TOWARDS THE ART OF THINKING WITH UNCERTAINTY A story of the troubled relationship of the Western mind with complexity

摘要

This paper is an investigation into the relationship of truth with uncertainty in thernWestern intellectual tradition. It is suggested that the Western approach to truth hasrnessentially been one of thinking against and around uncertainty, and that we are presentlyrnchallenged to learn to think with uncertainty, if our further pursuit of truth is to be fruitful.rnMy approach is basically metaphorical as a mode of thinking that more easilyrnaccommodates uncertainty and complexity. I start by noting the difficulty that Westernrnscience and philosophy seem to have with the implications of thernuncertainty/indeterminacy that has come with the increasing complexity of the views andrnthe realities dealt with. The sciences of complexity depict the nature of our world as arncomplex, fluid whole, as a world of process and dynamic interrelations. Yet, even in thosernsciences there is a remarkable resistance to accepting complexity as irreducible andrnindeterminacy or uncertainty as an ineradicable feature of all our human knowledge. Irnsuggest that our very notion of "truth" is at odds with complexity and uncertainty. Basedrnon the work of the transdisciplinary thinker Morin, who proposes that in a complex worldrnthe very organization of our knowledge and the structure of our thinking have to berncomplex and allow for such insults to traditional logic as paradox, recursivity, orrnuncertainty, and drawing on the writings of the eco-philosopher Abram, who emphasizesrnthe crucial role of alphabetic literacy in the shaping of the Western approach to truth, thisrnpaper offers a possible deconstruction of our Western notion of truth as based inrnabstraction, in the logic of literal-minded thinking, and in reductionistic simplification.rnThe search for the Truth—the grand unifying theory, the absolute, God—, as a strivingrnfor certainty, is shown to be antagonistic to complexity and depicted as obstructing thernway to the Unknown, the abyss beyond all grounds of certainty. The Western striving forrncertainty is considered a cultural attempt to provide a rationally-derivedrnexistential/metaphysical grounding that would substitute the lost sense of ecological,rnsocial, and spiritual embeddedness characteristic of prehistoric and present-dayrnIndigenous oral cultures. The construction of a rationally solid, metaphysical ground ofrncertainty, as executed by Descartes and as essential to the Scientific Revolution, is arnprerequisite a) for the Western project of erecting an artificial, static structure ofrnphilosophical truths or scientific facts and laws over a dynamic world of process andrnuncertainty and b) for an increasingly autonomous ego to keep safe and afloat on such anrnocean of flux and dynamic interrelations. Finally, uncertainty is explored as intrinsicallyrnrelated to—rather than antithetical to—truth, and as key for a complex integration of thernobjectifying, abstracting, methodologically and conceptually mediated way to truth of