CURB YOUR EXPECTATIONS
27th June 2024
Don’t expect everything I write to be meaningful or make sense because personally, I do not plan on it. In fact, I expect and hope that this blog will be as messy as my head, as the world, and everything it entails. We have all heard the infamous quote “The truth is rarely pure and never simple”I think it's from the play The Importance of Being Earnest written by Oscar Wilde, great play by the way. Well, it is a quote I hold close to my heart and one I wholeheartedly believe to be true. Humans are complicated and flawed hence any reflection about people that does not embrace that is simply, at the very least, incomplete. I mean we lie sometimes not because we want to but because we simply don’t know what the truth is and other times we lie just because we can. We hurt others just to feel in control sometimes and other times we do it without even realizing we are. My point is, for every perceivable outcome there exist at least a billion possible causes or explanations that all seem equally plausible. And when there are not a billion causes there are at least a billion factors influencing each cause making the search for truth almost seem futile. What hope really is there for ever really figuring out what is the case?
Sure, logic is a helpful tool that can be utilized in our effort to discern truth from fiction, but how far can it really take us is a question I have found myself grappling with lately. I recently read the book Wittgenstein’s Poker written by John Eidinow and David Edmonds where the idea that logic was nothing more than a connector was explored. Citing Wittgenstein, it was mentioned that Wittgenstein held the belief that often logical statements tell us nothing about the actual world, all they can really tell us anything about is the relationship between ideas. In the words of the authors “[logical statements] are devoid of substance, they are only about the internal relationship of the statements or equation”. That claim had me in a spiral for weeks. See prior to stumbling upon that lovely nugget of knowledge, I had often wholly relied on logic to make sense of the world. It had been the case that if something did not make logical sense, I simply did not give it a second glance, so you can understand why I went down a spiral after reading that, or as I like to say Twirled down a spiral. Learning about the incompleteness theorem did not help matters, I don’t remember how I stumbled upon it, but I did and from what I understand, the incompleteness theorem is a mathematical theory formulated by Kurt Godel which holds that in a logical system like math it is inevitably the case that there exist some truths that must be true for mathematics to be sensible, but at the same time can not be proven using mathematics, proving them would require an external system outside of math. Now before I thought I was in a spiral, but learning about the incompleteness theorem had me in shambles. I am sure at this point you have connected the dots, but just in case you haven’t let me lay it out for you.
So if we accept the idea that logical statements are devoid of meaning, telling us nothing about the actual world and everything about the relationship between statements. And if we accept the claim that within any logical system, there exist true statements that can not be proven by said logical system, then we are faced with certain facts. Otherwise stated, we are forced to accept the following fact, just because all perceivable evidence makes it seem as though something would not be true does not in fact mean it isn’t, two seemingly contradicting things can be true, and my personal favorite there are truths that just can not be arrived at through logic. The last statements almost had me stepping into my spiritual era. In fact, I plan to spend the summer of 2025 in some monastery somewhere in Asia trying to figure out what more there is because apparently, logic is not the end all be all, I know wild, who could have guessed, somebody could have told me. Anyway, all this goes to really highlight the chaotic undertone of the whole human experience, a chaos that can not just be rationalized away using logic, no it is a chaos we all just have to learn to coexist with. So the question then becomes how does one do that?
An option is to live like those before us and leave the skepticism to the philosophers or any other group of people arrogant enough to think they can sieve out the truth by manipulating the chaos. We could embrace the same sense of duties and obligations those before us embraced and those before them embraced. Accept the same things those before us accepted were right and wrong. Have the same wants, the same preferences, etc, you get the idea. That would surely make living much easier because then one would know what to do, where to go, and even who to be. It makes the whole ordeal of making sense of life easier. But what about those who just can not summon this sense of duty and obligation others seem to embrace so effortlessly, or accept those things other accepts as right or wrong without so much as a second thought? What about those whose wants and preferences are out of alignment? What hope is there for them? How are they to coexist with the chaos? They could try acceptance. They could accept everything they are and everything they feel and just get on with living. But I think the goal, at least for me, has always been more than just getting by. I don’t want to just power through life because the only thing at the end of this is death which to me is equivalent to nothingness. No, I want to live a life that makes some sense, it does not even have to be remarkable, I just want it to make sense.
A long time ago right after I left college, I had a conversation with one of my cousins where he told me “Just because you want to does not mean you should” after I told him I was heading to Colorado to live and work in the woods. I agree with him, just because you want to is not reason enough to do anything and my follow-up question is if want is not the compass that directs what one does and doesn’t do, then what should be? Personally, I think truth could be what dictates the dos and don’ts of life for me and that is why I care about truth. Sure, to some extent, I would, respectfully, just like to know what the fuck is going on, but to another extent I do believe if I did know what really is and isn’t true, I would be better equipped in my strive to create a life worth living. But at the same time, if I am being honest a part of me has accepted the fact that truth is just something that is outside our grasp, bold claim, I know, but that’s just how I feel. I don’t think we would recognize the truth even if it was staring us right in our face. So I suppose I would just have to settle for reality.
Yes, I do define truth and reality differently. To me, reality is the story we tell ourselves, it is what the world we live in is made out of. Whereas truth is what exists independent of perception, unlike reality, it is not a narrative, it is just what is. Immanuel Kant wrote about this, in his work Critique of Pure Reason, he explored the question of whether the world exists independently of our experience and perception of it. Transcendental idealists would argue that the world does not exist independently of our perception and experience of it meanwhile transcendental realists would argue that it does. I am very obviously a transcendental realist because I do believe the world exists independently of our perception and experience of it. But just because I believe that does not mean I am of the impression that the world as it appears to us is not worth exploring. As I mentioned before, I do believe that the world as it is aka truth, is simply something that is inaccessible to us. So the only thing we can explore is the world as it appears to us aka reality and hope in doing so we might get a glimpse of what the world is really like aka the truth. So yes, I am under the impression that it remains a worth while endeavor to strive to understand reality, to spend time trying to untangle the complexities and nuances of life and living. Those are the parts of humanity that I am personally most intrigued by and therefore what I hope to explore in my writing.
All that being said, at the end of the day, all I really want here is a space to process my thoughts so I can let them go and get on with living.