When I went away to college, I was determined to spend my four years of voluntary study exposing my deepest convictions to unrelenting scrutiny. I chose to do this because I felt that, in High School, no one had wished to challenge my thoughts and opinions. Instead, my teachers and classmates just seemed pleased to learn that I
had thoughts and opinions and were content to leave it at that. But
I wasn’t satisfied. It wasn’t enough for me to know what I thought: I wished to find out if what I thought could withstand intense critique. It was my conviction then—and it remains my conviction to this day—that “the truth” (whatever that might be) did not need my protection: if it couldn’t defend itself, it wasn’t worthy of my loyalty.
My professors at the University were only too happy to oblige my desire for intellectual self-examination (or what amounted, at times, to a kind of emotional self-immolation). By the end of my sophomore year, I had immersed myself in an acid bath of honest, skeptical inquiry and felt pretty much picked clean: there was very little credulous flesh left on the body of my beliefs. So many of the assumptions and pet theories that I had acquired since childhood had been smoked out of their holes and left to languish in the bright sun of logic and an uncompromising demand for evidence. I found that, in their wake, I was left with very little about which I could say: "This much I know," or "Of this I am certain." I faced adulthood stripped down intellectually to bone and gristle. But that was the education for which I had asked; I had no regrets then and I have none now (over three decades later).
In addition to acquiring a diamond-hard critical acumen, this often exhilarating (sometimes painful) educational itinerary equipped me with at least one crucial insight: there is a difference between faith—the confidence one must have in order to cope with the troubles that darken our lives on this planet—and credulity (or what the 20th century theologian Paul Tillich referred to as "belief in the unbelievable"). Moreover, I discovered that once all the excess fat of childhood fantasy has burned away, we are ready to face up, with independent intelligence, to the problems of life.
As Wittgenstein reminds us, when it comes to negotiating life’s difficulties: "The facts all belong only to the task and not to its performance." I take this to mean that the "what" of our lives (the "facts") and the "how" (the "performance" of "the task") are two different things. In the performance of the tasks of daily living, we find ourselves, he added, face to face with what he termed "the inexpressible. This
shows itself" he said; "it is the mystical." For Wittgenstein, the "mystical" is not something we have to conjure up from our daily traffic with the ordinary "facts" of our lives; it is not an Eliadean hierophany that crashes the party of humdrum existence. No, the mystical stubbornly confronts us with confounding imponderables while crossing the street, answering the phone, baking bread, writing a sentence.
And what do we make of these strange "glitches" in the otherwise seamless fabric of a well-ordered consciousness? What
can we make of them? Try as we might, they consistently elude comprehension and, thank god, commodification.
So Wittgenstein admonished us enigmatically (in his inimitable way) and, I would suggest, sagely: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
