Ontological Humility: Lord Voldemort and the Philosophers

Chapter One: Epistemological Humility and Its Other

Chapter One Epistemological Humility and Its Other Descartes The happiness [the Utilitarians] meant was not a life of rapture, but moments of such, in an existence made up of few and transitory pains, many and various pleasures . . . and having as the foundation of the whole not to expect more from life that it is capable of bestowing. —John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism I “Epistemology” is the study of different theories of knowledge, of how we know things and how we can know when we know them. The philosophy of science, for instance, is a kind of epistemology that studies knowledge claims in the sciences. Epistemological humility would then be humility about the nature, extent, and reliability of human knowledge . The intrinsic link between that kind of humility and ontological humility should be clear: to think we can have absolute knowledge, even absolute knowledge that no knowledge is possible, is to deny human limitation, at least as regards our knowledge of the world. Conversely , epistemological humility, taken seriously enough, can become the grounds for ontological humility where it might not otherwise have developed, especially in philosophers who were not necessarily humble as human beings. One of the main lessons Harry Potter learns in the final book of the saga, as we have seen, is that he must surrender his “need to be sure, to know everything.”1 Much of “modern” philosophy (philosophy roughly between 1600 and 1800) focuses mainly, although certainly not exclusively, on the need “to know everything,” at least in part in response to the major 23 24 Ontological Humility scientific advances that were made during that time. The philosophers we will look at in this chapter represent three different major schools of thought about the nature and sources of human knowledge. This look backward to these three epistemological approaches will provide the historical context for the debates about knowledge, ontology, and humility in the twentieth century. At the same time, it will also offer some interesting examples of how different philosophical views can lead to a similar degree of humility and how similar philosophical views can lead to different attitudes toward what is implied in those philosophies about that which transcends human existence. The epistemological focus of modern philosophy has its deepest roots in the work of René Descartes. He begins his “Discourse on Method” (1637) with what might appear to be appropriate epistemological humility : “. . . the power of forming a good judgment and of distinguishing the true and the false, which is properly speaking what is called Good Sense or Reason, is by nature equal in all men” (PWD-I 81). The impact of his words is weakened, however, when one learns that this sentiment was a common one in seventeenth-century philosophical writings. Thomas Hobbes, for instance, writes in Leviathan (1668) that “Nature hath made men so equal in the faculties of body and mind as that . . . when all is reckoned together the difference between man and man is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he.”2 More doubt is cast on the epistemological humility of either Descartes or Hobbes when they go toe-to-toe in the acrimonious and unproductive debate in the “Objections and Replies” to Descartes’s “Meditations” (PWD-II 60–78). Similarly, Descartes’s seeming epistemological humility (“the nature of man, in as much as it is composed of mind and body, cannot be otherwise than sometimes a source of deception” [PWD-I 198]) takes on a different tone when examined more closely. In proving God’s existence in the Third Meditation, he says of his parents that, although all I have ever been able to believe of them were true, that does not make it follow that it is they who . . . [are] the authors of my being in any sense, in so far as I am a thinking being; since what they did was merely to implant certain dispositions in that matter in which the self—i.e. the mind, which alone I at present identify with myself—is by me deemed to exist. He goes on to say that “For from the sole fact that God created me it is most probable that in some way he has placed his image and similitude 25 Epistemological Humility and Its Other upon me, and that I perceive this similitude . . . by means of the same faculty...