I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I
lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
- Sylvia Plath, Mad Girl's Love Song
Two things, or maybe three. How fragile our minds - how fragile our world, in which we experience only through our minds. How limited. How incapable of reaching that great height, from which we can know anything to be true - except through faith of some sort. A leap. A knowing beyond knowing.
And can even the truest skeptic live without belief in the possibility that there are things worth knowing that have yet to be known?
In contrast to the reputable 'objective' or 'scientific', we have the disreputable 'subjective', 'intuitive' or worst of all, 'mystical' It is interesting, for example that one frequently encounters 'merely' before subjective, whereas it is almost inconceivable to speak of anyone being 'merely' objective.
The first definition of subjectivity I came across online was this:
existing in the mind; belonging to the thinking subject rather than to the object of thought.
But what, then, isn't subjective? If it is only through our mind that we perceive anything at all. If our very existence is a purely subjective one, if subjectivity is not a crutch but the crux of all experience - how can we lay claim to any form, shape or type of objectivity?
Again, Laing writes:
We all know from our personal experience that we can be ourselves only in and through our world and there is a sense in which 'our' world will die with us although 'the' world will go on without us.
And I cannot help but think: Perhaps one day we will really come to believe we know all the answers, all the explanations, all for the reasons for everything, and I will be able to explain everything away - to science, to reason, to the laws that govern nature - but then, who and what will be left in all the universe, to explain me?
***
Because now, what does it mean to know anything? It seems that to lay claim to knowledge one has to either admit ignorance, or be found guilty of it.
But what about things that can be assessed objectively? Studied, measured, calculated, deduced. In the grand court of Reason, is everything false until proven true?
If you were to make the claim that objective knowledge - quantifiable knowledge - is the only knowledge worth knowing, what evidence would you call up to the stand? Even if one could acquire the dimensions of the universe or a formula to predict every possible trajectory of the human mind an objective case would not be made.
Maybe we all have a little more faith than we realise.