Faith, Finitude, and the Conditions of Understanding

 

    

Faith, Finitude, and the Conditions of Understanding 

 

  The recognition of our radical finitude and fallibility seems the beginning of wisdom.   This follows because reality is big and the human heart and mind is limited by its very nature. For one thing, the long evolutionary prehistory trying to survive in the rather violent matrix of nature has left traces in our blood, so to speak, that makes it an almost impossible challenge to live in peace, justice, and love with our neighbors. We can’t help that. (How this probable fact fits in with the Christian concept of “original sin” and a Creator is a real problem.) Our personalities have been distorted over millennia by social injustice, exploitation, oppression, violence, failures of love – both the personalities of the actively unjust and those victims of injustice, and of course we are often both.  reasons, we are "cracked vessels" as Donne put it (which I first read in George Kennan's Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy - my favorite kind of philosophy, personal especially). We human beings are radically cognitively finite because reality always exceeds the limited perspective, lifespan, conceptual schemes, language, attention, and historical situation through which we encounter it; we know truly only by partial participation in a world whose full intelligibility transcends us. Emotionally, too, we are finite because our loves, fears, hopes, resentments, and attachments condition what can appear meaningful or visible to us at all, while themselves remaining vulnerable to distortion through suffering, self-interest, habit, ideology, and failures of love. Again, recognizing these basic truths is fundamental to any form of wisdom. Our biological inheritance often works against true community. Our minds and hearts are small; Being is big.

 

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    We are thus fallible on the one hand, radically so, and yet I have often discussed the importance of “hinge beliefs” that we can't sanely question (ontological, epistemological), following Wittgenstein’s On Certainty and expanding the concept to morals, inspired by C. S. Lewis writings on the Natural Law (Abolition of Man). And I think that some kind of faith (e.g., that the external world is not generated by the Matrix - I cannot prove that it is not to a serious skeptic; and even that love can 'reach its object' and reveal it) is ultimately a part of all knowledge and understanding. How might one go about squaring this seeming circle?

      The circle may only seem vicious if we assume that certainty and fallibility are opposites in the wrong sense. I agree with those who think that human understanding has a structure something like this: there are things we cannot coherently doubt while remaining participants in thought and life at all; everything we say about those things remains finite, revisable, and vulnerable to distortion. That is very close to Wittgenstein in On Certainty, though my take is more existential and moral than his. The crucial distinction is between universal theoretical certainty achieved by proof/argument and lived trust or fidelity that makes thought possible in the first place. The second comes first.

    A child does not first prove that language refers to a world and then begin speaking. He is initiated into trust, attention, love, correction, and shared reality. Doubt itself parasitically depends upon this background; radically so. Even principled skepticism presupposes language, inference, memory, identity through time, distinctions between seeming and reality, and confidence that reasons matter. The skeptic cannot stand nowhere. He already inhabits a world of meaning before questioning it. This is why hinge beliefs are not merely arbitrary cultural postulates. They are closer to conditions of intelligibility, the (transcendental) conditions for the possibility of thought and language at all, to use Kant’s phrase. “There is an external world,” “other persons are real,” “memory is broadly trustworthy,” “truth matters,” “wanton cruelty is evil” – these are not ordinarily conclusions from argument. They are more like the soil in which argument grows. This, too, is part of our finitude.

   But because we are finite, wounded, self-deceiving creatures (Murdoch’s expression “fat, relentless ego” doesn’t only describe the narcissistic personality of consumer-capitalist society), our interpretations of reality are always partial and vulnerable. The recognition of finitude therefore does not abolish truth; but it does condition the possible sense truth can have for us. We do not possess it as gods might: that is, exhaustively, transparently, beyond revision; absolutely. We possess it analogically, perspectivally, historically, morally. Conditioned by the things I mentioned at the beginning. This is where I find Josef Pieper is illuminating. He develops more explicitly the Thomist thought that reality exceeds our conceptual grasp, yet the mind is genuinely ordered toward Being. The finite intellect is not autonomous creator of truth, but receptive. Knowledge is participatory rather than dominating. One sees truly, but never totally.

     And this is also why love becomes epistemologically important for thinkers like Raimond Gaita or Iris Murdoch. Love is not merely an emotion added onto perception. It can be a purification of attention. Hatred, vanity, ideology, resentment, fear, or utilitarian reduction can literally prevent us from seeing what is there. Conversely, fidelity, humility, and love can disclose realities otherwise hidden. That does not mean love is infallible. Parents can idolize children. Lovers can project fantasies. Cultures can sanctify injustice. But the possibility of distortion does not imply that all seeing is distortion. If it did, the claim “all perception is distortion” would itself collapse into self-refuting skepticism.

      So perhaps the circle becomes less paradoxical if reframed this way. We begin not with indubitable propositions but with participation in a meaningful world. This participation involves trust before proof. Reflection reveals that our understanding is finite and corrigible yet corrigibility itself presupposes some contact with reality; otherwise “correction” has no meaning. Therefore, humility and trust are not opposites but complementary virtues. You might even say that radical doubt detached from trust becomes unintelligible, while certainty detached from humility becomes idolatry. The middle position is neither Cartesian certainty nor postmodern dissolution, but something like faithful realism: reality transcends us, we genuinely encounter it yet never exhaust it.

    This also explains why the deepest hinge beliefs often have moral form. A child learns that reality is intelligible partly through being truthfully addressed by others. Betrayal, manipulation, and injustice damage not only emotion but the very conditions of trust on which rational life depends. Hence the point about “cracked vessels” is not accidental psychology added onto epistemology. Human woundedness belongs inside epistemology itself. In this light, faith is not primarily belief without evidence. It is a disciplined fidelity to the meaningfulness and reality of the world that makes inquiry, love, and correction possible at all.

 

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Given this, Augustine’s credo ut intelligam (“I believe so that I may understand”) – which confounded me as a student and has never left me alone – need not mean irrational submission prior to thought. It should rather be understood as the recognition that finite knowers always begin from trust-laden participation in reality before reflective understanding becomes possible. We must first trust language before analyzing meaning, trust memory before reasoning from experience, trust that reality is intelligible before undertaking inquiry, and trust other persons before entering the moral world at all. Even science presupposes faith in the reliability of perception, reason, testimony, and the ordered intelligibility of nature. Augustine’s point is thus not that belief replaces understanding but that certain forms of faithful openness, fidelity, or trust are conditions for deeper understanding to emerge.

     The same applies morally and emotionally. A loveless or cynical person may possess information about another human being while failing truly to “know” him. Love, humility, repentance, friendship, and fidelity can become modes of cognitive purification. Such goods do not magically guarantee truth, true. But because they help overcome the egocentrism, fear, vanity, and resentment that narrow what reality can disclose itself to us as, they are integral to reason (i.e. our capacity to conform our minds to anything real, to that which cannot be reduced to our wishes or prejudices).  In that sense, faith is not the enemy of knowledge but one of its existential preconditions for radically finite beings.