No Knowledge Is Objective

[Author's Note: I could be wrong.]

It is my conviction (and I do not believe I am presumptuous in supposing it ought to be yours as well) that nothing is self-evident, and nothing -- no logic, proof, or experience of inner validity, -- however honored by tradition or convincing in itself, is sufficient to qualify any statement, doctrine, or position as incontrovertibly true.

No doubt, I myself will contradict this conviction, and betray my negligence of it, time and again, for the mind (or, at any rate, my own mind) is a fragmentary and undisciplined thing, frequently unconscious of its own most well-established pronouncements. We are habituated to a million foolish and commonplace figures of thought and speech, many of them manifested merely for convenience and expressing a kind of shorthand which, if we had infinite time, space, energy, ability, and inclination, we might still never succeed in clarifying by the process of articulation. Absolute clarity is not only ineffable, it is unachievable, for, though we may not often be conscious of it, we are perpetually and inextricably engaged in the act of refining and questioning our own views. It is only by ignoring these considerations that we come to demand consistency of thought and expression from ourselves or from others.

Nevertheless, I proclaim it now, as strange as it must sound, and as foreign a thing to my own mind, that there is ultimately no foundation solid enough to support the claim that any perception is undeniably more true than any other. There is always some larger vision, always some angle which transcends our perspective and eludes our notice, so that we are finally constrained to admit the limitations of our knowledge, and the intrinsically specious foundations upon which it rests.

We have seen with what stark and inscrutable verisimilitude the fantasies of pure lunatics may be imbued, so that reality itself (or what we call reality) cannot by any means be distinguished from a fiction. At last, we cannot deny the possibility that we, too, are mad, and that what seems to us true beyond any shadow of doubt may in fact be the most outlandish fabrication of delirium.

In saving a life, we may (unwittingly) be shattering a soul, or in saving a soul, we may be striking a formidable blow against the spirit. Whatever we do, we do according to the light which is given, understanding that light, wherever it plays, plays tricks.