It sounds like you are in the same spot Descartes was in that led him to use “I think therfore I am” as the starting point for all knowledge.
Descartes argument goes something like, “I doubt, therefore I think, therefore for I am.” This seems to be as good as we can get for proving
existence is possible, but it sure doesn’t convince me that existence is meaningful.
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They go around acting like all of the rest of us -assuming that other minds exist, that the laws of mathematics hold and are extraordinarily useful for the success of the empiriometric sciences, that charitable giving to the poor and suffering is a good and worthy pursuit, etc. Skeptics certainly act like they have sufficient justification for their beliefs.
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How would an honest skeptic live his life then? Just because mathematics seems to hold now does not to mean it won’t be one day be proven false. Just because science can manipulate matter in new and fasinating ways, and we can understand complexities that were before unknown, just shows that our minds are very limited. We grope arround in darkness for the most part, occassionally coming accross a big discovery which transforms society, but the process is very slow if you were you to consider how many things we don’t know. The very condition of man is to question and doubt; we have never seen anyone except for God, who would claim to see the whole picture of reality.
So my argument here would be, if we don’t know ALL things, then we can be sure of nothing, because amoung those things which we do not know, there could be a proposition not yet discovered that renders everything else meaningless. This revelation could put an end to logic and reason itself, and we can’t say that such a revelation does not exist because we are not God, we are not in possession of all knowledge.
What could we say then about the universe if it is indeed meaningless and perhaps non-existant?? Well we can hardly fathom the possibility because our minds are limited, and they will always be limited; the universe of nonmeaning does not care and may continue to go through the ages in possible or not possible state of eternal non-existence.
It is true that all knowledge ultimately rests on principles that cannot be proved. The principle of non-contradiction, for example, cannot be proven … it is merely intuited and must be accepted. If one does not accept it … then one rejects all knowledge and certainty.
the principle of non-contradiction seems to go a long way to establishing objective truth, especially in mathematical statements. however we can still assert supposedly “false” statements like 2 + 2 = 5, and even believe the “false” statement to be “true” until some mathematician who has discovered numbers comes along and demonstrates the truth to my intellect. But what if number exists only in the mind, or as Descartes said, what if we deceived by demons about these concepts in our minds which we call numbers?
…I would suggest studying more good philosophy. Postmodernism makes you stupid…
In high-school before I studied any other philosophy I had a literature and a writing class which focused exclusively on postmodern criticism and postmodern literature. I haven’t read a lot of him, but I seem to identify with Derrida a lot. Derrida said in his last interview when asked what the most widely held conception of him was, he said the misconception was that he was a skeptical nihilist.
Derrida says he insists on affirmation and faith. To me this seems to be a powerful message. I don’t like condemning or denying anything. To me it doesn’t make sense to deny any possibility…even clearly false propositions. I like the idea that 2 + 2 might equal 5, that I may not exist, that the universe can be anything and reality can be anything I might think it to be. I emphasize that this seems to be a liberating and freeing message; A universal affirmation may appear to lead to destruction of anything useful, as Chesterton seems to imply, but as a starting point a universal affirmation gives me a positive emotional feeling suggesting that there is something of value here that should not be left behind.
in other words, would a final meaningless be a “bad” thing necessarily? why the concepts of good or bad would not even exist, everything is, or everything is not; the state or non-state of the universe can not be articulated here, and this makes sense, as who are we to think language can accomplish anything or our thoughts accomplish anything at all? I think we may put new much importance on OUR experience and brains, thinking that we somehow are meaningful or special as opposed to the experience of non-living things, or organisms with only a few cells. In the grand scheme of things or the non-existence of grand scheme of things we may be just like we might think a rock or a grain of sand to be…quite meaningless, and its non-existence perhaps not a big deal.
Of course, I would prefer to have a different view of the world, because all these thoughts in my mind make it very hard to be anything but lukewarm in my Catholic faith, so that is why I am trying to read other philosophy and discuss on this forum, so that I can escape these philosophical views I have which make it hard to be a Catholic…
