to reality and the freedom it provides.

When I read James it occurs to me that this is the best we can do. If man is afraid to call it what it is, a hard truth and a discourse simultaneously, he will end up at exactly what he is trying to avoid. He will become a man who on the outside preaches tolerance and egalitariansim and, on the inside, is unable to cope with the contradiction he has created. And it is this contradiction: Absolute truth is impossible, absolutely.

*It may be noted that on the surface, the acceptance of irony seems a contradiction. But what I would say is that the entire enterprise of "realism" and critical commonsense is the statement, regarding reality, that truth persists. When the contradiction of empiricists is unleashed, chaos insues. When one embraces the existentialism and "realism" of irony there is a calm and a sincere relationship with the world that provides what we are so cautious to describe as "life."