In the previous article of this series, The Awful Truth About the Truth: How Do We Know What We Know?, we introduced the problem of whether we can rely on our own knowledge, which turns out to be more difficult than one might think. Now let us turn our attention to the way humanity has dealt with this problem since it first occurred to us to question our own perception of the world in which we live.
In no way is this brief overview intended to provide a complete and thorough history of epistemology.* Such a study is the work of a lifetime, not the subject of casual inquiry. Our intention is rather to highlight the main turning points in the evolution of the way we think about the nature of knowledge and how we evaluate its reliability. If the reader is moved from casual to scholarly pursuit, there is no lack of high-quality resources from which to draw.
The search for knowledge seems to be part of the core set of motivators for human beings. Early childhood is characterized by incessant questioning and experimentation. Likewise, the oldest literature of any civilization tends to be focused on cosmogony and mythology: the stories we told to explain why the world is the way that it is, where we came from and what we are doing here. Our ancient myths are more than just stories; they are attempts to make sense of things. People have always needed to know – or at the very least, to have a reasonably plausible explanation to rely on. Traditional accounts of the natural world, and of humanity’s place therein, evolved into early organized religious traditions along with the transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age. Religion provided a standard model for the inexplicable and the mysterious; this knowledge was of a different kind than the common facts of daily life, but was not recognized formally as such.
At some point, we began to distinguish between knowledge and truth. The search for true knowledge – not revealed, but observable and verifiable – seems to have begun simultaneously in various early civilizations, a few centuries before the Common Era. Early Buddhist philosophy aligns with older Hindu traditions concerning maya, or the idea that we do not see all things as they are, but perceive only an imperfect or distorted illusion of reality. Ancient Greeks were preoccupied with the same concerns, handed down by Plato in his parable of the cave. It seems significant that similar ideas should have originated during roughly the same period of time, in civilizations around the world which were separated beyond the possibility of communication – as if there were something in human nature that presupposes these ideas, requiring only the appropriate context to manifest.
To question the validity of one’s own perceptions – even, perhaps, the reliability of perceptions in general – was the necessary condition for the beginning of philosophy in any organized and purposeful sense. With this shift in conceptual framework, humanity went from telling stories about the nature of things to asking questions and searching methodically for the answers. This period of time was described by Karl Jaspers as the “Axial Age“, a kind of turning point in the spiritual development of humanity. Major movements of this period include Siddhartha Gautama, well known as the Buddha; Mahavira, a similar teacher in the Jain tradition; Zoroaster, a Mesopotamian prophet whose writings provided the central ideas in the Abrahamic religions; and the Hundred Schools of Thought in China, the two most influential of which are the teachings of Confucius and Lao-Tze: Confucianism and Taoism.
This may seem like a good deal of talk about religion in the middle of a discussion about reason. Nonetheless, the spiritual traditions established during this period were revolutionary in that they represented coherent systems of thought. For humanity, wonder was no longer enough; we now demanded that things should make sense.
The next major turning point in human thought is not so much a point as a slow, gradual change of direction. Two religions – Christianity and Islam – arose from the initially marginalized followers of two local prophets, each in its own way evolving over a few centuries into an authoritarian theocratic empire. Contrary to popular perception, science advanced within both Church and Caliphate; both Islamic and Christian scholars and philosophers preserved and built upon the knowledge of the Greco-Roman world, the Muslims also drawing from the science of India and Mesopotamia. Medieval scholarship in the Christian and Islamic worlds was very much involved with religious thought; nonetheless, both religions considered the natural world to be the sacred creation of God (albeit tainted with sin), legitimizing exploration of its secrets. A number of the explorers – most tragically, perhaps, Giordano Bruno – fell afoul of the authorities, due less to the revolutionary nature of their discoveries than to their failure to pay proper lip service to orthodoxy. During this period, there was much overlap and rather blurry distinction between the fields of philosophy, theology, science, and sorcery. The main thing was to clearly state one’s allegiance to the ruling dogma, and this remained the case even into the Renaissance.
In effect, medieval Islamic and Christian thinkers inherited the task of providing ever more elaborate logical structures to support an edifice of antiquated beliefs that had come, over centuries of litany, to be accepted as sacred dogma. Had the religious establishments been able to abandon the idea of absolute truth, many things would have turned out better. Instead, religion claimed exclusive possession of absolute truth, thus abandoning any chance of having truth at all. All the work that philosophers undertook composing arguments to defend the faith served, in the end, to clarify the errors of that very faith in terms of knowledge and logic. The medieval period was the time of greatest theocratic power, but ironically it was also when science and philosophy began to emerge as fields of study in their own right, separate from theology. By demanding service from Reason, Religion made a fatal mistake. Now, in the 21st century, religious institutions are faced with the choice to reinvent themselves to fit an evolving cultural context, or to become irrelevant.
The next stage opened dramatically, with a complete reversal of the dogmatic approach to knowledge. Whereas religion claimed unique possession of absolute truth, Descartes began from a position of absolute doubt. The presupposition of a Creator remained as a necessary premise to epistemological structures for some time, but Descartes’ alarming conclusion “I think, and so I am” only needs a creator in the event that the thinker needs to believe in one. The indisputable fact is no longer the revelation of a God or even the existence of one, but only the existence of a thinker. From this point on, the search for knowledge would no longer deal in speculation about God except as a phenomenon of human thought.
Descartes argued that reason was the foundation of all genuine knowledge. Locke disagreed, proposing that experience – processed by reason – was the only basis for reliable knowledge. He also differentiated between different types of knowledge with varying degrees of reliability: “intuitive knowledge” or the knowledge of things that are evident, such as one’s own existence; “demonstrative knowledge” or the kind of knowledge that can be deduced from known facts; and “sensitive knowledge” or the relatively unreliable report of our physical senses. Berkeley went farther, arguing that nothing exists but ideas. Berkeley supported his main thesis with a syllogistic argument: physical things—such as trees, dogs, and houses—are things perceived by sense; things perceived by sense are ideas; therefore, physical things are ideas.
This new revolution in theory of knowledge was quite as significant as its Copernican predecessor. Unlike Copernicus and Galileo, however, this generation of philosophers would be neither sentenced nor silenced by the religious orthodoxy. The quest for truth would from now on deal with the workings of the human mind as it relates to the rest of the universe – real or not.
By now, the reader will see where this is going: once thinkers were free to challenge religious authority, it was not long before everything was subject to question. Today, this presents religious dogmatists with a last-ditch appeal: see what happens when you question religious doctrine? You believe in nothing, and now you have nothing to count on, haha! As with all arguments in favor of dogma against reason, the arguments are by necessity of the straw-man variety. Truth was never an absolute, any more than anything else. Uncertainty is an acknowledgement that more remains to be known; it is better to know some things imperfectly than to know nothing. Moreover (with apologies to Plato), claiming to know everything is evidence of ignorance.
From Hume to Hegel, that issue is not whether anything is real. The question is how certain we can be about different classes of knowledge. The more we learn about the world, the less certain we know ourselves to be able to be – not because there is nothing to know, but because we are becoming painfully aware of our own limitations. The human being of ancient dogma is the special child of Heaven, the divinely appointed ruler of creation, the veritable image of God. We are learning that we are only a very clever and fortunately gifted species among many fellow creatures living on a tiny blue speck of rock hurtling through incomprehensible depths of frozen void. And yet, that knowledge alone sets us apart from our fellow travelers.
The history of our search is now approaching its end, arriving at our present state. Contemporary philosophy has two main areas of focus: in terms of knowing what it is we can know, the analytical branch deals largely with finding clarity in spite of the muddled nature of language, while the continental branch in concerned with how we process our perceptions of the world. Perhaps the most important of the concepts here include the awareness that language is only a set of symbols, and the idea – or realization – that the line between a phenomenon and its observer is fuzzy indeed. Reality and perception cannot be understood as entirely separate things.
In this brief historical journey, we have gone from questioning nothing to questioning everything; from belief in an eternal divine order to a somewhat troubling uncertainty about existence itself. We have also recognized that humanity has invented vocabulary to describe new ideas as they have emerged over the centuries. This fact is more important and more relevant to our discussion than it may seem. It is an example of another revolutionary idea: that we, as conscious observers, become participants in the drama of creation. We literally invent our own world as we go, which should be a sobering thought as much as it is empowering.
In the next and final article of this series, we will look at some of the stranger branches on this tree of Knowledge.
*The area of philosophy dealing with analyzing the ways we acquire and process knowledge.