As college students, we seem to be exposed to relatively high degree of unpredictability. We can still operate, relatively contentedly, without knowing what will come next weekend, next semester, next year, or after college. But being unsettled in all things at all times is never comfortable. At some point, we feel better when we know, with firmness and confidence, what we are most passionate about, what we want to do with our lives, or what we believe about the issues that can define and shape us.
But the question of certainty is a different sort of consideration entirely. How does one know – beyond a shadow of a doubt – that you’ve found the one passion to pursue, the one job field to solicit, or the one worldview to believe?
You don’t. Life as a human being is funny that way. You have to operate in the vast majority of your life without absolute certainty. Starting most fundamentally, how do you even know that your ability to reason mentally relates to reality at all? We all have presuppositions that are the basis of how we live. Examining these foundations is one of the most important things you can ever do.
When faced with the strange and ubiquitous uncertainty of how we ought to live our life, two pat cultural answers ought to be first cleared out of the way. If we are to wrestle with the whole of life, it must be with no holds barred. One incomplete answer is to merely ascribe to a form of materialistic nihilism. The other is to retreat exclusively into the empirical sciences.
We have to deal carefully with thoughts that undermine the very meaning of thought. Our cultural nihilism, in asserting the pure meaninglessness of life beyond the consumption of products and information, removes any moral, philosophical, or meaningful ground for human action, let alone human passion. In the light of uncertainty, a nihilist claims that there is no meaning whatsoever. I admire the people who live out the complete consequences of that belief, because they seem to be very few. Pop nihilism is closer to pop consumerism than any philosophical tradition.
For all it’s social and technological advances, the empirical approach to science has only served to disguise the question of certainty. Our culture holds scientific and confirmable truth on a different level than the truths that relate to every other area of life. The problem arises when you try to apply the empirical approach to questions that it cannot answer. You can be certain that 2+2=4. But you cannot prove love, literature, courage, justice, or passion in the same way. This lack of certainty in our lives is not a science waiting to be unearthed, but a question completely separate from the scientific method.
The real question in our lives is what outlook best explains reality. There are hundreds of ideas out there, but some are decidedly better than others on both experiential and theoretical levels. What set of presuppositions give the fullest answer to life and our place, purpose and passions within it? And then the question becomes, are those answers ones that you can actually live as well as know?
Originally published in the Willamette Collegian.