EPILOGUE

EPILOGUE

The Critique Turns on Itself

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This book has argued, across nine parts, that several of the structures we rely on to make our lives coherent are less solid than they feel. The self is more constructed and less authored than we experience it to be. Moral certainty is more contingent and less cosmic. Religion was dismissed too quickly and deserves a more serious hearing than its critics have given it. The state naturalizes its power. Suffering resists philosophy's best attempts to account for it. Love is proximity as well as tenderness. Fame is mortality's shadow. Death is the argument that the other arguments have been trying to answer.

And now I want to say what I should have said from the beginning: I am not certain of any of this.

Not uncertain in the performative way of the philosopher who hedges to seem appropriately humble while expecting the reader to recognize that the hedges are rhetorical. Genuinely uncertain — uncertain in the way that the honest examination of these questions produces, which is the recognition that the tools available for the examination are themselves products of the conditions being examined, and that this circularity has not been resolved and may not be resolvable.

What I am certain of is the necessity of the inquiry. The inquiry is necessary not because it produces answers — it does not, or at least it produces answers that require constant revision — but because the alternative is the unexamined life, and the unexamined life is not a smaller philosophical error. It is the abandonment of the project of being genuinely human rather than functionally human. Functional humanity — the execution of the behaviors required for social participation and biological continuation — is available without philosophy. Genuine humanity — the consciousness that reflects on its own conditions, that asks whether the life being lived is the life that could be lived, that takes seriously the brief and unrepeatable time it has — this requires the examination.

The examined life does not guarantee happiness. It does not guarantee comfort. It does not even guarantee that the examination is accurate. What it guarantees is this: the person who has examined is not sleepwalking. They are awake to the life they are living, with all the difficulty that wakefulness entails and all the realness that sleep cannot provide.

Is wakefulness worth the difficulty? I think so. I hold this with the provisionality that everything in this book is held with. But I hold it.