Wanting to Know

In my line of work, people disagree with each other all the time. Does God exist? Is happiness the foundation of morality? What counts as knowledge? It’s frustrating to anyone looking in from the outside. We “go around in circles”, never change each other’s minds, and still call it a good day at work.

And the key ingredient of useless disagreement is certainty. The feelings of certainty and obviousness are like intellectual candy; it’s almost impossible to ignore their sweetness. But certainty is also intellectual loneliness. And for every person who feels certain about some position, there’s someone who feels just as certain on the other side. If all you have is your certainty, there’s nowhere to go. At the end of an argument, both sides feel the inevitable crash after a sugar high.

Fortunately, there’s intellectual life beyond certainty. Because in life, as in philosophy, a disagreement can be a wonderful thing. We can get too comfortable with our own thoughts, to the point that we forget the reasons we embraced them in the first place. Reasons, dialogue, argument: these are the tools we use to keep our thoughts alive, sharp, and ready. In time, you learn that being responsive to good reasons and good evidence is actually preferable to feeling sure of your position. And then the horizons stretch out infinitely in all directions.