AFTERWORD

AFTERWORD

On Not Knowing

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A friend read the first version of what became this book and said: nothing here is new. He was right, and I rewrote it.

He also said: you impose your conclusions on the reader. This was also right, and I rewrote it differently.

He also said: you dismiss religion too easily. This was the most important thing he said, and it sent me back to sources I had not read carefully enough — back to the mystics and the theologians and the philosophers of religion who are more philosophically serious than the version of religion that the modern critique typically engages.

I owe that friend a debt that this acknowledgment only partially pays. The philosophy that survives honest criticism is the only philosophy worth having, and the friend who provides the criticism is rarer and more valuable than the friend who provides agreement.

What I want to say in closing is something about the kind of reading this book requires and the kind of reader it hopes to produce.

The book does not want to produce followers. A philosophy that produces followers rather than independent thinkers has failed at the level of its deepest intention, regardless of how sophisticated its arguments. The goal is not agreement. The goal is the activation of the reader's own capacity for genuine inquiry — the inquiry that does not stop when it encounters a satisfying answer but continues asking whether the answer is genuinely satisfying or merely comfortable.

The reader who finishes this book and agrees with everything in it has not been changed by it. The reader who finishes it with more questions than they started with, with a less settled relationship to their own certainties, with the discomfort of genuine inquiry rather than the comfort of borrowed conclusions — that reader has done the work the book was written to enable. Agreement is the reader's gift to the author's ego. Genuine questioning is the reader's gift to themselves.

I do not know whether this book is good. I know that it is honest — as honest as I am capable of being given the limitations of my position, my formation, my available conceptual vocabulary. The honesty is its primary claim on your attention. Not expertise, not authority, not the credential of institutional philosophy. The honest attempt of a person who has found the questions genuinely important and who has tried to engage them without the protection of a predetermined answer.

Perhaps this is enough. Perhaps it is not. I find that I can live with the uncertainty.

That, if anything, is the point.

— Syed Muhammad Hur Jaffri

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The question is not whether you are free.

The question is whether you can bear to keep asking.

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