We live in an immense supermarket. Everything is available, often in innumerable forms and shades. We spend most of our time walking through the shelfs, pondering whether we want this kind of peanut butter or that kind, often forgetting that we don’t really need any. Our culture has little patience with metaphysical systems, with eternal truths, with God(s), with anything that sounds or promises to be everlasting. After all, that would not be good for business. We are fast multitaskers, always busy, often quite superficial in our encounters. We surf more than we dive.
If there is anything that is certain in our society and lives is that we do not hold anything to be certain. Reason doesn’t give you certainty: the argument that seems valid today, will be challenged tomorrow (look at the history of philosophy, both West and East, to find ample evidence). Science doesn’t give you certainty: the theory that works today, will be proved to be incomplete or will be superseded tomorrow (the history of natural sciences, but also of medicine and psychology provide again ample evidence). Spiritual trends are even more volatile and unstable: Transcendental Meditation used to be fashionable in the 1980', but now everybody is in love with Mindfulness; Buddhism seems to have won over Christianity, but what about (neo)Tantra, isn’t it much better? So we roam through the corridors of the cultural and spiritual supermarket, picking up this or that, based on the last news or the most trendy hashtag.
Nonetheless, there are already two things we can deduces with some certainty from this situation.
First, since we can doubt everything we necessarily suffer from the “fear of missing out”. We’re choosing this brand of peanut butter, but what about the other? We can’t know for sure that the other one wasn’t better after all. Being ultimately unsure in any decision means that we are naturally more sensitive than ever to the fact that our decisions, being ungrounded, could be wrong or at least sub-optimal. Maybe the alternative was better, and we can never exclude this option.
Second, since we can doubt whether we should follow the crowed, join the creed of a given community, or feel part of a specific people, doubt makes us always individualized in our assessment of what we should embrace. When we doubt, it’s actually “me” who doubts whether “I” should embrace this or that. “I” can’t trust anything else, since I can doubt that “I am” part of something else, or that "they" are right. Following a community today is regarded as a form of weakness. Where did your critical thinking go? Aren't you doubting about them too? How couldn't you? The experience of doubt brings us down to ourselves (Descartes wasn't wrong on this), even when we try to find some temporary escape and follow someone else for a while.
Hence, the experience of doubt reveals that “I am alone, and I am full of fear of missing out what might be best for me”. Now, look for a moment at this situation. What is the condition of possibility of doubting? What makes it possible, for me, to doubt about this or that? If you think a bit deeper, you’ll see that doubt has to do with freedom. I could not doubt if I wasn’t free. When something is necessary, there is no doubt about it. Doubt and freedom go together. If there is doubt, I must be free. Don't ask me what exactly freedom is. I don't know. All theory I could give is just a theory, you could doubt it. Just look for now at the experience: we can doubt about freedom, so we must free of doing so!
Good. But then, take a step further: what is the condition of possibility for this freedom? “Freedom” means here the possibility of saying “yes” or “no” to what is proposed to us, to pick this or that brand of peanut butter from the shelf. Well, what makes this freedom possible? Of course, there are options that are given. However, if they were necessary, we would not be free to choose, we would not doubt. Yet we doubt, so we are free. But why are we free? What is the one fundamental experience that necessarily requires freedom? You can work without freedom (slaves work pretty well). You can learn without freedom (parrots and dogs also learn pretty well). But you can’t love without freedom. Love is not just one experience, it’s the fundamental experience. Take all love out of your life, and you simply won’t be here anymore, you would not have been born, and you would not be able to survive. There is no love without freedom. So if there is freedom, then there is love. More: if there is freedom, it is because love makes freedom possible. A common mistake of philosophers is try to understand the nature of freedom in itself. They didn’t realize that freedom is a consequence of love, so they can't really figure out where is freedom coming from. It is because we love, that we are free. But then, what does this mean? Can you love alone? Of course not!
Primarily, love is a relation, it’s an opening towards another. However, here we’re talking about a fundamental kind of love, something that is a condition of possibility for all freedom and doubt, a love that creates us as beings capable of freedom and love. This can’t be just the ordinary love towards another human being or animal, since that love presupposes that both have been designed to be open to love and its freedom. Here it’s clear that we reach the tip of a springboard, we approach the need for a jump. The jump leads towards something like this text:
"As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.” (John 15:9-15)
Now you’ll say. Oh no, please, not the Gospel! We don’t know what to do with this idea of God the Father, eternal, omnipotent, etc. Who ever saw it? That’s fine. But remember our condition: we doubt. Now, doubt can never bring about certainty, right? So, when you doubt that this passage is talking about anything real, at the same time you cannot rule out that maybe it actually does. Towards this passage you can only doubt, hence you can’t be 100% certain that it is not telling you something true. But look: you’re doubting. Why? Because you’re free. Why? Because there is love. Because someone loved you so much that made you free, in order for you to be able to love Them in return, if you so wanted. And that One is now talking to you, now, from this text, asking: “will you love me? will you remain with me?”
If you doubt, you can’t rule out that this passage is saying the truth (which means: it is giving you the freedom of saying "yes" or "no" to the love that it offers and asks from you). Nevertheless, if you’re doubting, you can also recognize that you must be free, and that freedom is connected with love, precisely as this passage is asserting. This does not force you to assent, precisely because this would be against the request for love that it elicits. Yet, it opens the possibility that you could eventually assent. Why not, after all? What am I really afraid of missing here?
Therefore, when we doubt, we always face a dramatic choice: either keep roaming through the immense supermarket of our contemporary age, or realize that what we really need is not there on the shelfs, but just outside, waiting for us in open air. We can’t buy in the supermarket a genuine remedy for our condition. The only salvation is getting out of there, through a free and deliberate decision. Then we won’t fear anymore of missing anything out, because we’ll get everything that we might ever need: unconditional, personal, true love. Think about it. Doubt!
Note: a more extensive and elaborate version of these thoughts is articulated in the “Meditations on the Holy Week”, but as they are in Italian for now, I thought I might share this bit in English for now, as a reflection for the 40-days period.
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