Faith in Shadows
Without fundamental trust
there is no trust at all.
Lao-Tzu
TAO TE CHING
I know that I have read Ludwig Wittgenstein’s On Certainty (or see online version). I do not know that I have understood it. At the end of the text, I was left with a fundamental question about how individuals (and societies) of differing traditions are to find common ground for moving forward together.
Wittgenstein’s major argument is that the foundations of our knowledge of the external world are groundless, that “at the foundation of a well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded (253),” that there is not a single logical proposition that connects us to reality, but rather, that it is the entire system of propositions (141), built up during our childhood and confirmed and reconfirmed throughout our life (144), that provides a mutual support (142) for our certainty that, for instance, the doorknob will not disappear when we reach for it.
Once read, his argument seems like a no-brainer; in fact, Wittgenstein seems to say that most philosophy of this kind isn’t worthy of the man sitting at the end of the bar (338). But he is directing his argument toward a person (G.E. Moore) who is asserting that the fact that he is able to say that he knows he has a hand is directly connected to that assertion being true:
I have, I think, no better argument than simply this—namely that [this proposition is], in fact, true…But do I really know [this proposition and similar ones] to be true? Isn’t it possible that I only believe them? Or I know them to be highly probable? In answer to this question, I think I have nothing better to say than that it seems to me that I do know them, with certainty.
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George Edward Moore, “A Defence of Common Sense,” Twentieth Century Philosophy: The Analytic Tradition, ed. Morris Weitz (The Free Press: New York; 1966), (108-109).
And so Wittgenstein’s goal, in On Certainty, is to show why Moore is mistaken by trusting his certainty to reveal the truth of things and to investigate what certainty is, how it functions, and whether it is legitimate.
Wittgenstein is “interested in the fact that about certain empirical propositions no doubt can exist if making judgments is to be possible at all” (308). He is concerned because “there are cases where doubt is unreasonable, but others where it seems logically impossible. And there seems to be no clear boundary between them” (454). This concern is not resolved in the text (673-674), which means that Wittgenstein’s central question is left standing for us to wrestle with.
On Certainty reads like the journal of an ongoing epistemological investigation. One has the feeling that, when Wittgenstein wrote statement 1, he had no idea what he would write at, say, statement 88, and even less of an idea of what he would write at statement 676. Without a doubt, this is due to the fact that On Certainty was compiled from his private notebooks after his death in 1951 and published posthumously in 1969. This aspect of On Certainty allows us to glance at Wittgenstein’s seemingly uncensored thought process (see those points where Wittgenstein poses a question to himself, e.g. 68, 75, 86, 309, and maybe most importantly, 508.). The reader, then, becomes less concerned with whether Wittgenstein was right and more interested in what “targets [he] had been ceaselessly aiming at” (387).
If On Certainty does, in truth, give relatively unfettered access to Wittgenstein’s thought process, then it may be possible for the discerning reader to catch those mistakes that Wittgenstein missed (and mistakes is used purposefully here). If Wittgenstein is unsatisfied with his investigation into how a person gets about in the world without doubting every little thing (and his constant repetition would seem to illustrate his dissatisfaction, as if he wasn’t able to think his way out of the circle), then it seems his mistake may have been to not conduct a thorough investigation of trust.
It is my current understanding that the difference between trust and certainty is this: the certain man proceeds without thinking about a possible gap between the world and his certainty; the trusting woman acknowledges the gap, and proceeds anyway.
A strong concept of trust from Wittgenstein would take us beyond the banal realm of being certain that that is a tree and into the complex realm of being certain that that is the wrong way to treat another human being. When two individuals, from different traditions and playing different language games, attempt to resolve their cultural conflicts, they must have a common ground that they both trust in order to build something together. This common ground will not be that they both accept the fact that is a tree, though they both will accept it; rather, because they are dealing with the intangible world of cultural mores, their common ground will, necessarily, be an intangible fact that they can agree upon. This fact will have to be trusted by both of them the way a climber trusts that that the outcropping will hold: he trusts his life to it.
Witggenstein’s examples, which are also Moore’s examples, include being certain of trees, hands, arithmetic, basic physics, the relative age of the Earth, and the existence of his own brain. As Wittgenstein asks, “The propositions presenting what Moore ‘knows’ are all of such a kind that it is difficult to imagine why anyone should believe the contrary” (93). The examples I would have rather seen involve such intangibles as love, right, wrong, good, evil, etc. These are the questions we have today, the questions of a post-colonial age. We cannot fault Wittgenstein for avoiding these topics because they were outside of his scope, but we can ask how, in those cases where one knows that there is no true right or wrong, one can be certain of acting in the right manner, or rather, not acting in the wrong manner. My question to Wittgenstein is not, “When is it legitimate to be certain of the world?” (to which he might answer, “When you act”); but rather, “Knowing that there is no concrete foundation for my beliefs (253), when should I trust my certainty on such things as right and wrong and take a moral action?”
Wittgenstein touches on this cross-cultural confrontation (609-612), coming to the conclusion that the only thing that can cross this cultural gap is persuasion. Imagine I am trying to convince a conservative Muslim man that Western books will help his society succeed in a modern world, and he is trying to convince me that it is the modern world that’s a failure, and that my society, if it is to succeed in the eyes of Allah, should cast away our modern comforts and embrace the traditional Muslim way of doing things. Now, if I am certain that he is wrong and he is certain that he is right, then Wittgenstein says the only thing I have going for me is my power of persuasion. I am not convinced that Wittgenstein is incorrect; however, I am concerned that, if the Muslim is more persuasive than I am, I will renounce my certainty and accept his. There must be something (and I am convinced it revolves within the orbit of trust) that I can count on to protect my certainties — especially if they are certainties I have consciously chosen over the skeptical alternatives, such as the certainty that there is a right way to treat another human being. But if my castle of belief is founded on the shifting sands of the riverbed, how am I to defend it?
I believe that there is a reality that is external to our language games. I believe that, were human beings not to exist, there would still be a world in which beings existed: when the proverbial tree falls in the proverbial forest, regardless of who is around, it does make a proverbial sound. These are things that I believe, and they are also things of which I am certain. This fact of my belief — that there is an external world whose existence is not dependent upon our human language game — colors my question to Wittgenstein. Within it, I am not able to comprehend a manner in which to explain the way that I am certain of certain things. If there is no practical one-to-one correspondence between the realm of the language game and the realm of reality (215), if there is a definite gap between what I am able (due to my language game) to believe and any objective truth (403), if all of my beliefs are logically ungrounded (253), then how am I to explain the intellectual trust I have in concepts such as love?
Perhaps the answer lies in establishing an experiential simile. In the Tao Te Ching, Lao-Tzu writes, “Know not-knowing: supreme. Not know knowing: faulty” . The latter phrase suggests that one can know knowing, and that it is the psychologically healthy person (the Chinese character the translator interprets as “faulty” also translates as “sick, ill” ) who understands this knowledge of knowing. If one can know knowing, and if, from this, one knows what it feels like to know, perhaps we can devise an experiential ground for our knowledge of things more intangible than the Earth; perhaps we can say to ourselves, “This is what it feels like to know that that is a tree. It feels the same way when I think that I know that that is love. Therefore, my body tells me there is probably such a thing as love” (we can only say “probably” because it can never be greater than a simile). In this instance, we trust that we know the difference between feelings, and it is this trust that steers our action.
Regardless of whether an experiential simile is the way out of Wittgenstein’s circle, I am certain that the escape lies in an investigation of his concept of trust. It is one of the very few things that Wittgenstein considers as a necessary condition of his theory of language games (509). If the theory of language games is his number one contribution to philosophy, as it seems to be, then I am certain that the trust that is its condition deserves a greater treatment than it receives in On Certainty.