The Poverty of Certainty

There exists a peculiar commerce in the marketplace of ideas—merchants peddling the allure of absolute certainty, hawking the promise of impregnable security, offering the seduction of an impermeable faith that admits no fracture, tolerates no doubt. Yet I contend that such wares, however gleaming their presentation, constitute an offer of something profoundly unworthy of acquisition.

For what is certainty but the premature foreclosure of inquiry? What is absolute security of belief but the construction of walls that imprison the mind within the narrow confines of its present understanding? The soul that clutches certainty too tightly discovers, in time, that it has strangled the very capacity for growth that renders existence meaningful.

I choose instead to inhabit a different mode of being—to traverse this finite existence perpetually embracing the risk that my knowledge remains grievously insufficient, that my contemplations have yet to achieve adequate depth, that the horizons of understanding extend far beyond my present capacity to perceive them. I elect to dwell hungrily upon the margin of a potentially magnificent harvest of future wisdom, my intellectual appetite never sated, my curiosity never extinguished.

I would not have it any other way. For the alternative—the torpor of certainty, the slumber of unquestioned conviction—represents not peace but a kind of living death, a premature burial of the questioning spirit.

The Socratic Testament

When Socrates stood before the tribunal of Athens, condemned to death for the twin transgressions of philosophical investigation and impiety toward the gods of the city, he accepted his fate with a composure that has echoed through the millennia. Yet even in that moment of ultimate reckoning, the old philosopher permitted himself a modest hope: that perhaps, if fortune smiled upon him, he might find himself in the company of other seekers—philosophers, thinkers, and fellow doubters—with whom the eternal dialogue might continue unabated.

What sustained him in that final hour was not the promise of paradise, nor the consolation of certainty, but rather the prospect that the conversation—the inquiry into what constitutes the good, the beautiful, the noble, the pure, and the true—might persist beyond the boundaries of mortal existence.

The Eternal Inquiry

Why does this vision stir something fundamental within me? Why would I, too, desire nothing more than to perpetuate this endless colloquy?

Because it is, quite simply, the only conversation worth having.

All other discourse—the chatter of commerce, the machinations of power, the endless cataloguing of trivial particulars—these are but noise, temporary disturbances in the air that dissipate and leave no lasting residue upon the soul. But the inquiry into truth, the pursuit of beauty, the examination of what constitutes a life well-lived—this is the conversation that has animated every worthy mind since consciousness first awakened to its own existence.

To abandon this conversation is to abandon what makes us most fully human. To conclude it prematurely, to declare it resolved, to pronounce final verdicts upon questions that by their very nature admit of no final resolution—this is not wisdom but its counterfeit, not enlightenment but the closing of one’s eyes and the declaration that darkness is light.

Let us therefore remain, always and forever, in dialogue—with the great minds who preceded us, with our contemporaries who struggle alongside us, and with those who shall inherit our questions long after we have departed. For in this unending conversation, and in this alone, do we discover what it truly means to be alive.

The Only Conversation Worth Having

On epistemic humility and the eternal pursuit of truth.

Achraf SOLTANI — January 18, 2019