The Brooklyn Rail

Certainty—not religion, as Marx postulated—might be “the opium of the people”: implacable, unfounded, lulling belief (maximal subjectivity) masquerading as universal, absolute truth (maximal objectivity). In so many areas of contemporary life—personal identity, politics, art, science—governed and manipulated as they are by algorithms encouraging complacency and conformity of thought, all manner of “truths” are held to be “self-evident” sometimes regardless of evidence to the contrary, leading to a chaos of dogmatism and divisiveness.

We know, for instance, that the self is ever more about to be, that it is always evolving at a shifting intersection of a multiplicity of personal, social, and cultural vectors, that is, until it ceases to exist. Yet we continue to imagine it as a static complex of singular traits unaffected by even seismic societal and historical events. We know that race as a genetic or anthropological idea is remarkable for its astonishing scientific bankruptcy, yet this hardly lessens its inflammation of the body politic. We know that art historical categorizations and models of progression (or regression) are at best reductive, dismissive of ambiguity, and at worst crude, vulgar attempts to control, if not subjugate, the incomprehensible or inexplicable. Opting for the false security of oblivion, we ignore to our peril Voltaire’s observation that “doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.”

Blame the Enlightenment (the so-called Age of Reason) for this epistemic arrogance, when philosophes, denying the wisdom to be gleaned from poetry and myth, were busy exalting transcendental reason as the sole truth-apprehending faculty, capable of facilitating our emancipation from the darkness of devotion to religious and monarchical authority and superstition. But what if, as the novelist Thomas Bernhard has observed, “the aspiration for truth, like every other aspiration, is the quickest way to arrive at falsehoods and falsifications with regard to any state of affairs?” What if “Enlightenment” succeeded substantially in reifying an idolatrous ideology of certainty—closemindedness, anti-perspectivism, death-haunted self-righteousness—the very foundation of totalitarianism, which perforce denies liberty, equality, and dignity for all, the very promise of the Age of Reason?

Nowadays we all might benefit from a little epistemic humility not only in our personal lives but in politics and art. What follows are eleven meditations on “the tyranny of certainty” by writers of different disciplines who, in their respective ways, defy authoritarian dicta-sclerotic idees recues. All are in implicit conversation with Nietzsche’s brutalist surmise:

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions—they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.”

But Nietzsche, who understood the inadequacy and slipperiness of language, was shrewd enough to know: “That for which we find words is already something dead in our hearts.”