Typically, a person does not believe that her belief is a belief. If she does come to believe that a belief is a belief, she will recognize it for what it is, a mere belief, and no longer wholeheartedly believe in it. “To believe is to know that one believes, and to know that one believes is no longer to believe… every belief is a belief that falls short, one never wholly believes what one believes.” (Being and Nothingness, p. 69) A person is able to suspend disbelief in a belief because she fails to spell out to herself the fact that a belief is merely a belief. Spelling out the policy of not spelling out undermines the policy. Coming to believe that a belief is merely a belief undermines the belief. If a person comes to believe that a belief is a belief, then she ceases to be convinced by it and loses faith in it, because by its very nature, belief implies doubt.

Wittgenstein realized that the expression ‘I believed’ always means ‘I no longer believe.’ Therefore, ‘I believe’ cannot truly be the present tense of ‘i believed.’ The actual present tense of ‘I believed’ must express the lack of belief. ‘I believe’ doesn’t express lack of belief, although it does express a measure of doubt. If a person said ‘I believe in the existence of God,’ then it is because she is not certain of the existence of God. If God’s existence was certain, it would be as strange to say ‘I believe in the existence of chairs,’ extreme skeptics notwithstanding, the existence of which is certain.

Belief is an attitude that is only relevant when a person is uncertain. She can believe what she doesn’t know for certain. However, she doesn’t also believe what she knows, for certain, even if it’s impossible to disbelieve what she knows for certain. That one cannot disbelieve what one knows does not mean one believes what one knows. One doesn’t believe what one knows, she knows it. ‘I believe’ is redundant when a person is talking of matters about which she is certain.

Not to say that to refrain from any talk of belief is to be certain, but rather, that to talk meaningfully of belief is to reveal uncertainty, even if the use of ‘I believe’ is used to indicate the “unwavering firmness of belief.” (BN, p. 69) Beliefs can be firm, strongly and widely held, frequently expressed, but because they are beliefs they are always uncertain.

For instance, increasing the number of believers in a particular religious doctrine in no way makes the doctrine any more certain. Evangelism, the drive to recruit believers to a doctrine, is a reaction to the uncertainty inherent in religious faith. The evangelist is concerned with the belief of others in order to distract himself from the fact that his own belief is just a belief. If he honestly examined his own belief he would expose it as ‘necessarily uncertain” so he busies himself with the beliefs of others. For him, the beliefs of others is a thing, an objectified belief that is firmly based upon itself, rather than a mere disposition based upon a fragile suspension of disbelief. Consequently, the evangelist is in bad faith towards others because he denies them their freedom by regarding them as believer things incapable of going beyond their “state of convictions.” If someone stopped believing, the evangelist would regard them as corrupted or deluded, for they did not reach a decision on their own free will.

The evangelist champions sincerity regarding beliefs with the aim of reducing others to receptacles of objectified beliefs. Belief is thereby transformed into a public object that the evangelist can then take possession of. Incapable of believing without doubt in his own belief, he gets involved with the apparently certain and objectified beliefs of others by regarding himself as simply another object. The original project of bad faith allows a person to see himself exclusively from the point of view of others. Therefore, religious faith involves a person objectifying her own faith through the objectification of the faith of others. All faith is bad faith in the sense that all faith involves a state of false consciousness in which a person does not believe that her belief is a belief.

Traditionally, the two types of explanation are synthesis and analysis. Leibniz defined synthesis as “the process in which we begin from principles and …[proceed to]…build up theorems and problems,” and analysis as “the process in which we begin with a given conclusion or proposed problem and seek the principles by which we may demonstrate the conclusion or solve the problem.” (Philosophical Papers and Letters, p 286) It seems trivial to suppose that a complete explanation would of course include both types. However, if we do attempt a complete explanation, we will end with paradoxes.

Each and every explanation of anything may be challenged. A new explanation may be demanded of the terms in the original explanation. To meet this demand, new terms are required, otherwise the new explanation is circular. Yet, a third explanation can be demanded of the new terms introduced in the second explanation of the first explanation, and ad nauseaum. There are two resolutions to this: either continue introducing new explanations for an eternity, or end somewhere, out of sheer exhaustion or self-indulgent satisfaction.

In either case the explanation will be incomplete, in the former case, by definition, and in the latter, the terms of the last explanation will not themselves be explained. Therefore, the nature of explanation is that the explanation of anything will always be incomplete.

Analysis

In science, for that matter, ultimate explanations are offered in terms of matter, natural forces and scientific laws. Matter may be further analyzed in chemical formulae, the table of elements, fundamental particles. The natural forces are energy, gravitation, magnetism, electricity, etc. And the laws of science describes the regularities of matter in motion according to these natural forces. But the terms “matter,” “energy,” “scientific law” themselves remain unexplained, and the scientist turns the project over to the philosopher. These final explanations explain everything else, but remain unexplained. Hence, science can never give the ultimate insight into the mystery of existence. Their explanations do shift the locus of that mystery, but never explain it.

The same thing applies to mathematics: the entire edifice of demonstration totters on a foundation of axioms and rules which are themselves not demonstrated, but assumed. Ditto for the laws of logic: the attempt to justify them involves circularity, because they themselves are the justification procedures in discourse. Logical justification, by definition, is a demonstration that the laws of logic have been obeyed or followed. The limits of explanations for science, mathematics, and logic is the breeding grounds of the fundamental problems of philosophy.

Synthesis

It seems like synthesis is not prone to the dangers of analysis (infinite regress or arbitrary terms). According to synthesis, we can relate things to other things, until we have identified all the relations there are between everything there is, and that would be the natural and necessary end of synthesis. There wouldn’t be anything left to be related, and nothing else left to relate to it. The totality of all things would be a comprehensible whole that exhibits all its internal relations. Apparently, synthesis does not suffer the same theoretical issues of analysis.

This human need of further explanation for everything, the totality of human experience, is typical, and a consistent theme throughout human history. Because, by definition, there’s nothing else to which everything can be related, we, almost inevitably, recourse to an explanation outside of this totality, an explanation with transcendental terms. The known is explained by the terms of the unknown, or, the knowable in the terms of the unknowable. However, given that the unknowable is unknowable, no such total explanation can ever be validated.

It isn’t the case that the total explanation requires our faith or authority. They can only be taken on faith, for they have no other basis. Of course there are such explanations in the majority of the world’s religions. However they are incompatible with one another. Once their explanations are in conflict, we have no way of deciding between them, except for faith or authority. The attempt to explain the known in the terms of the unknown is the inversion of intelligible procedure, a flight into “cloud cuckoo land.”

Both types of explanations make things less clear than they are. Worse yet, both types involve statements about what is unknown or unknowable, and this is at best, self-indulgence, if not self-deception, and at worst, charlatanry. Even the great mathematician, Bernhard Riemann, in his The Mechanism of the Ear, admitted that both approaches, when rigorously adopted, are impossible. Each synthesis relies on the results of a preceding analysis, and each analysis requires a subsequent synthesis in order to be confirmed. They are at best complimentary methods that presuppose one another.

We have to swallow our pride and admit the limits of human apprehension: whatsoever is permanently inaccessible to the capacities of human apprehension is permanently unknown to us. Moreover, the nature of anything is utterly incomprehensible. “The sense of the world must lie outside of the world…. what we cannot speak about we must remain silent about.”