The Faith at the End of Knowing

Abstract

This essay explores the complexity of faith in our time. The continued belief in religion indicates, at least to some extent, the failure of science to fully demonstrate its absoluteness to a convincing degree for many believers. And, in Kantian terms, the reason for that is because it cannot. This essay will focus on the point at which faith and reason intersect and become neither each other nor themselves but share in an unspoken and unintended complicity of belief in order to negotiate the impossible truth of the matter, which is just that—the true is the impossible.

1. The Impossible Belief

Human Nature is made of faith

A person is what their faith is

The Bhagavad-Gita, Chapter 17 verse 31

We are a species of believers. We are all made of the convictions that drive us towards wherever it is that we are going, that compels us to see and understand things as we see and understand them. From the simplest, most basic belief to the most elaborate system of beliefs that can define a person’s or a society’s entire corpus of thoughts, feelings, memories, expectations, and actions, there is this holding something to be true that seems to be integral to belief itself. It is this “holding” that will be a guiding thread throughout this essay, in as much as we will be seeking to understand what happens when that very holding comes into question, as is the case so much in our time.2 What it means to believe in a truth has now emerged as one of the most pressing questions of the day, if only because we begin to see finally, as so many have predicted, what comes to be when the very idea of the priority and nature of truth melts into the air. What is implied here, or if not implied, at least signaled, is the fate of religion in a time when having faith can be the very thing that destroys that faith. It could be that faith must undergo not a revision of what it believes in but a reassessment and revolution of how it believes.

Though these last statements are extreme, perhaps even ludicrous, it does gesture at one possible, very familiar answer to the question concerning the fate of religion in our time—that it will eventually disappear. This particular narrative of the conquest of science over superstition is as well known as it is refuted by the history of religion over the past 200 years. The idea, and so the narrative, being that the truth of science will so strongly prevail that whatever questions we may have concerning the things that we label metaphysical or spiritual will gradually evaporate into nothing. It seems that no one paid enough attention to what Kant, for one, was doing in his critical philosophy in regards to religion. Without going too far in this direction, it is sufficient to say that the continued belief in religion indicates at least to some extent the failure of science to fully demonstrate its absoluteness to a convincing degree for many believers. And, in Kantian terms, the reason for that is because it cannot. We know that Kant’s intent in writing the Critique of Pure Reason was to “make room for faith”3. We can and have paid lip service to Kant’s critical intent without really thoroughly working this through to its more radical implications, including the implications for science. The most pressing of which is the limitation of empirical investigation when it is a question of trying to establish the truth or falsity of metaphysical beliefs. In other words, if someone worships God or Satan, science really cannot make a final appraisal of the reality of these things, though many would, with what would seem to be good reasons, like to believe that it could.

However, the crisis that has been humming its tune in our heads at least since the end of the 19th century, which Kant arguably foresaw, is not just about the well-worn story of conflict between religion and science (Kant 2008, pp. 148–55). Much too much has already been put forward about the conflict of Faith and Reason, two powers of shaping belief that are rooted in the human heart and mind. This essay will not so much be concerned with that, as with the point at which faith and reason intersect and become neither each other nor themselves, but share in an unspoken and unintended complicity of belief in order to negotiate the impossible truth of the matter, which is just that—the true is the impossible.4

2. The Emergency of Truth

We propose that what we refer to as “belief” is a human disposition to hold on to something that is accepted as true, whether it be a belief about the nature of evil or the nature of physical phenomena, about the safety of the food one is eating, or about the security of the job one is working at. To be clear, this is not about some glib attempt to relativize everything by saying, “it’s all belief, so where is the real knowing?” It is about making clear the fact that whether you call it belief, perspective, view, faith, or knowledge, it always involves this holding to be true.5 Then it becomes a matter of considering this question: insofar as believing itself is at stake here as a holding or an owning of the truth, what can we truly hold on to or truly own? And there it is—to truly hold is taken to be the mark of being in relation to the truth, to be truly true.

There are a few themes resounding in this statement. One of which is the obsession with certainty insofar as the truth is concerned. It is not merely the obsession of the philosophers; it is the obsession of anyone who worries about the truth. The anxiety over the trueness of one’s truth is evidenced everywhere these days; could we say perhaps more so than ever? There is, for example, the tendency of Fundamentalist Christianity for the past 200 years to emphatically deny any room for too much lack of literalness in the interpretation of scripture. The Bible is seen as an immovable object of literalness, standing now in opposition to the objective language of the sciences, its truth unassailable in the belief that it is the word of God, and therefore indubitable and immune to any other reading but the most literal. This can be re-understood as a move to read holy scripture simply as it is, the plainest possible truth, whose factuality might perhaps surpass science in its positivity. On the other side of things, there is the absolutism of the scientifically informed secular atheists, who certainly have facts on their side but who think and believe that they will always have the last word on any metaphysical issue because of the degree of certainty afforded by the findings and evidence of science. What is to be taken away from here is again the role of belief and its power to give the believer the charm and glamour of possessing what is true beyond all doubt. This is not to say the science is somehow relativized to a level of a mere parity with belief in scripture, but that the believer in science will often make the same move as the believer in the literal truth of scripture. That move is to see oneself owning it as the only way to own it or as the only version of “the truth” that can be truly owned.

What then is the true ownership of the truth? Indeed, what is at stake here, reflecting upon one of the most intractable of dispositions possessing human nature, is the nature of ownership, especially the ownership of the truth. This is where the crisis of the time is taking us, towards a reckoning with not just the nature of truth, but just how much our need, the necessity, to have the truth may in fact eclipse the truth “itself”. If there is anything that has been conveyed to us by the past 100 years, it is the emerging possibility of the disappearance of truth into a widening spiral of violent belief in the incontestable truth of “one’s own”.

It is not only a crisis of Faith that we are undergoing; it is a crisis of Reason. Both have their rootedness in belief, where “the reasonable” is the position that assumes the common coherence of beliefs that everyone “should” accept, as we know, not because there is coercion, but because it is assumed that there are some elements in a belief that all can agree on as true. Reason produces evidence for holding to its conclusions for all to see and for all to reach concordance regarding those conclusions. The only “common ground” that might remain among us when we reason together is the concordance of beliefs, the harmony of which is founded in some agreement of ends. When those ends are woven together in a necessity of understanding in order to increase security, power, possession, prestige, and privilege, then there is the stronger argument for the truth of that harmony, provided that there is success in the attainment of those ends. Reason is validated for most of us by the accomplishments of its attainments. But the attainment of those ends is still only the attainment of “things seen”. Science does have, without doubt, the advantage of the actual demonstration of its findings, yet those findings can only be definitive for the world defined by it, a defining that most find not only acceptable but also definitive—that being the so-called physical or material world as paradigmatic of the real. However, this is not sufficient for many.

Faith addresses, as we all know, the question of our metaphysical destinies. To put this another way, Faith is belief in a transcendent truth or reality that in some way or another cannot be verified, and may never be verifiable, yet carries with it a necessity that cannot be denied. The necessity spoken of here is the necessity of life and living itself. To sharpen the point: One variety of the manifestation of belief we find at the heart of faith is the belief that there is some Being that will justify and illuminate the pain and darkness that we find in our realm of things experienced, that death is somehow made at least approachable, if not familiar, that evil is real but surmountable, and that somehow, it is just going to be alright. There will be preservation, safety, and recompense of a transcendent nature. Otherwise, life might just be unlivable. It is this kind of Faith, which appears more recently to confuse the affirmation of life with a kind of metaphysical victory for oneself, that seems to have been growing ceaselessly in the Abrahamic faiths, much to both their dismay and exaltation. It is here that we find the element of Faith most susceptible to both a supreme positivism of belief as well as an abject descent into the violence of affirmation—the near complete surrender of faith to standards of certainty. It is here that one can see the need for a revaluation of all values, as it were, a need to reappraise what the issue, the matter, of Faith is about. To deny that Faith is of supreme importance to many because it has turned into idolatry is to miss the point, though that may not be so far from the truth.

What then is the matter with faith? In this age of crisis, we have to ask, given what has been said, whether or not a belief in anything is at all possible anymore, whether one can truly hold on to the truth. Yes, one can hold on to all kinds of beliefs; one can hold on to the belief that allows itself to be held, owned, or possessed. If it is a matter of the truth, the real, however, then what if the truth is the very thing that cannot be possessed? What if the truth is something that cannot be believed?

Again, to be clear, this is not a position as such, or at least not in the usual sense. It is not to be taken as a statement of simplistic nihilism, that there is nothing to believe in. To state that the truth cannot be believed is also not to be heard as a mere declaration of surprise and upset, as if the truth were an event that caught us all by surprise, like a bolt of lightning out of the blue sky. It is to say, however, that the truth may be something that can be understood as it is without understanding what it is, precisely because the truth is not a “what”, not a self-identical essence. This is not at all an unfamiliar theme by now. In many ways, what has been called the “post-modern” has been defined in just these terms of a critique of the truth as that which is essential and privileged as such. The denial of essentialism has by now become a familiar theme and motif in philosophy and culture, in philosophy on the level of a theoretical game and as a fodder for academic paper milling, and in culture as an ideological weapon to undo and condemn the historically essentialist-based institutions. The fact that it has become familiar enough to be played with and used as a weapon against those who would hold on to the “old ways” of definition betrays a misunderstanding of what is at stake in the undoing of essentialism, a misunderstanding of “depth”. And how could this misunderstanding not happen in conditions such as we all experience, where the increasing technological, social, and political success with the accumulation of power and control is directly proportional to the deployment of identity in the rush to secure access to this accumulation?6 To repeat this in a different fashion, the reliance upon the calculating, prudent self (that we must model ourselves after) to secure the expected future of the projected future self depends upon the assumption of the essentiality of the self, both as a means and as an endpoint. Who does not want to be happy? This is a ubiquitous tendency at this current moment of history, and has been so for at least the last 500 years in Western societies. We all have become subject to it in one way or another. However, to be caught up in this current is to increase the chances of missing the very heart of understanding this emergency of the truth – the emergence of the truth as it is.

3. The Need to Know

What is addressed here is the failure of faith, and by implication religion, in the face of this emerging truth about truth. If there is “nothing to believe in anymore”, then what happens? Without going so far as to outline the major phenomena, movements, reactions, etc. (and not merely the theoretical ones), that have taken place since what has otherwise been called the “Death of God”, we can point out one sequela of this emergency of truth. Instead of any kind of inevitable “de-essentializing” proclaimed by the post-modernists that was to announce itself and take place at the end of metaphysics, we the species, for the most part, are putting up quite a front of resistance by becoming all the more insistent on the importance of identities, a tendency as relentless as it is more and more pervasive. It is an apotheosis of the grasping god everywhere (Derrida 1978, pp. 146–52). It can be seen in the ever-present, ever-operative falling of so much discourse and action into the trappings of binary engagement, where identity is ever more defined and destroyed by its struggle with itself as the other; a dialectical process that defeats its own definition to the point where no aufhebung can transpire. It can be seen in the taking-of-sides engaged-in everyday and everywhere in innumerable ways, from the most insignificant battles of opinion concerning everything and anything online to the bloodiest and horrifying conflicts in the name of whatever truth has its hold on us because we hold to it. It can be seen in the inability to engage what is other and the failure of hospitality in the face of the other (Derrida 2000, pp. 75–83). It is operative in the most extreme fundamentalism, as well as in the most innocuous search for the definition of a word.7 Perhaps most significantly, it can be seen in the desire, the need, to “go back” to a time where identity was apparently clear and unquestioned, before boundaries were muddy and polluted. It is the insistence on the purity of blood and soil, holiness and desire anchored in a narrative of the past that will be true again in a future, exalting in a recovered glorious identity of purpose and people.8

There is absolutely nothing new about any of this. We could be describing the state of things 20, 40, 60, or maybe even 100 years ago. One thing that is significantly different in our own time, however, as everybody knows, are the advances in technology that have allowed the unprecedented flow, access, and consumption of information, ideas, inspirations, validations, confirmations, and condemnations to more and more people through the possession of devices that seem to feed us the truth “as what it is”. This is the kind of truth that can be identified as something to own, something to grasp, to use, enjoy, and exploit. It is the truth of “post-essentialist essentialism”9, the truth that supports any identity that needs an identity to ground it. To refer to the truth as it is, however, is not to refer to the momentary instantaneous reality delivered to us through the media, in whatever form that it may assume, but to the simultaneous affirmation and disappearance of the “as”, along with corresponding impossible belief in it.10 The truth as “what it is” refers to what many of us daily hunger for, that something we can see and hear will lead us to where we think we want to go, so long as our identity can be helped along in its quest for knowing what we think we need to know.11 This need to know is, as we know, something fickle, fragile, and desperate, but it keeps us searching, surfing, scrolling, browsing, shopping, living, loving, and hating. It has constructed the shrine of our devotions, the site and instigation of our prayers in the form of the screen. It is through the screen that we see the real efficacy of the grip that our demand for the truth has created for us.

It is not the mere substitution of experience by the virtual that is being called up here. The screen is not simply the place where representation has finally managed to perfect the presentation of life when life itself would not do. The screen is one inevitable result of the labor of centuries to give shape to the presentation of life as it is needed. What is really at stake is the nature of the little word “as” insofar as it is in service to our need to know, the interpretative “as” in service to our need to constantly manage our sense of identity, our sense of trust, and our need to believe and have faith—and it does seem that many have enough faith in the process of the screened “coming-to-know” to keep the whole thing rolling on and on. It is usual in the observation of this phenomenon to point out that information has taken the place of real knowing, and that the increase in information has exceeded the power of any real protocol of verification to parse and manage the veridical content of this ongoing stream of information. What has not been exceeded, however, is the human capacity to interpret and charge the meaning of this information as the consumer, the reader, the seeker, or the arbiter sees fit to interpret it. The point here is not so much a critique of the “as” (that would be the subject of a larger work), but only to point out that the “as” permits a plasticity of belief, allowing for the shaping of versions of the “world” that suits the industry of the seeking self.12

This is all a way to seek refuge from the emergency of the truth. We seek this refuge because there is no certainty in the emergency, except if there is certainty in the pure eventuality of the truth as it is. This eventuality is not something readable or writable as such. For instance, to say that this truth cannot be understood because it is experience “itself” is already to state what in fact cannot be said, because it says nothing but what is beyond obvious—the emergency of the truth (as it is) is the emergency of experience. And, yes, the gesture towards danger in the ambiguity of these words is deliberate. For it could be said that we are now fully in the throes of the death of experience, a death that is happening quietly and relentlessly as we enter into a world of identities tailored by the need to believe in the rightness, goodness, and wellness of one’s own. The need to know and the always-already busy desire to get and hold whatever our knowing belief dictates for our well-being, however that may be, predominate more and more in the webs of our believing. All of this is increasingly rooted in the ever-expanding empire of the screen and in the practices of the screen. The emergency of the truth does not, however, favor the best. Its resolution is not something that is bestowed upon those who would believe that it can be brought about through some preparation, prayer, or ritual. Or techne. The emergency is both the quiet end of these things as well as an invitation to experience the advent of the Impossible.

But, again, none of this is new. Why should it be?

4. No Return to Being, No Coming Resolutions—Gratitude, Surrender, Patience

Let us return to the issue driving all of this; call it the need for meaning, the desire for transcendence, the requirement for justification. We have faiths and/or faith in something that will provide this. We pray, we worship, we participate in rituals, and we hope that it is all going some-where that is somehow better, that what is referred to as Sacred has not abandoned us and instead still guides us and supports us. The abandonment of us by the sacred has come to haunt us more and more in the steady advance of the information age. It is here, however, in the scene of this abandonment, that perhaps Faith has fallen away from its most important exercise in engagement and connection with the sacred. Somehow, according to many of faith, there has always been this falling away of faith from its object, which must be somehow corrected, over and over again throughout history, as a sense of crisis repeatedly asserts itself over and over with ever more urgency. This urgency seems to be driven by the fear that the sacred is abandoning or already has abandoned us. Then the question here perhaps could be, “Will the sacred return to us?” But the background of this question repeats and presents a common supposition, borne on the back of millennia of stories and narratives found in religious scripture and teaching, that history is a continual degradation of the human connection with the sacred, resulting in a final ruin that proves to be a clearing and preparation for the advent of the sacred (Derrida 1995, pp. 81–85).

Perhaps that could be true. Perhaps we are now at the final ruin. Perhaps everything is now rushing to an end of one kind or another. So many seem to think so, from the multi-billionaires constructing elaborate safe havens to the millions of individuals praying for the soteriological end of it all, with some even praying for their own disappearance from this world, but then what comes? There is no doubt that there is at the present time in history a kind of withdrawal, of the kind that Heidegger speaks of, wherein the sense and reality of the Holy become more and more difficult to ascertain13. It is easy to point the finger at the rise of secularism as the “cause” of this, but secularism itself is just the adjunct phenomenon of the continued withdrawal of the sacred, a withdrawal that is itself also co-incidental with the ever-operative “need to know”. This coincidence of the need to know and the withdrawal of the holy deserves greater consideration in what follows.

One answer to that question, “What comes?”, which would make many unhappy, is an answer borne out by the repeated ruin of apocalyptic expectations over and over again through the centuries, that nothing will happen, just as nothing happened in all of the previous times that some return of the holy was expected. Again, returning to a theme already presented, we as a species of believers have come to expect the truth to reveal itself as “what it is.” Time and again, the expectations of religions, especially, but not exclusively, of the West, have been disappointed. Here, we are attempting to sketch out why this has been the case. The disappointment of faith throughout history could be seen as a long process of coming to terms with the nature of belief, or rather, of coming to terms not so much with what we believe, but with the ends of our believing, and with that the very idea that our belief in the Sacred could have an instrumentality to it; that the metaphysical could be useful to us, that it could serve our purpose (Habermas 1972, pp. 311–15). Our purpose would of course be to attain some measure of metaphysical certitude and safety. Can we say then that the metaphysical and the grasping god mentioned earlier have become one and the same? Furthermore, does it then all come down to the glorious self—rescued once and for all from error by the grasp of a god saving us from the end of it, saving us from what Buddhism refers to as Anatman or No-self?

Where we stand now is this place that threatens nothing as “nothing”, meaning there is apparently nothing sacred or holy, the soul to be saved becomes more and more the self to be discovered, created, and/or sustained in the need to know. Ultimately, this becomes the means of salvation as well; we have all heard some version of “The Good News”. The nothing that comes certainly will not be understood as merely nothing by all believers, especially not by those of faith who are invested in the narrative of apocalypse. There are some, however, who may not see it either as apocalypse or as mere nothing, but another possibility of faith we will return to reflect on. However, the crisis of faith, at the height of our abilities to fulfill the need to know, is the place where interpretation and belief are brought to an end by the approach of this “nothing”, not because there is a final resolution, but because it is the emergency of the truth as it is (Heidegger 2014, pp. 18–24). This is not at all an assertion that there is a literal end to interpretation and belief; on the contrary, there is, as can be seen, all the more reaching and scrambling to claim some valid view or other, to claim to have some access to the True Belief. This is not an end to the telling of stories, the spinning of narratives, the production of arguments, the shaping of theories, or the creation of techniques—these things will continue indefinitely (Levinas 1969, pp. 304–7). It is an end to the belief in a sacred that can in any way be approached as something to be believed in with purpose and, with that, an end to the view, the assumption, that the sacred can be appropriated, owned, held, and ultimately used to save ourselves. Nothing can be saved in this way. That is what the impossible means. It is impossible for us to be saved if that is what we think we need.

We are left with our own impossibility, and that is the emergency of the truth as it is. Our own impossibility is our confrontation with our own inability to know and act in respect of the truth as it is; our final discovery that our mastery is at an end (Levinas 1969, p. 269) The end of mastery elicited here is the powerlessness of our knowing, our understanding, and our believing in the face of this end, an end that will not appear to be an end at all to most, for how can “nothing happening” be the end of anything? It is not a barrier, an obstacle, or an impediment—nothing prevents nothing. It does not, however, signify the end of believing, but believing in the truth woven into the need to know. It is an end that is happening unnoticed, at least not as something directly observed, in the same way a dreamer may dream long past the appointed time of waking. Does this mean that we should turn our backs on the emergency of the truth, the final withdrawal of the sacred, since it will give us “nothing?” What would be the appropriate stance on this, given everything that is said, namely that the emergency of truth is the ruin of whatever is appropriate, because there is nothing to appropriate and nothing appropriate to the truth as it is.

In many ways, what gradually becomes clear that what is being described here is an (re)opening on another kind of faith, that being the faith of the believer with gratitude and patience when faced with the impossible. To elaborate this further, it is necessary to recall the nature of the emergency of truth as the emergency of experience. In this emergency, there is an opening onto the possibility of simply being with experience at the end of mastery, in contrast to increasing the tendency of substituting experience with the need to know experience. In other words, it is possible to recognize the impossible, the truth as it is, in the preferment of experience over information. It would be quite reasonable to ask at this point: Experience of what? That is, however, to miss an important point. It is not a matter of what is experienced, but it is a matter of simply “being with” experience, no matter what is experienced, for there is no experience “itself” (Levinas 1998, pp. 144–45; 162–65). There is simply experience with no reason, the impossible fact of given life in the moment, no matter how we might interpret, assess, and steer it, it happens, and accordingly, we the believers choose one kind of response or another to this advent of the impossible truth. What follows is by no means an exhaustive account of possible responses to the emergency of truth.14 It is only meant to be a series of suggestions for the engagement of faith with the impossible truth as it is. Perhaps it is not accurate to speak of faith being “engaged” with the truth as it is; however, it is faith here about which we speak, not knowing or knowledge, but a believing without grasping, a faith without investment.

To have faith, with respect to the sacred as the impossible truth, would mean not a “believing in” but a “believing towards” the Holy. Towards implies a direction, a following after the Holy. The emergency of the truth is, however, not something to be captured, stalked, or assessed by means of anything like a method. To follow after it is to realize that its “distance”, its withdrawal from us, is, in the same gesture, it giving us another moment to experience its impossibility (Derrida 1993, pp. 43–81).

There is therefore gratitude, to be thankful with no reserve for the gift of experiencing, something that many who escape death, the possibility of nothing given, can understand. Gratitude is the moment of appreciation, not for a single thing or phenomenon, but for the living that is at the edge or in the fold with dying, the insistent possibility of the impossible, the experience of a possible nothing that will come to nothing. This gratitude opens the way for realizing the limit of mastery, for it is gratitude not for the being that can be used but for the experience of going on, which is always already well out of hand.

As the end of mastery operative in the need to know becomes clear, there will have to be a reckoning with the choice of surrender. There is a possible recognition that no thinking, conceptualizing, theorizing, speaking, or writing can go around the end of mastery, that at a certain point it will just have to be given up. This is not saying that any and all of the abovementioned activities are simply fruitless, but it is to say that if they address the impossible “truly”, it is only as an acknowledgement of the impossible (Derrida 1993, pp. 42–45). The recognition of the end of mastery could imply, more importantly, a change in the attitude of knowing in the acknowledgement of the end; that being a knowing no longer wedded to certainty, but a knowing in concert with not knowing.15 There is the response of surrender, to understand the end of mastery and accept the limitation of the need to know. It is the moment of humility, that is, a moment of understanding that there is nothing to be done except wait on the impossible as the mark of the sacred.

Patience, to choose to wait for the truth as it is with no expectation except for the expectation of its emergency, would be another response to the impossible end to mastery. What then would be this waiting? It is the impossible wait for the advent of the truth as it is. Impossible here signifies there is waiting as waiting in gratitude and surrender. It is the moment of acknowledging the Sacred not in any return, but in an advent of the truth as it is, which knows no return. It is patience in the face of the acknowledgement of the truth as it is, a waiting the end of which is to simply wait as that truth.16

In this response to the emergency of truth, experience, and the sacred, the need to know and its attendant contemporary dispensary of truth, the screen, become choices of preferment rather than instruments of necessity. The Holy is apart from the human need to know, in spite of or perhaps because of the nature of the Holy. It does not prevail over the need to know. It does reveal itself as the truth that it is, which is not that of domination. It does not prevail. The religion of the future, if it is not to become an idolatry of power seeking only to constantly rebuild itself, should acknowledge the failure of power in the emergency of the Holy. The impossible is happening, and it is time to wake from the sleep conjured by dreaming masters of success.