Daylight is much more favorable than darkness, peace earns prevalent reputation over war, and no one would prefer something inexplicable to something explicable. That’s very common. But what’s in it for you to do so? Nothing, but a kind of self-relief to our uncertainty-feared hearts, and that’s all we can get from the daylight, peace and explicability, compared to their opposites: darkness, war and inexplicability. And this fear of uncertainty is invincible, instilled to our essence, and transformed into our DNA, our nature.
For instance, darkness blinds our eyes, and then projects fearsome shadows on our mental states. War mobilizes everything, insulating ourselves from beloved ones and valued things, tearing us between exhausting tiredness and daunting rootlessness, and finally driving us to teeter on the brink of collapsing. And all these bad effects imposed on us are ascribed to the fact that, they put us at the highly-stake uncertainty of where we are and where we are heading. That’s why we hate or fear darkness or war.
To make an abstract of these things like darkness and war put down above and philosophize them, using the concept of something inexplicable suffices, for darkness makes us inexplicable of where we are, and war makes us inexplicable of where we are heading. Henceforth, inexplicability is what produces uncertainty for us. Conversely, explicability is the source of uncertainty-free causes. Something like daylight and peace therefore represents something explicable to us.
But you must talk to yourselves, “Boo, what an extreme tone the writer is taking! He must be a crazy nerd!” You’re right to think that way somehow. Yeah, there is no denying that someone would claim he tends to like darkness, war or inexplicability personally, but not daylight, peace or explicability. And it seems true that more and more people have found themselves into vagueness and uncertainty, considering it unintelligibly beautiful and wonderful.
This kind of thinking often exemplifies what’s known as aesthetics. That is to say, if something is highly thought of as an epitome of beauty, it’s more often than not to be far from intelligible. Intelligible things familiarize our sense of what is beauty, and subsequently blunts it, leaving a finicky taste for new things to us to enjoy. Like the prestigious portrait of Mona Lisa painted by Leonard da Vinci, the enigmatic smile shown to us when we’re staring, makes it perennially popular through assorted generations. So it’s the vagueness and ambiguities depicted behind Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile that lead it to prodigious success and get admired for such a long time. It follows, not all kinds of explicability are necessarily preferable to inexplicability, and even something inexplicable can be inexplicably good and fantastic. Then our uncertainty-feared theory raised initially turns out to be no way rigorous and perfect.
That’s a tricky problem, I dare say. To clarify this theoretical problem, for starters, we ought to know in what sense explicability is explicability, and inexplicability is inexplicability.
Please be stringently honest to yourself and rethink: do you really recognize Mona Lisa as one of the greatest paintings in the world? Or, is it just out of your vanity or self-incurred tutelage to follow suit to hypocritically make that claim? Were you confronted with such questions, you would be less certain and self-confident, wouldn’t you? Without any knowledge of the historic success of Mona Lina, could you imagine how many people would be in love with it? Step back in these questions a little bit. For those who really think Mona Lisa a masterpiece of all time, do you think it possible to believe that they can’t point out anything about what makes it masterpiece? Or ask yourself: is it possible for you not to point out any reason why you love your favorites best? It’s of course impossible, just like someone never eats knowing which food is yummy and which yucky. When someone says Mona Lisa is a masterpiece, he must get some criteria inside to make comparisons and judge what he has felt from Mona Lisa. Maybe for such reasons as insufficient expression skills, and unwillingness to be exact about personal feelings, he fails or refuses to do any explanation. But it doesn’t mean what he think aesthetic beauty is not explicable. That’s not how explicability works by our understanding.
Explicability, by definition, should not be philosophically revolved by individually superficial opinions without rational deliberation. Explicability, however, should be invariably understandable, which means more or less objectiveness, independent of individual judgments. Please note: objectiveness herein means: 1) your preference feelings are objectively explicable; 2) at least to the outsiders who have reached a well-studied revealment on your feelings if you couldn’t yourself; 3) at worst, that revealment would be eventually reached if the contemporaries failed to make it. Take physics for example. Before modern laser technology shedding lights on atom, proton, neutron, and quark, while some philosophers have realized everything must be made up of by some basic elements (or one particular element), such as water, fire or atom etc, no one was capable of illustrating what exactly these tiny substances are, even the most sharp-minded analysts failing this job. But these facts are still not appropriately enough to deny the existence of those basic elements. They exist objectively, anyway. The same case goes for personal feelings. If personal feelings contained zero objectiveness, the relative studies, like aesthetic, ethics, or any other social science, would long since cease to develop. But the truth is obviously otherwise as we admit.
Similar to explicability, objectiveness is shared with by the inexplicability. It means: 1) your preference feelings are inexplicable in a way that is both personal and objective; 2) thus some phenomena might be rather obscurely tough for everyone to dwell on and make out; 3) there might be something under all circumstances inexplicable. What’s paradoxical is that, how can we know something is eternally inexplicable to us since it is totally inexplicable? Just like the statement that, how can we know what light is since we’re living in a permanent dark? It’s logically unsolvable. The only solution I figure out with utmost efforts is to say, inexplicability itself implies its objectiveness transcendently. That’s to say, the objectiveness of inexplicability is too self-evident for anyone to grasp a bit of proofs to backtrack.
Nevertheless, as far as I’m concerned, neither that curious problem nor that curious solution placed above does matter to the topic of this paper. All that matters is that, those strangenesses mentioned in facts lead us back to the pivotal point we constantly try to reconfirm: the central deference between explicability and inexplicability lies in the undisputed fact that, explicability is that we persistently pursue and discern, while inexplicability is that we evade or remove as possible. In this sense, even vagueness we use to describe something aesthetically beautiful would be merely a means of inexplicability-evading, hence uncertainty-removing. It’s because our uncertainty-feared hearts would be greatly relieved when we regard vagueness as one of the attributes carried by what we think is beautiful.
None of us would be willing to stand something we have completely no say about– even when we are talking we have no say about something, we actually are trying to bestow explicability on this inexplicable thing as have-no-say-about-ness, with slender hopes of making it knowable someday. After all, humanity’s fear of uncertainty is invincible. The relentless pursuit of explicability constitutes the only mental therapy for it, which finally comes down to this: it’s our fear of uncertainty rather than that so-called curiosity or something that urges us to go for knowledge, and then everything. It’s not about how authentic our love of knowledge is, but about our nature, about how strongly our fear of uncertainty is. Knowledge is the product of the invincible fear of uncertainty! The invincible fear of uncertainty is the original motivation of everything! So Aristotle was wrong!
Aristotle was wrong as he ever put, philosophy has origin in man’s sense of wonder, maybe plus spare minds. That’s not accurate, not the essence we are all the way to uncover. And it’s easy to prove. As we know, philosophy was not an informative knowledge like science, telling convincing theories based on commonly accepted and very simplified observations or premises, then what does philosophy exist for? It exists to soften the tension caused by our fear for something science or the like fails to answer. Questions raised like, who am I, where does the world come from, or how should we live a proper life, are philosophical. Solving these questions philosophically thereby means curing us of the uncertainty fear philosophically. We human beings need philosophical solutions to those philosophical questions, which is invincible as well. In this sense, philosophy is irreplaceable and will never be dead. On the contrary, if philosophy originated from curiosity, it would lose its root in human’s society to endure eventually, for nothing would be more reliable than human’s fear to survive the ages or do better job in terms of sustainability. And it would as well not be successful in explaining the reasons why various philosophical doctrines are believed by average audiences, some of whom even consider them as the panaceas of their emotional turmoils. All in all, curiosity at best is the fear of uncertainty that’s in disguise.
For me, the history of humanity is the history of fighting uncertainty. Take philosophy, science, and religions for example. Philosophy, science and religion appear different from one another, but none of them are giving up struggling to figure out a better way to understand the world we are brought into out of nowhere and know nothing about in the first place. In humanity’s history first came religions. Facing up to the unknown world, human beings chose to fill up fearsome uncertainty with mysterious beliefs to comfort themselves. In central teachings of religions, it seems that human beings don’t think the fearsome uncertainty would disappear unless we indoctrinated ourselves with something like prophecies. So it’s nothing but a matter of personal faith for everyone to overcome his uncertainty feelings. Philosophy, however, has no appeal to any unprovable faith, aiming to make the uncertain certain, like: it would make an endless journey to know exactly the nature of every existence and by what we know, remarked as ontology and epistemology, the two main branches of philosophy; and maybe it’s impossible, but who knows. Growing from philosophy, science skips these interminable questions, proposing something indubitable to be considered true by the maximized amount of people, and advancing our knowledge by logicalized and formulized statements to water down our uncertainty about the physical world. Apart from these, the fear of uncertainty also becomes the mainspring of everything else. In fear of darkness, natural disasters, and wars, we learned how to restore fire, how to defend ourselves, and finally established the society to best exist and procreate. And we still don’t yield any opportunity to give rise to humanity’s well-beings. All these are simply to make sure everything will go in certain way, at least as we feel it is.
So we revert to where we were at the very beginning again. And to come to conclusion, I should repeat it: our fear of uncertainty is invincible. Even this paper titled The invincible fear of uncertainty is out of my fear of uncertainty to get that over. When writing this paper, I am always reminded of two sayings from Socrate and Descartes. Socrate’s is: “One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing.” Descartes’s is: “I think, therefore I am(Cogito ergo sum) .” They are really the most profound philosophers ever.