The Unapproachable Shore
What does it mean to recognize our limits?
Human understanding is limited, and we know ourselves least of all.
Attempts at self-knowledge are bedeviled by change. My fears and desires are not steady with time; they shift and flow. If I claim to know myself today, that provides little assurance for tomorrow.
Despite the best efforts of researchers and scientists, the human mind remains a mystery box.
We’re still figuring out how to treat and prevent common mental illnesses: anxiety and depression among others. We’re not sure exactly what intelligence is, how to measure it or where it comes from. Are mental capacities determined at birth? To what extent can we improve them? And if we’ve made progress on these problems, we’re still learning to crawl as we struggle to locate and understand consciousness.
Can we hope to understand foreign lands when we are still strangers in our own territory? Other minds are separated from us by a seemingly unbridgeable gulf. At least we can visit other countries by plane, train or boat.
Despite the subjective gulf, the space between minds is more tractable than the distance between each tick of a clock’s hands. We can reach some mutual understanding with others, shouting across the chasm. We can travel through the physical world. But, though subjective and physical space can be bridged, time cannot. The future fades into the past as soon as it arrives, and we struggle to grasp its meaning.
Ignorance of the past frustrates our attempts to understand the present. This in turn makes it difficult, if not impossible, to predict the future.
For example, we’re not sure how technology shapes society. To know that the printing press made an impact is not the same as knowing its shape. So too for the steam engine, electricity, indoor plumbing, automobiles, nuclear weapons, shipping containers, personal computers, the internet, smartphones, social media…
One could spend every waking second studying these developments and become wise only until the present moment. The next innovation would present new problems, more questions.
We are ignorant and prejudiced, rash in our desire for certainty. To acknowledge this state does not require surrender, but it does engender humility. The world does not permit perfect knowledge to beings so limited. Perhaps this is for the best.
If all mysteries were revealed, if the box were thrown open to expose the machinery within, I don’t know what I’d do then. I prefer the search, the approach of an ever-receding shoreline: philosophy.
