On unanswerable questions…
“I feel that no human being anywhere can answer for you those questions and feelings that deep within them have a life of their own: for even the best err in words when they are meant to mean most delicate and almost inexpressible things.”
~ René Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.”
“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”
~ Schopenhauer
“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”
~Bertrand Russell
I don’t know anything, but neither does anyone else. No one knows anything about the eternal mysteries, how we got here, why we’re here, is there an afterlife.
There is an unresolvable tension between our urge to know, of reaching some sort of “final” answer to our deepest questions about existence and the impossibility of ever finding these answers.
There are things that language can’t describe.
There are things that are unknown.
Does a problem without a solution mean there is no problem?
“If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered.”
~ Wittgenstein, TLP 6.5
Or does a problem inherently present the possibility of a solution?
“What we know is a drop, what we don’t know is an ocean.”
~ Isaac Newton
“The need for certainty is the greatest disease the mind faces.”
~ Robert Greene
There are things that can never be known.
“There ain’t any answer, there ain’t going to be any answer, there never has been any answer, that’s the answer.”
~ Gertrude Stein, “Brewsie and Willie” (1946)
Not everything is knowable…and that is OK…in fact better than OK as it preserves the exotic element of mystery.
There are some things which you must simply take for granted without understanding them.
Not everything is explicable in terms of the limited human intellect, not only limits in our intelligence but also limits to our sense perception, as all human sensory perceptions an abstraction of objective reality.
Once you truly realize that rationality is an invention of man everything becomes possible.
There are no certainties only possibilities.
It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand.
Add Bertrand Russell quote from philo text book preface!!!!
There’s a huge difference between what is unknowable what is not known.
The right question is usually more important than the right answer. Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.
Although many questions simply have no answer, diving into them is exciting because it takes us to the edges of knowledge and you never know what you’ll find there.
It is impossible to know the future. Hence it is impossible to know how to change the future. Once you lose the urge to know how to change things, once you realize there is no hope, paradoxically, an internal peace emerges.
“I’m satisfied not knowing, because it allows me to be filled with speculation, and imagination, about all the possibilities.”
~ George Carlin
“It’s important to live life with the experience, and therefore the knowledge, of its mystery and of your own mystery. This gives life a new zest, a new balance, a ney harmony.”
~ Alan Watts
“What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”
~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
There is no absolute truth as all universal truths are creations of man. This statement excludes ‘truths by definition’ such as ‘there are no round squares’. Even scientific ‘empirical truths’ are not absolute; they just haven’t been disproven yet.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
There are some questions that have no answers and may never have answers.
They are simply ineffable.
Some answers we seek may be beyond our ability to perceive with our senses and our capacity to conceptualize, completely transcending intellectual understanding.
"If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't."
~ Lyall Watson
For example, there can never be objective analysis of the universe, since we are part of the universe.
They remain for the weak, finite intellect of man an eternal secret.
Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
i.e.
"To explain why something exists, we standardly appeal to the existence of something else..... For instance, if we answer ‘There is something because the Universal Designer wanted there to be something’, then our explanation takes for granted the existence of the Universal Designer. Someone who poses the question
-
Ineffable …..‘Totally transcends our imagination and powers of description’
An overwhelming sense of humility before the sublime mystery
-
Add an accounting for:
Gnosis, the knowledge that can only come from experience, not from study or from dialogue. Knowledge like 'what does an orange taste like' or 'what is it like to be a black man in America'.
Versus
Logos, the knowledge that can be transmitted by words
Always remember, truth cannot be said, it can be shown. It is a finger pointing to the moon. All words are just fingers pointing to the moon, but don’t accept the fingers as the moon. The moment you start clinging to the fingers – that’s where doctrines, cults, creeds, dogmas, are born – then you have missed the whole point. The fingers were not the point; the point was the moon.
Stay focused on your truth, not the ephemeral details of things pointing towards the ‘truth.’
Remember that the map is not the territory, it is an abstraction.
When someone points to the moon you are only supposed to pay attention to the finger long enough to find the moon.
Once you find the moon you ignore the finger.
If someone points to the moon – don’t just look at the finger – because:
You’ll miss the moon
You think the finger is the moon
When the teacher is showing the moon (knowledge), don’t dwell on his finger (teachings)…look far and grasp the concept instead of focusing on words.
Look directly at what the teacher is pointing at to see for yourself.
Another can tell you about the taste of an orange, but that description is empty compared to the actual taste of an orange.
Sometimes you just have to let the mystery be.