To convince you of the truth I must present an argument. Let us consider, what argument will convince you or ought to convince you?
You have a certain belief. I have another. We may at least both agree to that. But what more can we say? For me, the flower is red. For you, it is blue. I say, "the flower is red." You say, "No. It is blue." Who is correct?
Let me present a criterion. I say, "we shall agree it is red if my method determines that it is red," but you say, "no, I do not accept your method," and we are once more at an impasse.
Or perhaps you do accept my criterion. Perhaps, you are even convinced. Very well, but even should you now be convinced, I have only convinced you presently, but you remain unconvinced in the past. Or, to see the problem another way, if I convince you now that I will present a proof to you in the future, even still, you may rightly reason that this only means you are bound to be deceived.
So I cannot convince you. But it is much worse than mere flowers. For now we disagree on free-will or determinism, atheism or religion, science or mysticism, utilitarianism or dogmatism, and so many other questions. You see things one way. I see them another. Must you accept any proof I put forward of my position? If I convince you that you will change your attitude about politics because of what I will tell you, you will nonetheless remain in your current belief until that time should come. So we cannot even privilege the position bound to prevail.
What if I am skeptical and insist that you remain indifferent to all that you cannot prove? Skepticism is a strange and futile doctrine, in whatever form it comes, for nothing is proved to begin with, whether it is immediately real or mediately. If it is immediately real, then it simply exists to us, and it is real for us, as with perception. Otherwise, if it is mediately real, then it may be still just as real as what is immediate. There is no difference of quality to the believer.
If the skeptic and the believer meet, then the skeptic may say, "justify your belief." The believer may rightly respond, "my belief is already justified, since I am as certain in what I believe as I am that I exist." How will you contest this claim? For you, what is beyond your senses lacks confidence. For the other, it is just as sure as if he had seen it with his own two eyes. Consider if you tell the believer "But what about all those who believed and were wrong? You could also be wrong." The believer then simply responds, "That is just as coherent as to say that someone heard a sound, but that they were wrong about having heard it. Belief is a sense of truth." You would have no response. The basic problem is that you do not have access to the mode of consciousness in which his belief is certain, or if you do (for example certain belief in the case of the sun rising each day) you pretend not to. So skepticism is not a basis for discriminating who is right because skepticism itself is just another criterion for truth anyone may hold or not hold.
Well then, can we at least agree about what we disagree about? Even if I do not agree with you, I can at least understand what you believe. Can this even be, though? Even this fails, for we not only believe different things, but we do not even believe the same things about the words we use. We do not even express the same thoughts in the same ways. Thus, to you my speech of God is mere incoherence, and to me your speech of beings beyond consciousness is likewise incoherent. If I take out a dictionary will that serve as an authority to demonstrate to you my meaning? Even if you should comprehend my meaning, you are not obliged to accept it.
Thus, we remain at an impasse. I cannot convince you. I cannot agree with you about what we are saying, and indeed, I cannot even get you to understand what it is I am attempting to communicate.
And here, for many, the journey ends. For many, this path will go no further, simply because my reality is different from yours. You have a reality, and my reality quite simply is not real for it.
There is the world. All that is true. All that could be and ever was and will be. There is the universe. There is the totality of things. My words correspond to something within this totality, they are something, and perhaps mean something. You sense in this state of affairs of what my words are and perhaps mean, something which creates in you the desire to speak, and so you speak. What it is that my words mean is something not well-formed, which does not correspond to anything, possible or real. Or perhaps it refers to something possible, but not real. Either way, you sense it right to speak, and so you do.
This above paragraph is how the world is to you. To me, it is a different way. To me, my words are intelligible and symbolize a real truth. Between the two of us there is only our perspectives, our perspectives of what the other's perspectives are, and so forth. Is there no objective truth? If I say there is objective truth, than I have said it. It is my belief. It is real for me. Is it real for you? Perhaps so, and perhaps not. But it makes no difference to your world, to your consciousness of reality, whether there is or isn't objective truth, only to mine and to those like me who believe in an objective truth.
Perhaps to you I am just a man uttering nonsense. There is no thought in your world that there may be a world outside of it in which what I am saying has sense. To you, there is only one possibility, the one where my words are nonsense. Nevertheless, in my world there is still this possibility, but there is also the possibility, and indeed the reality, of meaning to my words. But this doesn’t matter, because that meaning doesn’t exist. These words which you read are meaningless as long as you don’t understand them.
This is an "argument from ignorance" and it is valid. What we are ignorant of does not exist. Proof: demonstrate the existence of what you are ignorant of. Better yet, believe you are ignorant of something while remaining ignorant of what the word "something" signifies. If you believe that what you are ignorant of does exist, then you are conscious of this "existence beyond" in an abstract way as existing in some consciousness that is "other" to your own, but which you nonetheless have indirect access to. Very well, but then you are not really ignorant of it, are you? You are knowing of it indirectly, and even this indirect consciousness is a consciousness that somehow it is not just abstraction, not just a vague generality of "something" out beyond. It is thus a particular in a world in which it exists as a particular.
Each man is a world. In each world, at each moment, there is the whole world. This world is not in detail, but abstractly it is. In this moment, there is the earth, the sky, all reason, etc. It is all there, if only lingering at the edge of my consciousness in abstract. It is the whole world. There is no other. The past, the future, and the present, are all here now in myself, because I know them.
You are a different man, a different world. Nothing which I have said is true to you. Something else is true. You assert it, "the world is round." You assert what is to you in that moment. You do not say, "it is to me." You simply say, "It is." You do not see it as a subjective preference. You may only reinterpret it as such if you comprehend what I am communicating regarding the truly radical nature of our intersubjective fragmentation. We are two worlds. We are two truths. Your world is, for me, beyond reality itself, in a reality that is only real in some secondary sense, the primary sense being the world of my direct consciousness in this very moment, unabstract and direct. I do not dare to say what the world is for you. Perhaps you lack any consciousness of this distinction.
And this is why I say we are at an impasse. Perhaps you understand what I am saying, that for each of us there is a world which consists of all the things which coesse, which exist together, and that each world exists apart from the others. Perhaps you don't. There is a gulf of ignorance between us which is only bridged by my abstract knowledge of there being a world beyond, and likewise you only bridge it through a similar consciousness. If you do not share my consciousness, you do not even know what these words mean, and so I write in vain.
If, however, you do understand, then we have some common ground. If you understand, then in fact we do agree on something. Indeed, we are both conscious of the same exact thing, that thing being intersubjectivity. It is like when we are both speaking of the same thing by "numbers," so that we can do math together with a method. We can do math because we are conscious of the same reality, logical structure, and even if we communicate it differently or fail to be conscious of all its aspects at once, we already are conscious of its abstract being whose details are not contradicted by an explication, since its details are one and the same with its being.
If you understand what I mean by "abstract conception" then we are on the same page. We both read these two words and understand by them a concept that already is its details, which stretches somewhat beyond our consciousness, but whose essential being is within our consciousness. If you are not conscious of math in this way, or if you are not conscious of intersubjectivity in this way, then we simply are not speaking of the same thing by "math" or "consciousness." If we are not speaking of the same thing, nothing real for you contradicts what is real for me, for you lack the consciousness of an intersubjective distinction which grasps the abstract nature of what is beyond itself, and thus are not conscious of my world not existing, since no intersubjective worlds exist for you, and thus the very idea of truth and falsehood do not exist in your world, for if you mean something different by truth and falsehood than what I mean, then I have no possible idea anymore what the symbols of "true" and "falsehood" refer to, so we are no longer speaking of the same thing by "true" and "falsehood," nor even of related things.
If you understand that I have a distinct consciousness from your own, then you understand that when I am conscious of you, I am conscious of the union of I and you. I am conscious of our union, I join the two of us together so that we conceptually exist together. Since consciousness of abstractions, as you are to me, always stretch beyond one's own consciousness, then you are really beyond me in the fullness of the conception we both only have abstract and incomplete glosses of.
"We" that is, the collection of I and you, do not exist in my consciousness fully. We do not exist in your consciousness fully. Both particular conceptions of "we" are incomplete. Both conceptions refer to an imagined, conceptual union which we both believe in. This believed union is itself a coessense, an existing-together. Therefore, it is a unified whole with all its particulars filled out from the abstraction, which is the consciousness of the whole and its particulars. This is not my consciousness nor yours, so it is a higher consciousness. Likewise, we generalize this case to the case of all things, to the case of everything, and conclude with the realization of an all-encompassing world of existence, which world is a world like my world or your world, only this world has no lack, has no void of intersubjectivity. We call this world "the universe." We call the subject whose perspective is represented by it "God."
The skeptic can be skeptical of many things, but not of God. He may lack belief, but that is his ignorance, since if he is conscious of intersubjectivity than I am conscious that his intersubjectivity is the same thing as mine is, and so that he accesses an objective perspective in bringing my own into his indirectly. This is simply the nature of consciousness as addition is the nature of math. One need not be conscious of a multiplicity of beings, need not be conscious of math. That is a perspective. If one is conscious of math, then it is my math, or else we mean different things by the word. If one is conscious of truth, he means it in the sense I do, or else it is not truth, but merely a word which happens to be spelled the same way. Then if it is truth it accesses God. This is simply the necessity of how reality is. If you understand that you disagree with me, then you understand that God's perspective, an objective perspective, exists, since in my consciousness there is an abstraction of the perspective that encompasses us both, with details unfilled. These missing details are nonetheless intimately connected with the form in my thought, such that the form of the details is the details, and such that my consciousness of the form is the abstract consciousness of God's consciousness.
Thus from pure relativity we arrive at absolute truth, and see that the absolute truth is presupposed along with the multiplicity of opinion. There can be no opinion without Truth, no many without the One, no ignorance without omniscience.1
The above essay is one of a great number of philosophical texts I’ve written over the years that I will hopefully be slowly publishing here, although I may modify or scrap some altogether where my thinking on the matter has shifted. Look forward to more dense metaphysics to come!