Saturday, December 4, 2010

In Defense of the Radical Skeptic

They're right, you know, the radical skeptics and sometimes we envy them that. They fail to see the reason in our confidence, refuse to play the game of axioms, and shame us when we cannot provide justifications for our knowledge.

They're right, you know. They know that they cannot act, cannot think, cannot reason unless they join us more slipshod folk, but they will not back down from the truth: we don't know anything for sure, not even that we do not know. For this I praise the radical skeptic for their bravery. They are the great philosophical nobles, their spirits bent forever straight in the face of a truth that the rest of us fear, that we know nothing at all.

No, the of the radical skeptic is not flawed in their rationality, but their unwillingness to say what we cannot reasonably speak does trouble us lesser thinkers. We mumble to them things like practicality and hearts and souls and what dandelions would dream, if they could dream. We sometimes-skeptics (for we are never completely assured of our beliefs) are caught sometimes by these skeptics staring across fields dappled by summer time sunsets, sucking the sting out of frozen fingers, and drinking warm tea, wondering if there is not some greater purpose to this all, if our inability to speak is perhaps the whole point.

So it seems to us, the radical skeptic isn't at all wrong, they just are missing all the fun. Our messy worlds don't fit into the crossword boxes and our minds are less troubled by our ineptitudes than they seem to be. So, we will sit with these skeptics, puzzled by their fervor, but delighted by their passion for truth, for in their presence, they are the experts and we the bumbling amateurs who've never yet bothered to learn the rules of good thinking.

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