The Philosophy department in which I am based runs a weekly ‘Philosophy Society’, where we discuss whatever weird and wonderful philosophical question the postgraduate facilitator of the week has come up with. We never reach an answer, though. There are always too many different good but contrary points, too many ‘what abouts’, to ever settle on a conclusion. But that’s okay. I always remind them that the point is not to agree on an answer, but to explore it as fully as we possibly can. The point is not easy answers, but rather to problematise those answers. Even if it means we end up with none of our own.
This is not a practice intended to be kept to the Philosophy Society or to the Philosophy classroom. It’s important for us to examine the easy answers, to explore every ‘what about’, to consider the different and contrary views in every situation, about everything. It’s part of the Socratic legacy, after all. Sometimes we might reach conclusions and thus beliefs we can rely on to guide our actions. This is always helpful. But often, much like in the Philosophy Society, we don’t. We are left in a state of ambiguity, knowing that we can’t accept the answers that are there, and yet also that we have no answers of our own.
The existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir (2018) claims that ambiguity is central to the human experience. We exist in the ambiguity between our facticity and our freedom, immanence and transcendence, both subject and object. Beauvoir argues that we need to recognise and accept this ambiguity in our existence, rather than try, as philosophers tend to do, to rationalise our way out of it. We need to learn to be comfortable with ambiguity.
This is not only an ontological claim. There is, I argue, a necessary epistemic ambiguity as well. We cannot know everything (this is something we do know). We tend to divvy up knowledge between the categories of ‘that which I know’ and ‘that which I do not know’, and between ‘that which is true’ and ‘that which is false’ (of course, what it means for something to be ‘true’ is itself an ambiguous topic that is beyond the scope of what I can consider here). The first two categories, that which we know and which is true, tend to be what guides us. It’s satisfyingly binary: we know or we don’t, it’s true or it’s not. But as is often the case with anything perceived to be binary, the reality is often not that simple, that convenient, or that satisfying.
The students in the Philosophy Society could not sort their contemplations and the answers they reached neatly into ‘I know this’ and ‘I don’t know this’ boxes. They knew an answer, they knew many answers. They both knew what they didn’t know and oftentimes found that they didn’t know all that they actually knew. Many things, contrary things, turn out to be true and yet irreconcilable. It’s complicated. It’s ambiguous. In paying dues to critical thinking, we find ourselves torn between all the things we know to be true and yet which we cannot integrate into a clear answer.
Let me give another example. I, and many others, know about the genocide occurring in Gaza (at the time of writing) and know that it is wrong. This, as far as we are concerned, is true. I also believe that when we are confronted with an injustice, we should do something about it. This is another of my guiding beliefs which I take to be true. However, I also believe that many forms of action are performative and ineffectual. At the same time, I believe that one should rather do something than nothing, even if that something is ultimately ineffectual. I also believe one should beware of action which is simply a case of virtue signalling. But I simultaneously believe in the importance of being clear on one’s position and owning it. And I also believe that, as human beings, we only have the capacity to care for a limited number of things before we do harm to ourselves. But to be aware of some injustice and not care about it is wrong. But we should also protect ourselves and pick our battles. But, but, but.
All of these things are beliefs which I take to be true. Reconciling them into an answer, a guide to action, proves to be difficult. The problem is that this irreconcilability can lead to no action at all – a kind of stupefied daze in which one has no idea where to go, which belief to follow. Which in itself is unhelpful. We must find a way to embark on meaningful action despite messy epistemic ambiguity.
Jonathan Ichikawa’s (2024) notion of epistemic courage might be helpful here. Contra-scepticism, Ichikawa argues that it is not always more prudent to refrain from belief when there is a lack of evidence, and that sometimes it might actually be immoral to do so. Refraining from forming a belief or judgement might moreover have politically conservative or even harmful implications because it simply leaves things unchanged, maintaining the status quo. Ichikawa argues that we should have epistemic courage, as opposed to epistemic anxiety, a concept from Jennifer Nagel (2011), in which we feel that we should refrain from forming a belief until all the evidence is irrefutable (if this is even possible). In being epistemically courageous, we make the leap towards forming a belief or judgement despite anxieties that we don’t know enough.
Ichikawa speaks to a situation wherein we are concerned that we do not know enough. I, on the other hand, have been speaking to a situation in which we know too much, have formed too many irreconcilable beliefs and so are stuck in a state of inaction, thereby also maintaining the status quo. But perhaps we should also have a kind of epistemic courage, one that accepts the epistemic ambiguity we reside in and refuses the epistemic anxiety of refraining from action for fear it is the wrong one, because of all that is contrary to it. Maybe there is courage in choosing to have faith in the truth of our beliefs, despite how irreconcilable they are, and being brave enough to pick a course of action – any course of action – while still remaining aware of the ambiguity this choice arises within.
Perhaps we need to be courageous in accepting the ambiguity of our epistemic situation, accepting that there is no such thing as a perfectly correct and right action, and yet act anyway. Perhaps we can act despite the fact that we don’t have a clear answer, because we recognise that to refrain from any action is not only epistemic cowardice (a la Ichikawa) but also maintains a status quo we do not want to maintain. What if we can act without having all the answers? Maybe we need to learn to be courageously comfortable in ambiguity, and act anyway.
Works Cited
De Beauvoir, S. 2018. The Ethics of Ambiguity. (Trans. by B. Frechtman). New York: Open Road Inaugurated Media, Inc.
Ichikawa, J. 2024. Epistemic Courage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nagel, J. 2011. Epistemic Anxiety and Adaptive Invariantism. Philosophical Perspectives. 24(1), pp. 407-435.
By Kayleigh Timmer
Kayleigh Timmer is completing a PhD at Stellenbosch University. Her areas of interest include Feminist Philosophy, broadly construed, Existentialism, Phenomenology, Critical Theory, and the Philosophy of Emotions. Her current areas of research include existential analyses of femininity, complicity, and bad faith; the affective experience of gender-based violence; and the relationship between social media and subversive socio-political praxis.