255. Caught In A Net

You want to understand the world as well as you can, so you’re always reading. You read thick academic books, books about science and technology, books where experiments, models, and data are used to produce hard, satisfying conclusions.

You’ve learned a lot by doing this, but you’ve also been wondering about the justification of science itself. You want to be certain that the results you’ve discovered are reliable and won’t soon be replaced with entirely different conclusions.

So you start reading philosophy. Here the concerns seem more primary, more focused on the issue of what it is to be a subjective being trying to understand a world. You quickly find yourself reading not about science or its justifications, but about knowledge and its possible foundations. This feels necessary, for how else could you truly understand anything at all?

You want to be able to hold everything together at once. You want to see how the parts form a single, coherent whole. But the more you read, the more complex the problem of knowledge seems to be, and you’re no longer certain there are any final answers. You keep reading and reading, but it doesn’t feel like you’re making any progress.

You’re caught in a net made of arguments and reasons. You could stop reading today, but you’d still be stuck in the net. For the the net is no longer only in the books you’re reading. It now lives inside you. Even if you stopped reading entirely, the problems you’ve become aware of — the problems that plague knowledge of any kind — are lodged so deeply inside you that they cannot be ignored.

You want to break free because you can see you’re only getting more and more tangled in the net with each passing day. You need tools to cut yourself free, but you cannot seem to find them. Your goal is no longer understanding, but freedom. You want the possibility of stopping. You want the possibility of freedom from philosophy, from argument, and even from reason itself.

But there is no stopping and there is no going back. It’s too late for that. You have to find your own way out of the net. It is a process you must undergo. The tired cliché is true: the only way out is through.