NOEMAYA

Dated August 21st, 2013

The question rose, in spite of my instinctual optimism, whether humanity and its civilization was essentially masochistic and self-destructive! Aside from its limitless consumption of its own limited resources, which is just a soft touch compared to what follows, I find above all most destructive the pursuit of knowledge. The destructive element here is that this whole pursuit of knowledge, starting from antiquity, is motivated by this prejudice, that certainty is essentially better and superior to uncertainty. How is this prejudice and preference justified I don’t know! What is clear is that the systematic pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and not necessarily for human practical purposes is charged with this preference for certainty over uncertainty. And such preference is sought to its highest degree such that we’re not even content to some relative or practical level of certainty; rather, truth, the real truth, ought to be that which enjoys APODICTIC certainty. The achievement of this APODICTIC certainty is the ultimate goal of any true science or philosophy if it’s to be firmly grounded in evidence. Now, the very fact that it’s a pursuit implies that the truth is not yet known; even if we have some vague idea of our orientation and methodology, we never know beforehand the exact nature of the truth we’re going to attain, for otherwise the pursuit would not be necessary at all.

Now the problem is this: We, as stubborn scientists and philosophers, are after some apodictic truth and we never know beforehand what it will turn out to be. What if, just assuming, and what if we come upon such apodictic truth and know it apodictically such that there is no way to turn away from it or to ignore it, and what if it turns out that the truth is that it’s all bullshit, that it was all from the very beginning our own constructs, intellectual traps, that really the whole world and everything in it, including the questions, truths, doubts, certainties and uncertainties, cosmos, god, and everything that can possibly exist or not exist, was put there by ourselves! Let’s just assume; we then see as truth that it was all just a carrot on a stick and we were the stick, and even our stickness was put there by ourselves. We come to see apodictically that we were nothing from the beginning but a constituting thing, which cannot itself be or become anything because it is itself the origin and condition of thingness, and we realize that our being is in fact our constantly constituting nature and nothing else; and part of what we have constituted, namely showing up as our human selves, has immersed itself in the rest of our constitutions as if we were really out there in the world!

What if we come to see and grasp all this apodictically?! There is no way of turning back; there is no way of unseeing and unlearning what we’ve seen and learnt. What if our pursuit of certain and apodictic knowledge leads to the point I just mentioned?! We don’t know if it won’t, but if it does then we’re fucked in the strictest sense of the word. Would we then rather not know anything with absolute certainty, wishing we had never initiated that masochistic and irreversible journey which consisted in undermining the certainties we had in search of those we didn’t! It’s too late now, for apodictic certainty by its nature can’t be erased or undone. Then are we ready to embrace this new species of madness and psychosis, to forget that we now know that it’s all nonsense, especially that we now know that it was all things of our own making and doing! So you insatiable mankind, beware of what you ask for, or else the real, terminal psychosis could be your next and last moment.