Truls Ljungström’s Reviews > On Doubt > Status Update

Denna bok tvingar till eftertanke.

The symptoms of this statement abound. The intellect’s suicide, a fruit of its own intellectualization, manifests itself in every field. In the field of philosophy, it produces Existentialism and Formal Logic, two abdications of the intellect in favor of a raw and unarticulated experience, therefore, the end of philosophy.

Through us the Modern Age achieves its aim. But the doubt of doubt, nihilism, is an unbearable existential situation. The total loss of faith, the madness of the all-enveloping nothingness, the absurdity of choice within this nothingness, are unbearable situations. In this sense, we are the overcoming of the Modern Age: through us, the Modern Age is reduced to the absurd.

Kant stated that skepticism is a place of rest for reason, although it is not a dwelling.

As a moral experience, it is torture. Doubt, allied to curiosity, is the cradle of research, therefore, of all systematic knowledge. In a distilled state, doubt kills all curiosity and is the end of all knowledge.

Doubt is a polyvalent state of mind. It could mean the end of a faith or the beginning of another. It could even, if taken to the extreme, be instituted as “skepticism,” that is, as a kind of inverted faith. In moderate doses it stimulates thought. In excessive doses, it paralyzes all mental activity. Doubt, as an intellectual exercise, provides one of the few pure pleasures we know.