Criteria of Truth

[thiebes]

Here is some amateur philosophizing in case you haven't had enough of that on LJ.

gallows_brother made a good point in this thread (where you can read the whole comment rather than just the main point I'm responding to here) and I thought I'd share my response as a post because it brings up another topic of potential discussion that I find interesting

Comments

[rikb]

Funny - I was contemplating "certainty, not faith, while in life, upon death" tonight before I read this.

On the one hand, I find certainty threatening, because so often the kind of certainty religious people have is a certainty that leads to the persecution of others in one form or another. I find religious doubt far more interesting and vital - as Crowley writes about it in Liber 333, for example ("I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning." "Doubt. Doubt thyself. Doubt even if thou doubtest thyself. Doubt all. Doubt even if thou doubtest all. It seems sometimes as if beneath all conscious doubt there lay some deepest certainty. O kill it! Slay the snake!") Erich Fromm said "The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers." In this sense, certainty can be stultifying.

On the other hand, this idea that there is an esoteric space for certainty that is exclusive of evidence, proof, and reasoning is interesting. I'm not sure how to really expand on the idea though. It's too late for me to decide if that's ironic or not.

[thiebes]

It's not quite exclusive of proof. It has different criteria for proof that are revelatory. Which is real confusing in a world where every truth is supposed to be objective. Oftentimes however, people who have revelatory knowledge seem to be able to recognize it in others even in disagreement.