as I continue my research into 17 century philosophy,
one of the main questions asked was this, how do we
know what we know? How is knowledge possible and what
are the limits of this knowledge? Descartes is all about this…
to make knowledge certain, was one of the goals of the 17 century…
and yet, this flies into the face of being human…
we exist in a state of being without knowledge all the time…
we can never have any knowledge of the future, this uncertainty
drives many… we fear the future because we aren’t certain about
future…we are afraid, not knowing, not being certain…
we cannot have knowledge about the future, we cannot be certain…
if life has three parts, then we have no knowledge about one part, the
future… but what about the past? can we be certain about our knowledge
about the past? I have “knowledge” about the past, about people, places, events
times, and in talking to my sister about my “knowledge” about the past, I have learned
I am often wrong and sometimes drastically wrong about my “knowledge” about
people, places, events and times…
for example, I would have bet the family fortune that my mom grew up on a farm,
for that was my knowledge about my mom’s past and yet, when talking to my mom,
I learned she never lived on a farm… so where the hell did I get the idea, “knowledge”
that she grew up on a farm? my knowledge about my past is shaky at best,
I really can’t be certain about anything that did exist, my knowledge about,
the past, I can’t trust…I may just as wrong about the past as I am about my mom
growing up on a farm… I am uncertain about my information about my past…
because my “knowledge” about my past may be misremembered or misinterpreted
or just plain forgotten… I wouldn’t be the first person in history to rewrite
my history to match some idea or ideal about myself…and this is why we
cannot trust our own personal history… we cannot be certain…
so we have the past be in doubt as well as the future…
that leaves us the present and the present has its problems…
I may think I have a perfect and wonderful marriage and
yet, my wife may not think so and she is planning on leaving me for
a circus clown… I cannot be any more certain about the present
then I am about the future or the past…
we exist in doubt and uncertainty and we lack the knowledge
to dispel that doubt and uncertainty… we cannot make knowledge
certain despite Descartes attempt…
so we do we do in the face of this uncertainty about our knowledge?
we live with it, just as we always have… we cannot be certain about
our knowledge of ourselves or of the universe…for facts can change,
which changes our knowledge of the universe. So we can never be sure
about our knowledge of the universe. Our pursuit in finding certainty
of our knowledge is doomed to failure and that is alright…
we can have knowledge, but we must assume that the knowledge we
have of the universe is flawed and uncertain…
this leads us to the idea that we must embrace uncertainty
and doubt and that we can’t be certain about anything and
say, that is ok…
doubt, uncertainty, chance, probability, chaos, these are the real
options in life, in the universe…
our attempts at certainty and fixed knowledge and the removal of
doubt is just our vain attempts to find certainty in an uncertain
universe…the ism’s and ideologies and paradigms and attempts
at human systems are all an attempt to create certainty in our lives…
Kropotkin