A Reflection on Truth, Certainty, and Faith

“We shall show them Our signs in every region of the earth and in themselves, until it becomes clear to them that this is the Truth. Is it not enough that your Lord witnesses everything?” (41:53)

My brother, Amir, asked me: “when you were Marxist, you were so sure, how can you be so certain about your religious belief now?”  I try to respond to his question in this reflection.

My initial response is this: I realize that it is not that much important that one passionately follows what rings true to one, it is more important that one is not entrenched in an ego-identity.  Most of us continue doing what we do, because change is difficult.  My role model in this regard is Wittgenstein.  Early Wittgenstein wrote Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in a strict atomistic view and a picture theory of the correspondence of atomic propositions to the world.  Late Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, is a radical critique of atomistic understanding of language.  One might argue, well if in his first work, Wittgenstein was sure that he revealed ultimate truth to the extent that he quit his education in Oxford, how could he dare to write his now famous Philosophical Investigations with the same certainty?  The point is that no faith or certainty should create an ego-identity who evades truth, with the rationale that after all change is difficult.

We are all one way or another immersed in our situation and take our perception and emotions as true.  We open our eyes as thrown into a situation, a culture, a way of life, and a zeitgeist.  If we are lucky, we strive to make sense of our lives and search for the truth.  If you remember, we followed sciences and philosophy from childhood.  We didn’t have a spiritual guidance.  We had to find our way by our own effort and through trial and error.  And we had a deep feeling for justice and political change.  Marxism seemed to be the best choice.  It was called ‘scientific philosophy’, and it quenched our political-spiritual thirst for justice.  I didn’t understand its philosophy fully, but I was sure about its sense of justice.  Dialectical materialism seemed liberating, because it grounded consciousness and ethics in relations of production and material conditions of life.  I didn’t understand that a subtle hedonistic-well-being was the ultimate meaning-goal of life for materialists.  This is the only life, let’s enjoy it, at best, in peace and socialism.  We all know this rationale.  “Let’s enjoy this one life” is the common current now in a secular world—devoid of spirit.  I passionately followed Marxism, because I think now Marxism hijacks the noblest spiritual feelings in human beings, a desire for justice and empathy, and takes them to the spiritual desert of hedonistic socialism: self-actualization and principle of pleasure, including aestheticism.  This is also now a common coinage: self-actualization.  So, at best we have three things coming together: subtle hedonism-aestheticism, self-actualization, and socialism.

Everything changed for me when I was on death row and facing my pending death.  I was two years on death row and my spiritual quest has started since then.  I asked myself: “can you find dialectical materialism a satisfying response to your existential-spiritual thirst now that you are going to die young?”  I didn’t find it satisfactory.  So, after my verdict changed from death sentence to 8 years in prison, I started studying philosophy in prison and then in the US.  During years studying philosophy for the last 25 years, I went through so many changes and made so many mistakes.  At each point, I lived my philosophy passionately and paid the price.  So, the second part of my response to you is that: I can’t help it, I always live my thoughts passionately.  However, given my youth and lack of experience and knowledge, my certainty about Marxism is not comparable to my faith in God now.  Simply because I am now 57 years old (2017) and studied philosophy for decades and had spiritual experiences that completely changed my perspective about life.  I couldn’t elaborate my faith in Marxism deeply then, but I have written and will write thousands of pages to show how faith in God is possible and necessary.  In the following, I will try to answer the philosophical aspect of your question: we constantly make mistakes, scientifically or spiritually, we are always absorbed in our condition of existence and emotions, and even astute rational thinking for a life cannot be a guarantee that one might not be in wrong.  How can we be philosophically and spiritually sure about anything?  What is “truth” after all and how can we believe (holding-as-true) anything?

After so much ups and downs and self-reflection, I could finally create a wedge into my eyes and shift my outlook to see behind and beyond its domination.  I was living in that congealed perception for too long to be able to see the other side.  Ethical-spiritual sickness is like mental sickness.  Severely mentally ill, such as bipolar or schizophrenics can’t realize that they are sick.  For a long time, psychiatrists and ordinary people thought that these patients are in denial.  However, later they realized that the problem of lack of self-observation is indeed part of sickness.  It is now called anosognosia, which means without-disease-knowledge, or not-being-aware-of-disease, which is a neurological disorder.  But I don’t think it is only a neurological disorder.  It seems that more or less all humans are in the state of anosognosia.  It is not difficult to imagine that when one is immersed in a situation or state, it is difficult and sometimes impossible to separate oneself from that state and see oneself clearly as others can see us, or as we can see others, or more importantly as God sees all sub specie aeternitatis (from the perspective of the eternal). 

However, it seems there is something more to this self-blindness.  I try to sketch it as I can envision.  Even if one might be in the state of lethargic ennui and acedia, toxic guilt, lifelessness, depression, lack of motivation, or feeling-thinking life is absurd, still there is something about human beings that they would like to stick to their self-perception, whatever it is, even if it is killing them, rather than admitting that they are in a special sense “blind” and their overwhelming feelings and declarative assertions might be fictitious and delusional through and through.  In a sense, we worship our self-perception and assume it carries an all-embracing truth about reality, and “I” am the center of this truth.  It reminds me of a psychopath who killed his own mother because she criticized his girlfriend.  His sentence was life in prison.  He killed two of his parole officers, who were interviewing him, with a hidden knife.  Then he was condemned to death.  In an interview, I saw him saying: “I proved I am the master of my life.  I forced them to kill me.” 

One might call it our childish narcissism.  But I see it as our essential blindness to our position in the world.  How can I be sure that my certainty now is not another self-deception and indulgence?  Should I adopt skepticism as my major disposition?  As Chomsky once put it, radical skepticism is a theory, in practice we all know what to do and do it.  We might be wrong but we learn through trial and error.  How can I find a measure to keep me alert about self-deception, because after all I can’t live without certain self-interpretation and taking it as true?  It doesn’t matter how many times I examine my views scientifically, at the end, as Kuhn puts it, I form a dogmatic adherence to whatever I came to believe based on experiment and scientific consensus. 

In a sense, history of philosophy is this impassionate self-examination, which in so many points go astray.  However, now, in twenty first century, we have come to some understanding about ‘truth’, whether in analytic or continental traditions, whether through Wittgenstein, Gödel, Quine, or Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Sartre, Foucault, or Heidegger.  It seems so obvious now, after the puzzle is solved, that we can’t prove our axioms, postulates, or presuppositions.  We postulate as truth certain propositions and build up a theorem or theory based on them.  As long as the theory consistently works, which means it is not self-defeating or self-contradictory AND practically gives result, we take it as true.  Pierce, James, Dewy, Rorty call it pragmatic conception of truth.  Truth is what works.  Foucault says knowledge is for cutting, not for understanding.  Thomas Kuhn basically excludes the pursuit of Truth as the major motivation of sciences: the mechanism works from interactions of institutional elements to form experientially and dogmatically what is held-as-true (belief) and gives results.  Nietzsche is sure that our physiology and will-to-power is the measure of truth.  In his Politics of Truth, Foucault writes: “Critique is to question truth on its effects of power and to question power on its discourses of truth.”  In objection, Popper posits truth as a regulatory principle for sciences. 

  

Marx was also so sure that material conditions of life determine consciousness.  He was so sure he could find a scientific description for historical development based on relations of production. Now, we know that science doesn’t work like this.  Even though Marx’s economic analysis is insightful, his philosophical-spiritual view is flawed through and through and, in other reflections, I argued that why it is fundamentally nihilistic.  As well, Popper showed well how Freud and Marx invented a religion rather than a science.  In twenty first century, still we are dealing with mind-body dualism.  The question of consciousness is not resolved.  Despite all the self-complacent declarations of AI and cognitive science industry that we are about to make an artificial consciousness, we don’t know what consciousness is.  Chomsky and Nagel are raising new questions about evolutionary theory and consciousness.  They are accused of new mysterianism. 

So, the first lesson of 21 century is about limitation of knowledge.  In his paper, Science, Mind, and Limits of Understanding (https://chomsky.info/201401__/), Chomsky questions the dream of Western Enlightenment that principally we are able to know ‘everything’.  We can’t, because of the inherent limitation of human understanding, the relation between scope and limitation.  Even though Chomsky and Popper and others still follow Socratic spirit that truth has a regulative value and gives us a direction, none of them believe that capital T-Truth is achievable.  In a sense, as long as human knowledge goes, we can’t be one hundred percent sure about our scientific perception of the world.  By definition, science is refutable. 

Now, all these philosophical and scientific discussions happen within the sphere of a special worldview: it is looking at the world like an alien is looking into our anatomy.  It is a reductive microscopic or analytic investigation of how things work based on certain theory or hypothesis.  The measure as always is “if it works”.  So many take our technological advance as the measure of veracity of our scientific views.  But now that we are on the verge of six mass extinction and the Working Group on the Anthropocene (WGA) voted to formally designate the epoch Anthropocene and presented the recommendation to the International Geological Congress on 29 August 2016, we ought to ponder our handy measure of truth as “if it works” and reevaluate it, because it seems depending on our worldview, we can make things work in different ways.  In another word, we ought to evaluate whether our sciences are grounded in a spiritually barren and nihilistic worldview or not.  In a sense, ethical-spiritual truth ought to precede scientific truth[1].  And it doesn't mean rising a new censorship for sciences, but creating a new science.  I believe that to see the world from the point of view of a subject against the world of objects is destructive, regardless of the fact that how creative it has been. 

Heidegger fundamentally changed the direction of questioning and in a genuine and rigorous way criticized the problem of subjectivism and the history of Western philosophy.  Since Descartes, we took our subjectivity as the most certain and the measure of truth.  For a few centuries now, we have been looking at how things happen from an inside (a subject) to an outside (object).  Empiricism has been transfixed on the disjunction-conjunction of our senses and the world.  If we could figure out how our senses, dissimilar to reality, grasp the reality as such, then we could arrive at the truth of perception.  Reading Heidegger’s philosophy feels like awakening from an addiction or dream.  We have been addicted to dismantle all the systems from inside and to see how they work and build up similar structures.  It has been working all along, so why should we doubt it?  We can see how neurons in brain interact and give rise to consciousness.  This seems so self-evident.  Our anatomic physiology and atomic physics take it for granted that we can see the working of a system by analyzing the components that make it tick.  Find how the particles in atom work and you arrest the nexus of reality.   As Max Planck put it: reality is what can be measured. Mathematics is the essence of reality.  And mathematics is a property of self-grounding ego cogito.  The “I” became the self-positing and self-proposing ground of all being.  Kant’s Copernicus Revolution, to posit the subject as the center of knowledge rather than empiricism’s tradition of the relation of dissimilar subject-object, enclosed the whole world into the prison of phenomenal (what appears to us) vs. noumenal (what is in itself).  We were then ensnared in the delusion of autonomous subject.  The history of thinking seems like constant entrapping ourselves into dead ends.  But this is the way we learn.  We are excessive beings and can’t see the big picture.  We are self-blind.  We overdo everything until we knock our heads against the limit and come back to our senses and try to find some equilibrium.  

   

Let’s now briefly reflect on Heidegger’s holistic philosophy.  Heidegger, phenomenologically shows that the subject (an inside) is not standing against the world of objects (outside).  Moreover, not only we are not understanding the world from encountering-additions of objects but also the world (having a world) is the condition of possibility of understanding objects in the world.  If we can let go for a moment of the addiction of seeing truth as correspondence of our statements to the state of world, then the world, the Open, the horizon of possibility of statements and objects come into light.  How can I see an object if it is not in this open space to which I can attend and thus discover the truth or untruth of my statements?  If I am at home and think that the statement ‘there is a world out of my home’ corresponds to the fact that there is a world out there, the condition of possibility of this statement is the openness in which this relationship can interplay.  The traditional way of thinking (Cartesian way), posits the essence of truth in the subjectivity of subject and logical possibility.  So, it seems obvious that it is logically possible that my home can be in a vacuum, and if I open the door it is possible to imagine that there is no world out there.  A moment reflection shows that even analytically the word ‘home’ presupposes the world.  Indeed, being-in-the-world is the ontological condition of possibility of imagination.  Reducing ‘truth’ to subjective logical possibility, disregards the fact that we are not a brain in a vat.  Not only thinking and being come together (i.e., it is fallacious to say, “I think, therefor I am”), but also Being and the Open in which everything is free to act and become is the condition of possibility of propositional truth. We are grounded in the world, and the world is grounded in Being, which in a holistic sense is not rule-governed or rule-described, as it is the condition of possibility and the horizon against which rules can be perceived.  This is a miracle: each single concept is (and implies) an indicator and a directive sign to “language”, “the world”, “Being”, and “freedom” as such.  And the world and Being can’t be grasped through any concept once for all.  This is called ontological difference between Being and the entities we perceive in the world.  Heidegger shows that the condition of possibility of ontological truth resides in the Open: “All working and achieving, all action and calculation, keep within an open region within which beings, with regard to what they are and how they are, can properly take their stand and become capable of beings said.” (On the Essence of Truth, Basic Writings, p.122). 

We understand ‘truth’ as ‘accord’.  True gold is the measure and then we measure different kind of mixtures to that original and authentic gold.  My words accord to who I am or I am a liar and conceal it.  Foucault’s statement that “knowledge is not for understanding, but for cutting” must accord to real function of knowledge in order to be true.  Regardless of the fact that Foucault holds that all values and knowledges are ontologically posited in historical discourses at the disposal of power.  So, in a circular way he defines knowledge as power and disregards the ontological horizon of everything existing, power included.  What is this ontological possibility of everything existing?  It is so simple that it falls on our blind spot.  We are like fishes in water who can’t see the water as the condition of our existence.  It is relatedness and freedom as such.  This freedom and relatedness is not only a property of human beings.  It is the freedom “for what is opened up in an open region” (p.125).  A tree is free to grow and gives fruit.  I am free to move around and graciously eat that fruit to survive.  There is an open region of relatedness between me and that tree.  We are both free to appear in the open, to be.  Then I am free to examine and discover flowers and fruits.  And in this uncoveredness and unconcealment of fruits and leaves and my movement and statements about the fact that “the fruits are not ripe” the essence of truth reveals itself as a domain of relatedness and freedom in terms of letting be.  Being lets beings (including me and the tree) be so that in our relation we can arrive at disclosedness of fruits, leaves, roots, hands, homes, life, death, and our awe of being-in-the-world:

“Here ‘existence’ does not mean existentia in the sense of occurring [an actual object] or being at hand [an instrument].  Nor on the other hand does it mean, in an ‘existentiell’ fashion, man’s moral endeavor on behalf of his ‘self’, based on his psychophysical constitution. Ek-sistence, rooted in truth as freedom, is exposure to the disclosedness of beings as such.  Still uncomprehended, indeed, not even in need of an essential grounding, the ek-sistence of historical man begins at that moment when the first thinker takes a questioning stance with regard to the unconealment of beings by asking: what are beings?” (p.126) 

There is a major difference between freedom-to-be of trees and animals, the gift given to existence, and freedom of human beings to be and to be free: a distinctive relatedness to Being as a whole as such.  The moment I open my eyes the miracle lightens up—as it happened for Helen Keller when she grasped “general concept” in language in her blind, deaf, mute state of being— through which I simultaneously pre-ontologically recognize the Open, Being, the world, the whole, the core of my existence as a longing-belonging for and to the Truth, as the horizon against which I ontologically and thematically recognize myself and objects in the world.

[“We shall show them Our signs in every region of the earth and in themselves, until it becomes clear to them that this is the Truth. Is it not enough that your Lord witnesses everything?” (41:53)]

Now, if you ask me how can I be one hundred percent sure about anything, I can say this much: I came to see the pendulum swing of philosophical and scientific discourses in the course of history.  To make it simple, it looks like a swing between Chomsky, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger.  Chomsky focuses on the innate and inherent capacities and Heidegger brings the world into this ek-static (standing-outside) capacity.  Kierkegaard experiences the mystical and religious as deeply personal and subjective [thus, his 'truth is subjectivity'], to which Heidegger is blind.  We can join interesting parts of all of these views; however, by itself none of them gives us absolute methodical-philosophical certainty.  They give us insights, and in the case of Heidegger and Kierkegaard, a spiritual-mystical awareness.  This is all I can say. 

Now if I want to answer your question: how sure can I be of my faith in God now?  By myself, I couldn’t.  You know I was working on writing my dissertation on Nietzsche-Foucault philosophy.  I was far from religions and faith, though postmodern philosophy can have a liberating effect, which usually ends up to nihilism.  The liberating effect of postmodern philosophy and its nihilism were not satisfactory to me.  I didn’t know where to go and what to do.  By myself, I couldn’t form any universal certainty, but aesthetic fashioning myself in some ways that pleased me; Nietzsche-Foucault call it ‘self-creation’, which is a hopeless way to say that we really don’t know what is the point of living, so let’s do whatever it feels okay to us, because there is no answer to the question who is creating who, and what does “creation” mean here?  It is oxymoron to talk about certainty and faith in Foucault’s philosophy. 

It is a fact that Heidegger’s philosophy and his conception of Being has a resonance of Godhead in Meister Eckhart and late Heidegger talks about the Fourfold of the earth, the sky, mortals, and divinities:

“Mortals dwell in that they await the divinities as divinities.  In hope they hold up to the divinities what is unhoped for.  They wait for intimations of their coming and do not mistake the signs of their absence.  They do not make their gods for themselves and do not worship idols.  In the very depth of misfortune they wait for the weal that has been withdrawn.” (Poetry, Language, thought, p.150)

Heidegger’s philosophy is deeply spiritual and awakens a deep understanding of God, for those who can hear.  However, none of these could create faith in me.  So, am I now one hundred percent sure about religious truth?  This is a long story and I will elaborate the details in my memoir, but to make my point, I can say this much: it happened to me.  This is Kierkegaard's notion that religious truth is subjective and deeply individual and personal.  It is a happening to a soul who longs for divine.  God responds to those who call God hopelessly and sincerely, not for gain or at the time of misery only.  God responded to me; I was startled in fear and trembling in encountering God's signs.  I thought I was losing my mind.  It took twelve years investigation and teaching philosophy and world religions that everything fell into place and made sense to me.  I have seen it, heard it, experienced it, and then based on the given guidance, God helped me to cultivate myself through knowledge and philosophy, and it became my destiny and mission.  Later, I learned that the Quran and Bible call it divine grace or in Farsi we say: عنایت الهی I am a believer now, in the original sense of "belief": to hold dear, desire, care, love.  However, all these are empty claims if my faith is fruitless.  Real faith brings fruits and encourages one to do good and gives a helping hand to others.  I hope I can show my faith, not in words but in action.  

Also, I think scriptures and the Quran by themselves are enough to bring faith in God.  The problem is that I was ignorant of this tradition.  I never read scriptures with understanding.  Teaching World Religions cemented my faith in God.  This is a general problem with all atheists.  They are quick to reject without doing their empathetic investigation.  In another reflection, I wrote about Russell's response to a student's question: "Professor Russell, what would you say to Lord, if after death God asks you: why did you not believe in me?"  Russell responded: I would say, "Lord you didn't give me enough evidence."  I imagined that God would say: "I sent numerous scriptures through thousands of years; but you never read them or put your heart in them."  Now in the age of internet, we can easily read and have access to all variations of scriptures and the Quran.  Most translations and so many analyses of the verses are now available online.  We don't have any more excuses.  However, God is merciful and if a lost soul like me is yearning for the Source desperately, God would guide that person.  God is the most forgiving, the most merciful.

To end this letter, I should say God guided me to explore God’s signs and this disclosure of God’s signs also strengthened my faith, to the extent that one can see God as the poet of existence[2] and everything in the horizon and in ourselves is a poesis of God:

“We shall show them Our signs in every region of the earth and in themselves, until it becomes clear to them that this is the Truth. Is it not enough that your Lord witnesses everything?” (41:53)

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[1] http://philosophyweeklyreflections.blogspot.com/2016/06/a-religio-philosophicalreflection-on.html

[2] The Poet is there, who no one speaks until He speaks, and no one creates until He creates. 

 .شاعر آنجاست که هیچکس سخن نگوید تا او سخن گوید و هیچکس خلق نکند تا او خلق کند

http://philosophyweeklyreflections.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-universe-as-signposts-of-poet-of.html