The Limits of Knowing

Can you know the nature of anything on this plane of existence?

The ultimate sin of Western Civilization is the obsession with being and doing. The nature of something — being — is not within our grasp, because none of us is God. The hubris of such presumption, that we could know the nature of anything, is monumental. The obsession with results — doing — as if we could hope to control all the factors is also a monumental presumption. The looming collapse of the West is entirely just.

You and I are up against the double whammy of broken awareness plus the broken existence. There are two layers of falsehood. Certainly we can reach for an understanding, but the drive to understand is not the accomplishment. So long as we remain skeptical and cynical about ourselves, about our abilities, we are freer and wiser than most of humanity.

The more noble path is to realize you cannot hope to know anything more than what is required of you within the context of the moment. That is, you could conceivably catch glimpses of imperatives which amount to a functional awareness. You can understand enough to act. You can realize enough about things to choose wisely only in the sense of fulfilling your own commitments.

If you have no real commitments, then, you are utterly useless, an enemy of peace and sanity.

You may recall a past hit song about a fellow who is torn between his beloved wife and his music. He promised her the world if she would back him during his early career, because he would change the world with his awesome talent. It didn’t happen. Instead, he was just a man driven to music, and in the night when he stumbled into the kitchen for a drink of water, the music calls to him, and he can’t go back to bed. And he knows she weeps in the bed, waiting for him to come back to her. The music remains his first love, and she knows it.

This portrays well the reality of our broken existence. Frankly, this singer has it about as good as it gets in this awful world. He at least has the means to pursue his imperatives. Consider how sad the life of one driven only by the consumption of that music. They don’t even count as human, on that level; they are potential humans. The highest state of existence on this plane is to find something which drives you to do. It’s not the doing, but the driving. Consumption, the passive mode of receiving, is not enough. You have to be driven to act in order to become an active part of seeking to make the world more sane.

Nobody should suggest there is no time and place for passive absorption. The deadly flaw is acting when you should pass, and passing when you should act. There is a moral imperative woven into the ways of this world, and the single most important thought we have on such things is our individual imperative to seek out that moral imperative. We can state in general terms certain principles, but even those are mere estimates of where you should aim when you are driven through any moment. It’s on you, and you will surely fail, in ways both small and grand, but failure itself morphs with the context and viewpoint.

You cannot know the nature of things, only some functional estimation of that nature. You are permitted that much only so you may estimate your course of action based on your commitments, your imperatives. If your imperatives are no larger than your self, you are wrong regardless of any other factors.