Wednesday, June 21, 2023

Intelligence, Truth, and Certainty, by Olavo de Carvalho

Intelligence, Truth, and Certainty, by Olavo de Carvalho, is a comprehensive work that delves into the nature of intelligence and its relationship with truth and certainty. The author critiques prevailing views on intelligence, challenges the notion of artificial thinking, explores evidence and certainty, examines the connection between intelligence and will, and discusses the importance of intellectual elites, independent thinking, doubt, and self-awareness. The work emphasizes the role of intelligence in apprehending truth, cultivating a desire for truth, and making judgments of truth or falsehood. It underscores the importance of embracing doubt, intellectual humility, and the formation of an intellectual elite based on shared belief in the power of human intelligence. The development of reflective consciousness and self-awareness is highlighted as essential for the pursuit of knowledge and the transformation of knowledge into self-awareness. Overall, the work provides a thought-provoking exploration of intelligence, truth, and certainty, urging readers to prioritize the pursuit of truth and engage in independent thinking.

1. Definition

Intelligence, in the sense in which I employ the word here, in the sense it has etymologically and in the sense it was used when words had meaning, does not mean the ability to solve problems, mathematical ability, visual imagination, musical aptitude, or any other specific type of ability. It means, in the most general and comprehensive way, the capacity to apprehend truth. Intelligence does not consist even in thinking. When we think, but our thinking does not properly grasp what is true in what it thinks, then what is at work in that thinking is not properly intelligence, in the strict sense of the term, but only the frustrated desire to understand or even the pure automatism of unintelligent thinking. Thinking and understanding are completely distinct activities. The proof of this is that many times you think, think, and understand nothing, and other times you understand without having thought, in a sudden intuitive flash.

Intelligence is an organ — let us say: an organ — that only serves for this: to grasp truth. Sometimes it comes into operation through thought, sometimes through imagination or feeling, and sometimes it enters directly, in an intellectual — or intuitive — instant act, in which you apprehend something without any particular preparation or representative form that serves as a channel to intellection. Other times there is a long preparation through thought, imagination, and memory, and in the end you grasp absolutely nothing: after the representative acts are fulfilled, the intellection they were directed to fails completely; given the means, the purpose is not achieved. Intelligence lies in the accomplishment of the purpose, not in the nature of the means employed. And if the purpose of the means of knowledge is to know, and if knowledge is only true knowledge if it knows the truth, then the definition of intelligence is: the power to know the truth by whatever means.

The concept of truth, and all the discussions it raises, can be left for another occasion. For now, and provisionally taking the word “truth” in its ordinary sense of coincidence between fact and idea, these elementary distinctions are enough to make us perceive how erroneous is the direction taken by the current theory of “multiple intelligences,” which dissolves the very notion of intelligence into a collection of abilities — ranging from mathematical reasoning to physical dexterity and social skills — without realizing that all these capacities and many others like them are means and that intelligence is not a means, but the very act, the result to which these means tend, and for which none of them is by itself — nor is the sum of all of them by itself — a sufficient condition. The theory of multiple intelligences arose as a reaction against the theory of IQ, which in turn identified intelligence exclusively with verbal, mathematical, and imaginative-spatial ability. But it is a typical case of substituting one falsehood for another. Whether few or many are the abilities with which intelligence is identified, the error is the same: confusing intelligence with the instruments it uses.

This confusion occurs because most people know themselves very poorly, even in practical matters and the most obvious aspects of life. How much greater would be their difficulty in grasping the subtle difference between representative acts and intelligence! Always seeing intelligence act through thought, memory, imagination, and feeling, they therefore confuse the channel with what passes through it, the vehicle with the passenger, and take mere mental acts for “intelligence.”

This confusion has ended up being officialized and legitimized by education. In general, all forms of teaching aim to increase the skills on which intelligence relies, such as memory, imagination, reasoning, etc., and do not attach the slightest importance to intelligence itself. The fact is that the emergence of these other faculties does not necessarily entail that of intelligence. We can develop reasoning, visual imagination, memory, or artistic aptitude considerably without there being effectively an intelligence directing their steps — the proof is that several of these aptitudes are more developed in certain mentally disabled individuals than in the common people. Moreover, if it is through reasoning that we sometimes understand, it is also through it that we deceive ourselves. Similarly, imagination sometimes leads us to a real comprehension of something, but sometimes it leads us away from the truth. The development of these faculties, imagination, memory, reasoning, etc., does not necessarily imply the development of intelligence; it is also true the other way around: intelligence is independent of these other processes, which serve as its channels, instruments, and occasions, and nothing more. But the other way around should not be taken in a strict sense, for an intelligence resolutely determined to discover the truth about something generally ends up finding the mental channels through which to reach its goal, that is, it develops the “faculties” it needs. Without excluding the possibility that there are cases of even superior intelligence but lacking specific means or channels of action, I say that they are exceptions and rarities that further confirm the rule: the development of means does not imply the development of intelligence, whereas the development of intelligence almost necessarily leads to the conquest of means.

If we define intelligence as the human capacity to grasp what is true, we also understand that the essence of the human being, what differentiates us from animals, is not thought, reason, or exceptionally developed imagination or memory, although all of these are indeed present in human beings. For a monkey also thinks: it completes a syllogism and even chains syllogisms in a relatively perfect reasoning. Imagination, even a cat possesses: cats dream. Along this path, we will not find the specific human difference, what makes us humans instead of animals. And while it is important to root man in the animal kingdom, so as not to turn him into an angelic being without feet on the ground, it is also important to know how to distinguish him from a turtle or a mollusk by some difference that is not merely quantitative and accidental.

What makes us human is the fact that everything we imagine, reason, remember, we are capable of seeing it as a whole and, in relation to this whole, we can say yes or no, we can say: “It is true” or “It is false.” We are capable of judging the truth or falsity of everything that our own mind knows or produces, and no animal can do this.

But, the old Pilate within us will say, quid est Veritas? Each of us is a Roman judge, corrupted to the core, pretending not to know what we know perfectly well. The truth of which you claim to know nothing, unfortunate Pontius, the truth is the quid — that same quid that, if you were unaware of, you could not use as a measure for the term “truth.” If I ask what something is, if I even ignore what something is, it is because the thing presented to me at that moment does not perfectly meet the condition required by the word quid — that consistency, that coherence of being, acting, and suffering, that patency, and above all that inevitability, that non-being-otherwise, that imperative absence of questions — and of the capacity to ask questions — that overtakes me when I know the quid. Ecce veritas. That is enough for now, without prejudice to further discussions and deepening.

2. Artificial Intelligence Does Not Exist

Nowadays, when we talk about “artificial intelligence,” it would be more accurate to say artificial “thinking” or perhaps artificial “imagination” because a certain sequence of thoughts, a set of mental operations, can be imitated in various ways. One such set is imitated, for example, in writing. Writing is a graphical imitation of sounds, which in turn imitate ideas, which in turn imitate the forms, functions, and relationships of things. Writing was the first form of artificial thinking. Any form of recording that humans use is already a type of artificial thinking since it involves a code of conversions and permutations. In this sense, a computer program is not very different from a set of rules in a game, like in chess, where a sequence of operations with many alternatives is conceived and crystallized into a specific pattern that can be imitated, repeated, or varied according to a basic algorithm. There are many forms of artificial thinking or artificial imagination. However, intelligence itself cannot be artificial. Artificial thinking is essentially an imitation of acts of thinking according to the formula of their sequences and combinations. Similarly, we can imitate imagination and memory by using an analogical network of correspondences instead of a one-to-one correspondence between a sign and its meaning. It amounts to the same thing: in both cases, we are imitating an algorithm, the formula of a sequence or network of combinations, which in turn imitate the actual operations of the mind. The thing is, intelligence is not an “operation of the mind”; it is the name we give to a certain quality of the result of those operations, regardless of which faculty performed them or which code was used. It is legitimate to say that an individual “understood” something only when they grasped the truth of that thing, whether through reasoning, imagination, or any other means. Even feelings can understand when they love what is truly lovable and hate what is truly hateful: there is an intelligence of feelings, just as there is a foolishness of feelings. Intelligence does not reside “in” the mind, but in a certain type of relationship between the mental act and its object, a relationship we call the “truthfulness” of the content of that mental act (note well: the truthfulness of the content, not the act itself).

One might object that when an act of artificial thinking produces a true result, for example, when a computer assures us that 2 + 2 = 4, it is an act of intelligence because it provides us with a truth. The difference here is as follows: the computer does not “understand” that 2 + 2 = 4; it merely performs the operations that yield 4 as a result, according to a predefined program or algorithm. If it is programmed according to the rule that 2 + 2 = 5, it will not only consistently yield this result but also generalize it to all similar cases, according to the rule 2a + 2a = 5a. Intelligence does not merely consist of arriving at a true result but in “acknowledging” that result as true. What does “acknowledging” mean? First, it means being free to prefer a false result (a computer can be programmed to prefer false results in a certain number of instances, but always according to a predefined pattern). Second, it means “believing” in that result, i.e., assuming personal responsibility for affirming it and for the consequences that follow from it. Intelligence, in this sense, is only admissible in beings that are free and responsible, and the first free and responsible being we know in the hierarchy of living creatures is humans. No being below humans possesses intelligence, and whether there are beings superior to humans is a problem that does not concern us at the moment and whose solution would not interfere with what we are examining here. Intelligence is the relationship that is established between humans and the truth, a relationship that only humans have with the truth and that they have only at the moment when they understand and acknowledge the truth, as they can become unintelligent in the next instant when they forget or deny it.

In this sense, the result of the calculation 2 + 2 that appears on the computer screen is a truth, but a truth that is “in the object” and not yet in intelligence; this truth is on the screen as the true mineral structure of a stone is in the stone or as the true physiology of an animal is in the animal: they are latent truths, lying in the obscurity of the objective world, waiting for the moment when they will be actualized in human intelligence. Similarly, we can think a true idea without realizing that it is true; in this case, the truth is in the thought as the truth of a stone is in the stone: the act of intelligence is only fulfilled when we perceive and acknowledge that truth as truth. Intelligence, in this sense, is more “internal” to us than thought. Thought, for us, can be an object. Intelligence cannot. The act of reflection by which we return to a thought to examine or judge it is another thought, with a different content from the first. But the recollection of an act of intelligence is the very same act of intelligence, reinforced and revitalized, in a new affirmation of itself.

I cannot recall the content of an act of intellection without once again understanding the same content, often with redoubled force of evidence.

If we define artificial thinking as the imitation, through electronic signals, of certain acts of thinking, we understand that artificial thinking is thinking, that the imitation of thinking is thinking, because ultimately, thinking is just using signals or signs to represent certain internal or external data. But the imitation of intelligence is not intelligence since there is only intelligence in the actual act by which a real human being actually apprehends a truth at the moment they apprehend it. In imitation, we would have only a hypothetical subject hypothetically apprehending a hypothetical truth, whose truthfulness they can only assert hypothetically. All of this would be mere thought, not intelligence.

Intelligence is only exercised in the face of a real, concrete situation: to understand is to focus attention on a present evidence. It is not to be confused with merely thinking about a truth because it consists of grasping the truth of that thought; nor is it to be confused with perceiving a color or a form because it consists of apprehending the veracity of that color or form; nor is it to be confused with remembering or imagining a figure because it consists of assuming the truthfulness of that recollection or imagination. Therefore, it is not possible to imitate an act of intelligence because its imitation could only be a copy of the thought or the recollection or the image that served as its channel. But if this copy were accompanied by the apprehension of its truthfulness, it would not be a copy but the very act itself, fully relived. And if it were unaccompanied by this apprehension, it would be a copy only of the thought or the imagination, not of the act of intelligence. And this thought or imagination, if true in its content, would only possess the truth of an object, the latent truth of a stone or a calculation displayed on a computer screen, waiting to be illuminated by the act of intelligence that would transform it into actual, effective, known truth.

A computer can only judge truth or falsity within certain parameters that are already in its program, i.e., falsity or truthfulness “relative to” a pre-established code, which can be entirely conventional. That is, it does not judge truthfulness but only the logicality of conclusions, without being able to establish premises or principles on its own. Now, logicity, strictly speaking, has nothing to do with truthfulness, as it is merely a relationship between propositions and not the relationship between a proposition and real experience. When I say real experience, I am not only referring to the everyday experience of the five senses but to the total field of human experience, where scientific experience carried out through instruments and subjected to rigorous measurements fits in only as one modality among countless others. When judging truthfulness or falsity, intelligence can do so in absolute and unconditional terms, independently of the parameters used and the reference to a specific field of experience. And it is precisely this unconditional knowledge of unconditional truth that can subsequently establish the parameters of conditionality or relativity, as well as philosophically legitimize the divisions of fields of experience, such as in delimiting the spheres of various sciences.

3. Evidence and Certainty

The term “intuition” in philosophy refers to direct knowledge, a maximally evident understanding (which does not mean it should be confused with the subjective feeling of certainty). An example of an act of intuitive intelligence: the fact that you are here at this moment is an absolute and unconditional certainty, which does not mean you cannot doubt it, that you cannot even, through a clever game of imagination, have the feeling of certainty of being elsewhere; it only means that you will only doubt it and believe you are somewhere else if you perceive your field of experience as divided into separate blocks, if you lose the sense of unity of the field of experience, which only occurs in fantasy, hypnotic state, or schizophrenia. When your intelligence acknowledges that you are here, you are accepting as true a particular interpretation you make of the set of information you have at this moment, not only about this moment but also about its connection to the moments that preceded it and those that will follow. You know that you are here not only because of the sensory information you receive about the environment, auditory information, tactile information, etc., but also because you know that this information is coherent with a past (you remember coming here), coherent with a future plan, that is, with an idea you have about the purpose of coming here; and all of this forms such a cohesive, inseparable system that you pronounce the judgment that “this is true”: “You know that you are here.” However, it would not be unthinkable that, while being here, you imagine being elsewhere and even persuade yourself and, somewhat self-hypnotically, “feel” that you are in another place. All of this can be produced, but if the sense of unity of your field of experience still functions, something will tell you: “this is false.” Why? Because the information that says you are here comes all together, whereas the ones you are producing to say you are elsewhere come in parts. Examine. What did you imagine about the other place where you suppose you are? The sound? The visual? One or the other? Certainly, they were not both exactly at the same time and in proportion. Were the reasons, the temporal antecedents of your presence there, as clear to you as the visual or auditory sensations? No: but the information you receive here about your presence comes all connected. You don’t first perceive the visual, then the auditory, then the tactile; in other words, you don’t compose this environment, it comes to you all at once; and even though you may momentarily pay more attention to one aspect than another through abstraction, you know and remember that the neglected aspects are present and can be updated in perception at any moment, without any internal voluntary construction work (which would be necessary to complete the image of the supposed other place where you would supposedly be or feel while actually being here).

This certainty that you have of being here is what is called “evidence.” Evidence is an undeniable knowledge and, in a certain way, indestructible because if you were to say that you are not here, to whom would you say it? To someone who is there or to someone who is here? The very act of saying that you are not here implies that you are.

In certain thoughts we have, there is this character of truthfulness, but we don’t know exactly how to define it; we only know that we ascribe this truthfulness to some thoughts and deny it to others. For example, here we deny truthfulness to the thought that we are not here. It is to this faculty - the one that says “yes” or “no” to thoughts, imaginations, and feelings, that judges them as a whole and says “it is true” or “it is false” - that we call “intelligence.”

4. Intelligence and Will

Intelligence, in short, is the “sense of truth,” and an apt, skillful, or strong intelligence is an intelligence that is accustomed to discerning truth and falsehood in all circumstances of life, to accepting truth and remaining in it.

By this I mean that intelligence is not exhausted in the mere cognitive aspect: if the power to know the truth constitutes the seed of intelligence, this seed only blossoms by the initiative of the will, and it also weakens and dies by the will. Will means the exercise of freedom. When you perceive something as true, it means that you have accepted it as true, and when you perceive it as false, it means that you have rejected it. Now, it is not a particular faculty that accepts or rejects, but it is you as a whole, in an act of free will. This means that intelligence is indissolubly the synthesis of a cognitive aptitude and a will to know. If there were a teaching aimed at the development of intelligence, it would have to, first and foremost, accustom the student to desire the truth in all circumstances and not evade it. Therefore, the exercise of intelligence necessarily has an ethical, moral aspect. Plato said, “Known truth is obeyed truth.”

If intelligence were a purely cognitive faculty, there would be nothing preventing it from being equally well exercised by the good and the bad, the sincere and the deceitful, the honest and the dishonest. In reality, things do not work that way, and internal dishonesty necessarily weakens intelligence, which ends up being replaced by a kind of cunning, clever evil. Cunning does not consist in grasping the truth, but rather in grasping - undoubtedly with accuracy - which lie is most efficient in each occasion. The cunning person is effective but is bound to fail in situations from which they cannot escape through some subterfuge, which require a confrontation with the truth. The connection between intelligence and goodness is recognized by all the great philosophers of the past, just as the corresponding connection, from the side of the object, between truth and goodness. A world that denies this connection, that turns intelligence into a “neutral” faculty capable of functioning equally well in the good and the bad, like breathing or digestion, is a blatantly evil world that takes pride in its wickedness as an achievement of science, through which it elevates itself above past civilizations. Mauriac noted, “In fallen beings, this skill to embellish their decadence. It is the ultimate illness to which man can descend: when his filth dazzles him like a diamond.”

The connection I refer to becomes particularly clear when we examine the following facts. Often our actions are not accompanied by words that explain them, not even internally; that is, we are capable of acting in certain ways, explaining those acts in exactly the opposite ways, precisely because the true motivations, remaining unexpressed and silent, elude conscious judgment. This causes us, at least subconsciously, to maintain a double discourse. From the moment you admit that something is true but proceed, even in secret, even internally, as if it were not, you maintain a double discourse: in one realm, you affirm one thing, and in another realm, you affirm another. Truth has few opportunities to emerge for us with complete clarity, and the human mind works in such a way that when you deny certain information, the subconscious suppresses all analogous information so that when you tell yourself a certain convenient lie, for practical or psychological reasons, or to protect yourself from unpleasant feelings, at the same instant you suppress this information, you suppress a series of other information that would be useful to you and that you did not intend to suppress. This is why inner lying is always detrimental to intelligence: it is a scotoma that spreads until it darkens the entire field of vision and replaces it with a complete system of errors and lies. When we get used to suppressing the truth regarding our memories, our imagination, our feelings, and actions, this suppression does not remain confined to the area we tampered with but spreads to other surrounding territories, and by becoming unable to understand a certain thing, we become unable to understand many others as well. Defense against inconvenient truths also becomes a defense against truth in general, against all truths. Later, when we desire to study a particular subject that interests us or understand what is happening in our lives and we cannot, we will hardly realize that we ourselves caused this injury to our intelligence. I notice in many intellectuals today a repugnance, an instinctive defense against the truth, to such an extent that even when they wish to accept it, they must wrap it in a cloak of lies. The worst thing about this is that this injury is often compensated by a hypertrophied development of auxiliary faculties, in a useless ornamental excrescence, such as the breasts that grow in some women after menopause. Many of these impaired intelligences succeed in intellectual professions.

5. Small and Great Truths

When the word “truth” is spoken in public in today’s cynical environment, someone clever quickly repeats Pontius Pilate’s question and presents to us, as if it were the greatest novelty, the old skeptical arguments, the refutation of which is classically the first step in philosophical learning. Many of these people have a rather affected, theatrical, ostentatious, and romanticized notion of the word “truth.” They are only willing to admit that man can know the truth if someone shows them the total, universal, and complete truth about the most difficult questions, and since no one meets this requirement, they conclude, with classical skepticism, that all truth is unknowable. But this kind of demand does not express a sincere search for truth. Sincere search goes from humble and ordinary truths to supreme truths, accepting the former as a path to the latter, without demanding despotic final answers to all questions from the outset.

An example of a humble yet reliable truth, which you can take as a model for evaluating other possible truths, is what you know - and only you know - about your own history, especially the inner history of your feelings, motivations, desires, etc.

If there were a teaching aimed at the development of intelligence, it would have to begin by proposing to the student, the learner, beginner, or aspirant, a kind of review of their memories, that is, telling their story properly (analogously to what is done in psychoanalysis). Everything that is true has a cohesive nature because a true piece of information cannot be artificially isolated from another piece of information that is also true and has a relationship of cause and effect, contiguity, similarity and difference, complementarity, etc.; this means that if you admit an A and a B, you will have to admit a C, D, E, F, etc. Truth always has a systemic, organic character, which is why its apprehension by personal intelligence requires openness of personality, a predisposition to accept all truths that reveal themselves as such, without any pre-selection of convenient truths.

6. Dismissal of Intellectuals

What would happen if, in a particular society, there were a large number of people capable of judging for themselves and perceiving the truth, not about everything, but about the points of greatest interest to society or the most urgent ones? There would be more wisdom, debates would lead to fairer conclusions, and decisions would have a more realistic meaning. Now, in a society where everyone is persuading each other of things they themselves are not convinced of, where everyone is trying to deceive themselves, or where everyone is seeking the help of others to deceive themselves more easily, all discussions revolve around ghosts, decisions fade into mere dreams, frustrations lead the people to a state of exasperation from which they seek to escape through new fantasies, and so on. This happens in the religious, political, moral, economic, and even in the scientific field. We can approach it from another definition and say that a country has its own culture when it has a sufficient number of people capable of perceiving the truth for themselves and do not need to be persuaded by anyone. These people function as a kind of guardians of collective intelligence. In our country, the number of such people is scandalously small. The people responsible for perceiving the truth for themselves must have an intelligence trained for this, they must have an intelligence that is docile to the truth and be the first to perceive and understand what is happening. This is what constitutes a national intelligence, a national intellectualism. Authentic intellectualism is not necessarily constituted by people who practice professions related to culture or intelligence, but rather by people who, whether or not they practice these professions, perform the corresponding actions. We don’t need to go very far to say that the overall fate of a country depends on there being a layer of people like this, who can, in times of difficulty, make this modest contribution, which is simply to tell the truth. In Brazil, we have an astonishing number of people working in cultural activities, writers, teachers, artists, generally subsidized by the government, but who are far from fulfilling the elementary obligations of intellectual life; all they do is support each other in a collective discourse, reaffirming the same beliefs of purely selfish and subjective origin, expressing collective and personal desires and prejudices, promoting fashion. These people are always complaining that there is little funding for culture in this country. But for doing what they call culture, they already receive much more money than they deserve. Filmmakers, theater directors, etc., constitute a privileged caste, stipendiated by the government to publicly display cheap emotions, feign indignation, and pose as “wonderful people” in apartments on Vieira Souto Avenue.

Of course, people always have the freedom to choose between truth and falsehood, and even knowing the truth, they can deceive themselves again; however, the possibility of deceiving themselves is much greater when no one ever tells them the truth. What happens when people who work in intellectual or cultural professions only use them as a means of supporting their own inner lie, that is, they perform these works purely rhetorically or rhetorically to lead the people into errors and illusions? I assert emphatically that this is the case with the Brazilian intellectualism, which in its almost entirety uses cultural professions to make the people and the Brazilian public serve it, confirming its beliefs, of which it has no personal certainty, and for which it seeks to gain collective support. There are areas where there can be a wide range of uncertainty and free exchange of similar opinions, but in other areas there are not. However, the fact is that when intellectualism as a whole presents itself to the public in a flattering persuasion attitude, then intellectual life is being prostituted, and when it is prostituted, I ask: how can we desire more ethics, more honesty in politics or in business, if large sections of the active population have no notion of what is true or false? How can intellectualism preach a dissolving relativism, where the criteria of the true and the false dissolve to the point of becoming indistinguishable, and at the same time demand that politicians be honest and tell the truth to the people? People, in this situation, could not be honest even if they wanted to because they do not know what is right, they have no moral awareness, they are coarse and insensitive from a moral point of view. So, there is no doubt that the corruption of society begins with the corruption of the intellectual layer, not with the corruption of business or politics: on the contrary, there are countries where the rich and powerful men are very corrupt and yet the country functions properly; there are countries where politicians are corrupt and yet the country does not grossly err in solving its own problems. But in a country where the intellectual layer, which is the professionally responsible layer for examining the truth and stating it, begins to deceive itself, then it will be absolutely useless for all politicians to be honest.

If, from the individual’s point of view, the aim of this course is the development of their intelligence, from the social and cultural point of view, the aim of the course is to provide people for a future true intellectual elite. What is an intellectual elite? It is people so trained to perceive the truth as a boxer is trained to fight and a soldier is trained to wage war. In this sense, all nations that have achieved greatness in history have had such an elite, formed long before the country achieved any economic, political, military projection, etc. For it is not possible to solve problems first and become intelligent later. In every debate on national problems that is currently taking place, there is only one thing that everyone is forgetting: Who will solve these problems? Who will examine them? Who has the capacity to examine them with effective intelligence? If these people do not exist, then the initial problem is to form them. The primary objective of this course is precisely this, if not to form, at least to contribute to the formation, tomorrow or later, over perhaps twenty or thirty years, of a true intellectual elite.

7. “Independent Opinion” and “Autonomous Judgment”

Considering the objectives of the course, it is necessary, with regard to the individual, not only to develop intelligence but to make it the backbone of that individual’s behavior, that is, to lead a life guided by intelligence. In doing so, the individual will finally become autonomous and reliable in their judgments, to the extent possible for a human being. An important distinction exists between one’s own judgment, that is, being able to think for oneself, and merely having an own opinion. Nowadays, everyone insists on having their own opinion, but that is not the same as thinking for oneself. Thinking for oneself is not just expressing an opinion that reflects one’s preference, one’s taste (which, incidentally, is usually much less personal than proclaimed) or one’s individuality, but being able to independently and unaided examine an issue and arrive at a true or sufficient conclusion about it, and far from seeking to be different from others' opinions, more or less coinciding with the opinions of other people who have independently examined the subject, so that each person, examining for themselves and without any external coercion, reaches more or less the same conclusions. Thinking for oneself means being able to reach the truth alone, not just inventing a personalized lie. Moreover, one of the conditions for the development of intelligence is that you do not insist on having your own opinion, that is, you do not insist on your opinion being different from that of other people; on the contrary, you only insist on examining things for yourself, without needing crutches, without needing the approval of the majority or anyone else, in order to ultimately come to a conclusion, so that you express not so much agreement or disagreement by nature, but that agreement or disagreement is produced by a thoughtful examination of the subject. Being able to independently examine is more important than having a different opinion from others.

8. The State of Doubt

The development of intelligence also requires another thing, which is tolerance for the state of doubt, which is a psychological state defined by two contradictory and simultaneous assertions of apparently equal credibility. That is, when examining an issue, saying both yes and no with equal conviction, that is, believing in both a hypothesis and its contrary, having equal reasons for and against. In almost all the subjects we deal with, there is no time and no practical condition to leave the state of doubt. The individual who either does not have a vocation for the life of intelligence or has deviated from it for some reason, feels it as very urgent to leave the state of doubt; they need to have an opinion anyway, they need to pronounce themselves, they need to come to a yes or a no, and this need is felt as more urgent than that of knowing the truth. In this case, intelligence does not develop because it is replaced by the simple search for security, since doubt is a state of insecurity. If we want to develop intelligence, we have to make a choice: to prefer to remain in doubt rather than have a pseudo-certainty. Obviously, certainty is preferable to doubt, but it is only truly preferable when it is an authentic certainty, not just an individual preference. Therefore, another requirement for the development of intellectual life is a kind of vow of poverty in matters of opinion, a vow to have an opinion on very few things and to reserve oneself to express an opinion on things on which you have actually had time to think, and in the rest, to consent to remain in doubt, even if necessary for the rest of your life. Firm certainty is preferable to a million doubts, but unfortunately, if we want to develop intelligence, we will have to tolerate the state of doubt, the state of uncertainty, for longer than people usually tolerate. In addition to making this vow of poverty in matters of opinion, another type of vow of poverty is also necessary, which is renouncing the search for support, that is, not believing that the number of people who support you represents an effective argument in favor of the truth of what you are saying. In most difficult issues, the majority is usually wrong, that is, in general, the immediate consensus is formed around some error. Why? As St. Thomas Aquinas said: Truth is the daughter of time. Truth usually takes time to appear. If necessary, if absolutely necessary to seek support in a majority opinion, then it is preferable to rely on the opinions that humanity has kept intact over time, which have withstood the changes and wear of time, rather than on those that simply form the majority voice of our time, and that are at serious risk of becoming the minority tomorrow or later. In other words, if the opinion of the majority has any value, it is not that of the momentary majority, the market-driven, fleeting, and inconstant majority, but rather the human majority, the majority of humankind throughout all epochs and places: quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus credita est, “what has been believed by all, always, and everywhere.”

Regarding the formation of an intellectual elite, it is needless to say that it is not absolutely necessary for the members of such an elite to have concurring opinions; in fact, if they have differing opinions, it might even be better in certain circumstances. But there are some points on which agreement is necessary, first and foremost, regarding the value of intelligence, the value of truth, and the possibility of human beings discovering the truth. Faith in the power to attain the truth is the initial condition of any philosophical inquiry, as Hegel said. If we do not believe in the possibility of discovering the truth, we will not make efforts to seek it. We must persuade ourselves that it is possible to discover the truth, but not always the final truth, not always the absolute truth, and above all, not always the truth about everything. In many things, it is possible to reach a final and absolute truth, in far more things than one usually imagines, but in much less than we would like. In most cases, we will have to settle for probabilistic certainty, and sometimes only for plausibility, and sometimes even less than that, and perhaps be content with a doubt that will accompany us to the grave. However, to the extent that an individual has confidence in human intelligence in general, they must distrust their own opinion, which is somewhat the opposite of the attitude disseminated today, where people claim not to believe in absolute truths but believe with absolute faith in those relative truths that please them: there is a repugnant mixture of intellectual relativism with fanatic emotional dogmatism. Even if we acknowledge the difficulty of attaining the truth regarding almost all subjects, we must admit that, at least regarding some modest things, we can verify the human possibility of reaching the truth, from the moment we cultivate the notion of evidence, and above all, cultivate the norm of never denying that we know what we actually know.

9. Self-awareness, the birthplace of truth

It is important to learn to acknowledge what you know to be true. Even if they are insignificant truths, meditating on the obvious is perhaps the best way to become accustomed to truth, to overcome fear and unjust suspicion regarding the power of intelligence. For example, although almost all knowledge is relative or doubtful, you know that you cannot seriously doubt that you are here in this moment; you can pretend you’re not, but you cannot effectively doubt it. If there are so many obvious truths about insignificant things, imagine where we could go if we achieved evidence of this kind regarding truly important things! The sense of truth develops from the sense of evidence itself, and the sense of evidence has its roots in what you already know and know that you know. When you truly know something, you automatically know that you know, and if you know that you know, you know that you know that you know. This means that any effective knowledge also implies consciousness of this knowledge and the full admission of its truth. Intelligence, therefore, has a volitional aspect inseparably linked to its cognitive aspect.

Where does the training of consciousness to acknowledge truth begin? The first step in the learning of truth is to recognize those truths that only you know and that no one, other than yourself, can confirm or deny. For example, only you know your intentions, only you know the acts you have performed in secret, only you know the feelings you have not confessed. In these cases, you are the only witness, and that is where you will experience the radical and insurmountable difference between truth and falsehood. People who constantly deny the existence of truths do not know this experience; they have never given anything but false testimony of themselves before the tribunal of consciousness, they lie to themselves, and that is why they feel that everything in the world is a lie. Hegel said: self-awareness is the birthplace of truth. And Giambattista Vico observed that we only know perfectly well what we ourselves have done: only God knows the nature perfectly well because He created it. However, only we ourselves can know our own actions, as well as our thoughts and inner states. There is no one there to supervise us, no one who can defend us from ourselves.

10. Degrees of certainty

If we want to develop the sense of certainty, we must ask ourselves exactly about those things that only we know and that no one can know better than ourselves. These will serve as the model for all other certainties. The acquisition of any knowledge is perfectly useless if there is no reflective consciousness, which consists of the phrase “I know that I know,” or its complementary opposite, which is “I know that I don’t know.”

Even in doubtful matters, with a little reflection, you can delineate the boundary between possible and impossible knowledge. It would be sufficient if we could capture the degree of certainty or doubt that exists in each knowledge already acquired. There are four possible degrees of certainty:

  1. Certainty;
  2. Probability;
  3. Plausibility;
  4. Conjecture of possibility.

Certainty, for example, is when you say “I am here now” or “I am myself and not another.”

What is a probable opinion? It is an opinion where you can only have evident certainty (apodictic) regarding a specific or determinable degree of probability.

In other cases, you cannot even have that; you can only have an indeterminate probability, that is, plausibility, not rigorous probability.

And finally, in some cases, we can only have conjectures, such as asking whether there is intelligent life on other planets. Some will say yes, others will say no, and those who say yes are as right as those who say no. In this case, we only know a generic possibility, impossible to grade probabilistically.

Here is a good way to clean up your intellectual universe, to start afresh in good order. It involves asking yourself the following questions: Out of all the things you have studied, which ones do you know with absolute certainty? Which ones do you know as reasonable probabilities? Which ones do you know as plausible conjectures? Which ones do you know as mere possibilities? In short, how much is each of your knowledge worth?

Here is a bitter truth: if, regarding a subject, you believe that you possess certain knowledge but do not know whether that knowledge is certain, plausible, probable, or conjectural, then you absolutely know nothing about the subject. The evaluation of knowledge is part of knowledge itself. If there is no clear evaluation of the knowledge already acquired, you do not know the distinction between what you know and what you do not know, and that is the same as knowing nothing. One might ask: What good is an education that teaches you a bunch of things but does not teach you to evaluate and judge what you learn? There is no difference between you knowing something and being able to distinguish the true from the false within it, for to know is to know how to distinguish the true from the false, and nothing more than that. If you were to apply this set of distinctions to everything you have read or studied, if you were to classify all your opinions according to it, imagine the mountain of truthful knowledge you would have in the end.

Forming conviction is forming degrees of conviction. For example: Do you know that God exists with the same certainty that you know that you exist? If God exists, He is good: that is obvious. It would be good if God existed: that is also obvious. However, there is a great distance between thinking that it would be good if God existed and thinking that God actually exists. So, for example, if I have a discussion with someone and I think that I am right and they are wrong, what am I trying to say? I am trying to say: it would be good if I were right and they were wrong, or rather, it would be good for me. But there is also a great distance between thinking that it would be good if I were right and being absolutely certain of it. Unfortunately, we cannot be as certain about many things as we usually pretend to be. However, if you eliminate from your universe of beliefs a multitude of false certainties, you will see that in the end, a few unshakable certainties remain, and these are very valuable. But if you desire to preserve all your convictions equally, on the same level, without critical scaling, in the end, they will all be mixed together, and you will not have legitimate certainty about any of them, and you will end up doubting even that two plus two equals four, that you are here in this moment, and even that you exist. False certainty is the mother of pathological doubt.

Often, what happens is that individuals end up having absolute certainty about entirely conjectural things and have doubts about obvious and undeniable things because they do not know how to equate their certainties and doubts according to the greater or lesser security of the knowledge itself. Of course, there are things about which we would like to be certain. Wouldn’t you like to be certain, for example, about the immortality of the soul? Often, we need certain knowledge, and this knowledge eludes us, denies itself. But other times, there are knowledge claims that you believe you do not need, and yet they come with absolute certainty. So why don’t you accept them? An apparently useless but certain knowledge is less harmful than an apparently useful but false knowledge. If we learn to evaluate degrees of certainty not simply according to our desires but according to the thing itself, according to whether the subject allows for greater or lesser certainty, we will have made our minds obedient to the degrees of certainty offered by reality itself. This would also save us an enormous amount of work. It would save us the trouble of arguing in favor of things that are obvious and do not need any argument to support them, as well as the trouble of arguing in favor of the indefensible, the arbitrary, the nonsense.

This sense of docility towards truth apprehended by one’s own consciousness is transmitted to the students of this course as a practice, not just as homework to be done from today to tomorrow, but as a practice for the rest of their lives. Given any knowledge, the student is incessantly invited to ask the four decisive questions: Is this true? Is it probable? Is it plausible? Is it possible? The criterion of degrees of certainty is used throughout this course; it is the first and also the last lesson. And the first thing that should be reviewed with this criterion is any subject you have formally studied. Just with this review, you will already see that the mass of knowledge, of acquired information, begins to take on an organic, intelligible form, and for the first time, you have a clear idea of the culture you possess and the culture you lack. When the universe of your knowledge takes shape, you gain reflective awareness of what you know and what you do not know.

11. The Topography of Ignorance

The development of reflective consciousness can be exemplified in the following practice I give to the students of this course:

We are constantly acquiring information that comes to us through our five senses, reading, hearsay, etc., but we pay attention and give value to some of them while ignoring others. So I ask you: where do you always look, where do you often look, where do you occasionally look, and where do you never look? It is precisely the awareness of this selection that will give you the topography of the world, of your world. No personal world coincides extensively, quantitatively, with the objective world. But a complete personal world, endowed with unity like a living organism, already resembles the objective world precisely because of this organic unity and, essentially, it is an adequate map of the world, whereas the fragile, fragmented, and mechanical inner world resembles nothing but itself, with human-created fantasies. The difference lies not in the quantity of information, but precisely in its topography.

Self-aware topography produces a sense of profile, of clarity of things. This is exactly what reflective consciousness will do with your knowledge. From the moment you know that you know, you effectively know. And knowing that you know is also knowing when you don’t know. The generic and vague proclamation of ignorance is merely a hidden vanity, but the organized and critical repertoire of our ignorance is knowledge, effective and very important knowledge. The drawing of ignorance, the profile of ignorance, is a first knowing. And this profile of ignorance is precisely created by applying the scale of degrees of certainty. If you can map, on one side, your ignorance, and on the other side, the possible value of your acquired knowledge, you will have laid the foundation for a brilliant intellectual life. Do you now realize the difference between an education focused on cognitive faculties (memory, imagination, reasoning, etc.) and an education focused on intelligence? What matters here is not so much the knowledge itself, but the awareness of knowledge. Consciousness, cum + scientia, is precisely this: knowing that you know what you know.

An awakened consciousness not only makes the knowledge you already have clearer but also prepares you and enhances your ability to acquire new knowledge with much greater efficiency than before. So, in order to master a whole new field of science, history, or art, sometimes all you need is assistance in reaching the fundamental principles of that area; the rest you will discover on your own because you will have acquired the sense, the “nose,” for the unity of knowledge, and you will learn many things in a more or less synthetic and simultaneous manner, where before you needed detailed explanations, repetitions, exercises, etc. It is clear that this greater integration of consciousness, with the consequent increase in learning capacity, occurs not only in the field of formal studies but in all areas of life, gradually revealing their interconnections. The benefit this brings extends not only to intellectual matters but to the entire psyche, the entire personality.

Starting from the premise that everyone already knows something—knows from living, knows because of memory, because they have witnessed events, because they have read a book, heard about something, watched television, read a newspaper, and in the end, everyone knows something—then the task is to transform that knowledge into self-awareness. If effective knowledge, if intelligence, is fundamentally identified with self-awareness, the knowledge you possess will only become intelligent knowledge if it is self-aware knowledge, meaning that you subject all this knowledge to the following questions:

  1. To what extent do I really know this?
  2. How valuable is this knowledge?
  3. What is lacking for it to be complete?

In other words, start by reviewing the things you believe you know. It is worth noting that this knowledge does not refer only to things studied formally through official channels of education, but above all to those studies, experiences, and thoughts that have solidified certain convictions within you. Another important point to emphasize is that when you dedicate, out of professional or educational obligation not internalized but imposed from outside, greater attention to topics that do not deeply interest you and you do not develop authentic interest, but approach the subject with peripheral attention as if on autopilot, you harm your intelligence and almost inevitably drift away from the truth. Because if intelligence is the capacity to grasp the truth and to grasp it in a true situation, the mere fact of devoting false attention to the subject already hinders the knowledge of truth; it is a vice that does not help you develop intelligence in any way. We can only use intelligence with one hundred percent of its strength where there is one hundred percent interest, and unfortunately, interest does not depend entirely on us because the interest we have in this or that problem may arise from an external situation, chance, contingency, fear, fortuitous desire, and so on. This also means that the process of developing intelligence cannot follow a predetermined program like the study of a particular discipline. It has to ebb and flow, more or less guided by the flow of real interests of the moment and the possibility of developing new interests.

at
Labels:

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)