In a philosophy course that I took last semester, we briefly touched on the problem of induction, the issue that arises when objective knowledge of the past and present is used to predict future events. Because all of our knowledge of the world up to this point is based solely on either current or past occurrences, we have no way of definitively knowing that the future will follow the same rules as the past. This simple logic problem was and continues to be slightly disturbing to me. As a self proclaimed scientist, I have lived most of my teen and adult life in accordance with logic and rationality, believing them to be the only true way to learn about reality. However, this problem of induction, which I still have no idea how to resolve, put skeptical strain on the same logic and rationality that I had placed so much trust into. While this problem has not been sufficient enough to steer me into a life of ignorant bliss, it has remained a problem nonetheless. After reading Kierkegaard’s Truth is Subjectivity, I am struck once again with the feeling that Kierkegaard has very similar thought processes to my own. Kierkegaard seems to differentiate between the actual truth of things and what we believe to be the truth of things. The things that are actually true have an objective uncertainty, a very similar idea to the problem of induction, that makes them impossible to actually know. However, we believe that we know these things, so much so that they appear to us to be facts, despite the fact that due to objective uncertainty we can never truly know anything about the future. The mental faculty that fills the gap between the objective uncertainty of what is actually true and what we believe we know to be true is, according to Kierkegaard, faith. In one elegant swoop Kierkegaard managed to hold to his use of logic and rationality while also justifying and strengthening his concept of faith. A bold and brilliant move that has not been lost on me.
“Faith is just the contradiction between inwardnesses infinite passion and the objective uncertainty”
-Kierkegaard
No comments:
Post a Comment