The Beauty of Not Knowing

On the need for a new humanist tradition based in mystery

Photo by Stephan Widua

“As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.” — Einstein

“I don’t know. And this I don’t know you uttered in the infinite interior of the spirit, this I don’t know is the same thing as I love, I let go.” — Alan Watts

note: A version of this essay was originally published months ago under the title, The Devil is the Details. It was unpublished for reasons I disclosed in my post, On Mystery. It’s mysterious how these things work. Considering this is one of the most important topics that I explore, and because I recently edited it for my upcoming Madbird Reader Collection, which will be a physical book, I thought I’d reshare it. Please read it even if you read the original post. I’ve made some significant changes. Thanks!

“I think I’m going insane,” a coworker told me last week, “I don’t know what to believe anymore.” He explained that he had recently discovered philosophy, had been reading overviews of the work of Descartes, Kant, and Nietzsche, and trying to reconcile all of this with his sincere Christian faith, asking God as well as these dead men to help him understand his place in this world.

“Yeah, you’re going insane,” I said. “You should be careful with Nietzsche; he’ll have you abandoning civilization.”

The longer he talked, the more perplexed and unhinged he became. He rubbed his flushed forehead; his watery eyes searched the room. This was a man in a meaning crisis. Probably, I thought, he had been watching too much Youtube. He’s been known to share conspiracy theories around the lunch table. Then, sure enough, he asked if I was on TikTok and said nothing when I said no.

The TikTok question stuck with me. Hours later, I wondered if by “reading overviews” he meant that he watched videos on one of those accounts that shares blips of quotes out of context. I imagined him open-eyed, first discovering the account, its reels fresh, maybe funny, maybe a bit alarming. After a while, the voices started piling up, contradictions mounted. One day he heard “God is dead” and didn’t care for that; the next day, “as for the correct way, it doesn’t exist.” Excuse me? Then another video, then another. He read “the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God,” and it had seemed like the world was ending.

I felt bad for my coworker and imagined other people out there in precarious mental states who might be feeling confused or threatened by the information they’re consuming. Social media is awfully effective at delivering persuasive, out of context content, often packaged as sage advice, and it does so at lightspeed. If one is drinking from the firehose of the internet, it is easy to drown, in other words. We all know that feeling, I think.

But mainly, this whole interaction made me consider certainty, or more specifically the dangerous aspects of a personal outlook determined that it knows the absolute truth of reality. This led me to the idea that perhaps the most liberating aspect of social media is that it confronts us with points of view different than our own. (Writing this, acknowledging a plus side of social media, feels nice.)

I should’ve explained to my coworker, and maybe I will later, that the great thing about philosophy is that it doesn’t take reality for granted — this could all be an illusion, it says. And it doesn’t pretend to have all the answers. Philosophy asks: How do you know this situation is what you think it is? Who is even asking the question? Do you think that at the time of your death you will still see this life as ultimately real, or will it be like a dream you are waking up from? Philosophy never assumes.

In Kant’s most well-known work, Critique of Pure Reason, he distinguishes between the world of nature, which we can experience and learn from, and the nominal world, the realm existing only in name and ideal. Kant says that we can name the world but that naming is not the same thing as knowledge; we can never really know nature in and of itself. We can study trees for years but never know the true essence of a tree. And so we can’t really be sure about what is objectively real. Our understanding is a matter of faith, intuition, and theory. Even if we all agree on the color of a flower, it doesn’t mean that’s the flower’s color. Similarly, according to Kant, we can never really know our own natures. Even the thing we believe we are most well acquainted with, the self, contains deep, tantalizing mysteries. We can never really know who we are completely. Our motivations remain obscure.

I am no Kant; I dare not claim that we Kant know nature. (I Kant even with myself sometimes). But seriously, I had dinner with nature like yesterday.

Obviously, there are practical reasons to search for things that are knowable — things we can all agree on, the very basis of science — and obviously there are knowable things, right? Right?! Practical certainties, like our collective agreeance on the time of day, of course exist, but practical certainties aren’t what this little reflection is about. We all agree that there must be road laws even if the roads are imaginary. Knowing the world is illusory doesn’t change the fact that you must live in it. Here, we are concerned not with pragmatic knowing but with the desire of the ego to know what is inherently not knowable — namely, the realm of the spirit.

Let’s take the very old, beaten horse, the pathetic example of religion. Okay, take it easy, pathetic as in pathos, drenched in emotion, appealing to vulnerabilities. Have you ever met anyone as certain of anything as religious people are certain of their religion? I don’t mean to offend anyone reading; I sometimes envy this level of faith. The problem is, though, that it’s not really faith that people are certain of. Faith, as Kant would remind us, does not mean knowledge. Faith is the act of believing in something without having an empirical knowledge of its truth. Faith doesn’t require knowledge.

Unfortunately, this most beautiful idea is lost among many religious believers (at least the ones I know). They teach and discuss their religious story, whatever version it may be, as if it is the absolute unquestionable truth. Take the idea of heaven, for example. Has there ever been a more destructive certainty than the idea that we’re only passing through to get to a better place? This certainty is responsible for unimaginable death and destruction. I am thinking not only of human deaths but of biospheric death. It is what straps bombs to children and celebrates their martyrdom, and it is what carpet bombs children in apartments and hospitals. Religious certainty believes that I am chosen and you are cursed, and the shedding of your blood matters less than the shedding of mine. It is utter madness.

Meanwhile, no one knows a damn thing. We are creatures born of nature, popped up here, building realms of ideals, languages, and identities, taking them way too far, taking ourselves way too seriously, killing one another and the planet. Meanwhile, the great common ground between us is that we are all stuck here in a world we know very little about. We don’t know where we came from, or why, or if why is even a reasonable question. We have theories about space and nature; they are essentially guesses. And the more we investigate (thank you, science), the more the camera is turned back on us. What are we? I don’t know, but isn’t it cool? What kind of world would it be if we could admit that? That I don’t know. That courageous gorgeous utterance.

Again, this isn’t me claiming that the seeking of certainty isn’t worthwhile, only that seeking and acknowledging what is mysterious about life is equally as worthwhile, especially as it pertains to our relationship with the divine. There are many examples of this kind of respect for the unknown in Eastern traditions. The Tao is the unnamable force that animates the world; it is the way of nature, the obstinate flow of life, and no one can really know it — it moves through us. Similarly, it is said in the ancient Vedas of Hinduism that those who claim to know Brahmin do not know, and those who know they do not know, actually know. Brahmin is a Sanskrit word that means “the creative principle which lies realized in the world.” Then there is Zen, which takes no detail too seriously. Zen masters are more likely to employ a koan or riddle, or to hit you with a stick, than to point toward scripture. Sometimes they smoke cigarettes and have laughing fits when their piety is questioned. In other words, they don’t take the details seriously because they understand that doing so would be a mistake, would be truly absurd. Jesus taught in parables and poets speak between the lines for this same reason.

If faith and knowledge are not the same, is it possible to have faith in a higher power and to admit to the limits of our understanding? I don’t see why not. In fact, that might be the basis for a more genuine approach to religion. If people could only manage to not forgot that premise, that faith and knowledge aren’t the same. I can still have my ideas of what’s going on, my feelings, and also admit that I don’t actually know. Do you think God cares?

I prefer, these days, to greet nature with that loving I don’t know in mind. I say these days because I used to be a pretty good naturalist, good at identifying plants around where I live. I still am to some degree but the writing life has taken its toll on study time in the old nature books. For a while, for me, this was a point of insecurity. I wondered if I would ever be exposed as a charlatan around some of my nature-loving friends. I even planned on making it a priority to hit the nature books again if I could just meet my writing goals. Ha!

The other day, while grounding in the front yard after a rain, I examined the tree fork of an old red maple, which teamed with lichens and mosses. Some of the crustose lichens I recognized, but I was more intrigued by the vibrant mosses, of which there were three distinct kinds, two of them carpet-like and one standing like haircap, though it wasn’t familiar to me. As mosses go, I know very little about them, and normally, this sight might’ve sparked a desire to break out a field guide — they were stunning, sopping, fully alive. But that desire never came, and I took this as a good sign. I thought about not knowing what these mosses were and acknowledged that I was okay with that, grateful even. There was no pressure to name them so I could fully appreciate being there with them. I loved them and I loved the mystery of them, and I felt as if these mosses, just like me, where an expression of that thing we call God, which is all of nature. I had a kind of worship there, and this great I don’t know energized me.

I still love to identify things in nature — I just got a new mushroom book, for heaven’s sake. And I always will be an independent scientist, learning what I can from the land. I think there is room for both science and spirit, and for now, when I go into nature to convene with the divine, I will practice a little unlearning. I will widen my view to get a look at the totality of things or focus it to witness the universe inside the bed of a tree fork. I will praise God without having to name what God is.

To sum this up, and to make a point I haven’t yet explicitly made, I think we should start a new mystery school where we can get together and celebrate not having all the answers. Maybe it will be a new type of cult that is too confused about its own identity to do anything destructive. Just imagine a scene where you are reminded daily that you don’t know shit. It wouldn’t be like the mystery schools of old — except that perhaps we would have wild psychedelic-infused ceremonies. The point would be to revere what we do not know — and to revere the not knowing in itself. In such a spirit, I’ll leave you with a quote from one of the greatest poetic geniuses to have ever graced the earth, Mary Oliver.  

“So many of us live most of our lives seeking the answerable and somehow demeaning or bypassing those things that can’t be answered, and, therefore, denuding one’s life of the acceptance of mystery, and the pleasure of mystery, and the willingness to live with mystery.”