Uncertainty is what humans fear most.
It has haunted mankind throughout history.
What can we be sure of in life? what do we really know to be true?
Lacking the answers to these very basic existential questions leaves us feeling fragile and full of doubt.
How are we to deal with this difficult situation ?
In different times of history, people have dealt with it differently. As mankind progressed, more sophisticated methods of dealing with uncertainty were introduced.
Let us begin with first defining the terms that we are discussing.
Knowledge- what is it? how is it understood?
Knowing might seem and has often been taken to be a relationship between two terms: the subject (the knower) and the object (the known)[1] .
Plato, Greek Philosopher stated "Knowledge must be of what is real, stable and unchanging ". Then asked himself what satisfies these conditions?
Following the Heraclitean doctrine that everything is in a state of change, all material objects are subject to the constant process of coming-to-be and passing away, he concluded that knowledge cannot be subjective since it may not involve the world of sense experience.
Finally Plato reaches an unfinished conclusion, That Knowledge is true belief plus something else. In the end this relation between belief and knowledge was not established, but it wasn't rejected either.[2]
The theory of knowledge has had an extensive amount of thought and philosophy put into it. But for the sake of this essay we must conclude that to know, is to have an understanding or grasp of something, to be familiar with or to be able to recognize or identify something or someone.[3]
Through Myth and Logos people understood the truth of their times. Their "today's truth " gave them certainty that their "knowledge" was valid. How then, can we say that to Know is objective?
Historically the Greeks were known for their usage of Myths to explain the origin of man and other existential questions that arose. Within the Greek domain there were common myths shared by all of the people. This was due to the commerce that took place between the polis, since the merchants exchanged their own myths with the one another. Then, there existed more local myths which were limited within each individual city-state.
These myths helped the people to come-to-grips with their lives, and provided them with stability, since there was no need to question further about the validity of how life operates.
This brief bubble of peace burst with the invasion of Indoeuropean cultures. This brought with it aggressive exposure to the invaders conflicting myths. This lead to a sudden and abrupt opening of the eyes that was disconcerting. Which was the beginning of what lead to rational thinking- the need to fill the gaps in understanding left by this clash of cultures.
Through these gaps emerged Logos, a new paradigm.
Logos replaced dogmatic belief, because the people no longer were prepared to accept whatever was fed to them. They needed reasons. They needed a less supernatural explanation, something more down-to-Earth.
With the creation of logos, myth was set aside as an explicative, but people still believed in the existence and importance of their deities.
People throughout history have and will always experience today's truth , so we are convinced of what we think is true until comes "tomorrow" and shows us otherwise . An example of this in our very own time is the introduction of quantum physics which defies logic (logos) as we knew it and runs counter intuitive to everything we previously "knew" to be true.
So how is knowledge subjective?
We as people have experienced the feeling of deep conviction at one time or another in our life, that we "know" and others are wrong. How can we explain this? Didn't Plato say that knowledge cannot be subjective? But then were is the room for opinion? People spent most of their lives debating about the things that they "knew" or wanted to clarify.
In this case, knowing must be subjective, because at some point in history people "knew" that Zeus controlled the lightning, but then they were corrected when people discovered the electrical nature of lightning so they "knew" what caused it. Next they'll discover another "reality", because like Heraclitus said everything is in a state of change, our minds most of all . Like quantum physics is our truth today and we think we "know", so I say that to "know" will always have a subjective connotation.
By: Leah Horowitz
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