What do I Really Know?

Certainty – A Self-Assured Existence

S. J. Walker

I CAN GUARANTEE that there is one desire that all of us in this world share. And I can also guarantee, that it is the one thing that none of us will ever obtain. 

Certainty.

Let’s consider: why is it that we want certainty? So that we can justify our decisions to ourselves? So that we can be sure of our purpose? So that we can lead comfortable, self-assured existences? 

When I think of certainty, I think of Michel de Montaigne’s sceptical aphorism “Que sais-je?”, which translates to “What do I really know?” Montaigne’s profound mistrust in generalisations, combined with his rejection of accepted ideas, produces a philosophy of continuous questioning and self-assessment. 

How can we be sure of what we know? How can we be sure that we truly understand what we know, and that our knowledge is not founded upon misconceptions?

The further we delve into this journey for certainty, the more we are prompted to realise its complex labyrinth of possible interpretations. 

Think, for example, of the Blind Men and the Elephant story. In this ancient Indian parable, six blind men who have never come across an elephant before, seek to envisage what one is like by touching it, yet all of their descriptions differ from each other. 

What this goes to show, is that each of us as individuals develops our own interpretations of reality. And as we more thoroughly interrogate other perspectives and angles, only then do we realise the narrowness of our own understanding. In this way, we inevitably find ourselves trapped in a paradoxical search for infinite truths whilst being constantly reminded of our own finiteness. As renowned scientist Niels Bohr succinctly puts it, “The opposite of a profound truth may very well be another profound truth”.

For me, this creates a perplexing, never-ending search for truth. It obsesses me to come to terms with the knowledge; with what I know, how I know, and why I know it.

Humankind has the tendency to reduce abstract ideas into the dichotomy of “good” and “evil”. But in doing so, we are blindly feeling the foot, the tail, and the trunk of the elephant without ever coming to terms with its whole.

No doubt, these generalisations serve for our own convenience, to understand the elephant at first grasp. One cannot deny that contradictions are unpleasant, that they reject the security of our perception of the world. Perhaps we are inherently afraid of complexity and observing things from different angles, only to discover that the road to truth is much longer and more expansive than we could possibly have imagined. 

Allow us to return to Bohr and the atomic model. Bohr’s planetary model of the atom relates electron orbitals to the manner by which the planets revolve around the sun. 13 years later, Schrödinger resolved limitations associated with Bohr’s model, reinterpreting electrons as waves occupying clouds of space. From this, we realise “certainty” is fluid and constantly evolving.

So, it seems, we may never find an absolute answer to certainty; Bohr’s paradoxical statement may never be resolvable. Like a fractal iterating ‘ad infinitum’, the closer you inspect, the more disorientating the patterns become.

Is it disappointing that we may never reach the end? That none of us may ever truly get what we want, what we need, to live reassured existences?

Maybe so. 

But in opening our eyes to this reality, and accepting the inability of any of us to secure what we all may want, perhaps we will all, one day, find great certainty in being uncertain.