Uncertainty demands an anchor, and while inner certainty feels like the logical choice, it’s often just an illusion. Embracing uncertainty rather than seeking to control it might just be the real solution.
In an earlier article, I mentioned Montaigne’s Essays as an excellent guide to uncertainty. Interestingly, they are full of contradictions. This is not surprising: the work is not a treatise on mathematics, but a kind of personal narrative of the author’s tribulations, with no real structure.
Montaigne’s inconsistencies and contradictions reflect our human nature. Montaigne is an acceptance of the fundamental ambiguity and ambivalence of all human behavior and emotion. We are full of contradictions. We move forward in spite of them, or perhaps because of them. We want to protect ourselves, but we also want to evolve, to progress in our being. We are ambitious, but also lazy. We want to lose weight, but we eat chocolate. We want to be free, but we also want to be protected. We want detailed procedures, but we complain about bureaucracy. We complain about reunionitis, but we worry about not being invited to the next meeting. We want to survive, but we’re also instinctively curious. I’m a hunter on the savannah twenty thousand years ago. This beautiful berry looks juicy. I haven’t eaten in two days. A small voice inside tells me to be careful. Another replies, “Why not try it?” To persevere in our being is to protect what we are, but still change. But perhaps one is the condition for the other? I can die if I eat the berry (poisoning), or I can die if I don’t eat the berry (hunger). Likewise, I can avoid dying in either case.
Malebranche, the great theologian and moralist of the 17th century, was quick to point out the many contradictions in the Essays. In doing so, the moralist was expressing a mental model of metaphysics that seeks an authentic, stable soul. In this model, uncertainty is a problem, and the solution to that problem is certainty. Imparable! If certainty cannot exist outwardly because of the complexity of the world, it must be realized inwardly. How logical! Therefore, the goal of self-knowledge is to eliminate all conflicts, doubts, and ambiguities in order to achieve perfection, which is the ideal of the wise man.
The metaphysics of the stable soul, of the purity of the heart, thus seeks to transform our soul into a geometrically simple and mathematically exact desert, rejecting ambiguous complexity as a degeneration that masks the pure essence of man. Self-knowledge consists in rediscovering this essence by stripping it of all artifice.
Doubt at the heart
Of course, Descartes, also a metaphysician, made it a principle to doubt everything, but in his method doubt exists only to be overcome. It is merely a means of reconstructing the world on a solid foundation, based on certainties that have survived his filter. For him, it was precisely a matter of reconstructing a world at the center of which there would be no tension, no uncertainty; only an absolute and clear truth shared by all, a mathematical equation.
There is, however, another kind of doubt, that of the Christian tradition, expressed by Peter Abelard, the Christian philosopher, dialectician and theologian, and father of scholasticism. Abelard made questioning and uncertainty the motor of his existence. He refused to rely on indirect knowledge, especially that of the “great ancients”. He wanted to go directly to the source. In the Middle Ages, a different concept of doubt emerged from Descartes’: the questioning of any definitive, static anchor point, the only way to build a body of work that unfolds over the course of a lifetime. In other words, for Abelard, the condition of progress is not certainty but doubt, inner conflict and ambiguity, not to be suppressed but exploited. Doubt becomes a constant experience, consubstantial with life.
This idea surprises us only because the opposite idea has become a dominant mental model in our thinking: uncertainty is a problem; the solution to this problem lies in the search for certainty, and before the age of science it was the role of religion to provide this certainty. In his book The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, the historian and sociologist Christopher Lasch notes that religion is thus systematically seen by contemporary observers as a source of intellectual and emotional security. Marx described it as the opium of the people, the drug that enables them to bear their suffering.
For Lasch, however, it is a misunderstanding to see religion as a set of definitive and absolute dogmas, resistant to any form of intelligent evaluation. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, on the contrary, religion does not bring certainty, but instills doubt. Moreover, the Bible, like the Essays, is full of contradictions: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, but you must turn your left cheek and love your neighbor. For those who take it seriously, that is, those who avoid falling into idolatry, faith is a burden, a challenge to complacency and pride, not a self-righteous claim to privileged status. This burden is one of ambiguity, uncertainty, and the absence of a clear answer, and thus of a necessary personal quest of its own, the outcome of which is never certain. The invention of purgatory in the 12th century enshrined this fundamental uncertainty at the heart of the Christian religion, and believers had to live with it.
The heart of human creative energy is not a celestial peace, a dead star, but a bundle of tensions and contradictions, a kind of joyful inner chaos. The solution to uncertainty, then, is not to seek certainty; it’s to move forward creatively, playing with our inner tensions, whether personal or collective.
The source for this article (in French): Avant-propos. Les vies du doute, de Descartes à Abélard, Véronique Dominguez.
🇫🇷 French version of this article here.
➕You can read my previous articles on uncertainty: 📃In uncertainty, what can you control? 📃The pilot in the plane: When faced with uncertainty, move from prediction to control
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