#on certainty

Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and a heretic.

I still remember that moment when I was 4 years old, seated in the back of my dad’s car, looking into my reflection by the car window, when all of a sudden, a thought occurred to me: “What am I doing here? What does it mean to exist? Why am I alive? What does it mean to be human?” At the onset of these thoughts, I felt myself being a spectator of my own body, as if I were foreign even to myself. There initially was a daunting sense of dislocation, an eerily displacement of not fully belonging to this world, for the possibility of another world has opened up to me. Along with the sentiment of aghast disorientation, there nevertheless was the ember of anticipation, that maybe life (and the self) had an enchanting secret that is yet to be discovered. I had a glimmer of hope that this discovery will add a dimension to reality, clothing myself with another layer of being that now sees both the fissures and treasures caught between the crevices of the self and the world.

Doubt comes after belief.

I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again ‘I know that that's a tree’, pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell them: ‘This fellow isn't insane. We are only doing philosophy.’