Quelling our nervousness and delusions of certainties

When life gets too hectic and too complex for any interpretation of it to quiet my anxiety, it is always refreshing to turn to familiar things and familiar people. It is nice to sit and have a simple chat with my mom, with a cup of coffee in hand at a kitchen table so often associated with a gathering of my closest loved ones. It is not too difficult and does not require much professionalism in psychology or sociology to make an agreeable observation about the homeliness of familiar people and places. It brings a bit of sanity to our lives and a certain faith in consistency.

I’ve been reading through the various articles of The Philosopher’s Magazine the past couple of days. Article after article, one philosopher and rationalist after another, make the continuous and persistent observation that reason is our most useful human outlet to substantive meaning and happiness, while not admitting that this is the one first principle they might need to question. Understandably so, because once you admit the questionability of this unquestionable principle, religious affections come trampling in over that one period in history we all worked so anxiously hard at to achieve. And that’s why they say “Religion poisons everything”, because, undoubtedly, religion does poison everything. Religion is the greatest offense to a system which prides itself in tearing down the one Catholic colossus which stood against the assumed unquestionability of that central principle of reason alone or all those “alones” which liberated man from the tyranny of a tradition of unreasonable first principles.

The rationalist insists that to question everything is the best first principle to begin with when seeking to grind out the sheer beauty of brute facts. There is this intuited acceptance, since Descartes, to first trust reason above all things, to doubt everything, and to trust reason itself even if reason can not, in that ridiculously pure Cartesian sense, entirely get underway. “Of course we can split hairs and doubt to the point of silliness and insanity” says the rationalist, “Descartes’ errors already showed us that. But why should we doubt our first senses and affections if we ever want to eventually arrive at a conclusion?”

And so here we are, standing on the shoulders of some continuum that looks, feels, and smells like a tradition, but we will call it anything but tradition. The very reason why is because that single admittance will bring us back to square one, and the nervousness of pure skepticism rears its head once again. The point is that to quell our anxiety about a world we can not have absolute knowledge of, we always go back to some aesthetic beginning point, because without a first principle that appeals to the human mind, the human mind is in disarray. At this point, the Enlightenment’s search for certainty is as much of a joke as all the first principles it once criticized, when the religious mind was satisfied with a simply reasonable conclusion, and could carry on with life without having to mold the entire universe to the dictates of that little Medieval brain.

This is why Chesterton said, when you tell a Catholic convert he has lost his liberty, he will have a thousand good reasons to laugh. The reason why is because the Catholic intellectual isn’t driven by a nervous obsession with trying to figure everything out. He accepts the insanity of claiming the inability to doubt one’s first principles by the use of “pure reason” or “pure faith”. He also understands that these “pure” predicates are as fanciful as unicorns. As Newman put it, we can have certainty, insofar as certainty amounts to confidence; in that case, certainty is a very good thing to have. The Catholic intellectual can rest assured that his Fathers have answers, and very good ones at that. Tradition is not just something for the Catholic. It’s something for everybody, and it’s a continuum in which everyone operates, whether they acknowledge it or not. And just like the rationalist, there is no good reason to doubt a good principle which has landed in your lap, if you don’t have a good reason to give it up in the first place. The problem is that, after the Enlightenment, or maybe before, all the traditions don’t accept that they are traditions, and now this new identity crisis has produced its own nervousness. This social crisis, in its own special way, is an identity that identifies itself by persistently trying to nullify itself; it’s an age much like a suicidal but unsuccessful bipolar child, by closest analogy. To quiet intellectual nervousness is to recognize the other person’s arms that hold you up, and once you recognize this reality, it’s okay to keep inquiring about the world without worrying about falling.