Lessons From Philip Seymour Hoffman

Nathan Empsall

It’s hard to condense four years of Dartmouth into one senior article. I want to write about the politicians and journalists the New Hampshire primary brought to town. I want to sing praises of my favorite professors and staff members. I very much want to be the 84,173rd person to warn underclassmen of how little time they have left.

However, after four years, 26 DFP articles, 37 courses, and countless extracurricular activities, one of the most important things I’ve learned here is summed up not by a list of things I wish I’d done, but by a short quote from Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character in the movie Doubt (thank you, Dartmouth Film Society):

“Certainty is an emotion, not a fact.”

This I believe: Humans are imperfect and small, and the universe around us is big and limitless. We are going to make mistakes. We will never conquer the universe, or even this planet. BUT, that’s okay. As long as we are willing to admit that we are imperfect, our mistakes can help us grow. Instead of trying to be certain in our imperfect beliefs, we should admit our imperfections, recognize that those imperfections seep into our worldviews, and seek to learn from rather than judge one another. It is better to grow together than to shrink alone.

This is true not just of what we learn, but of how we learn. Rationalism and the scientific method are important, but they are not supreme. Logic and reason may be the highest forms of learning possible by the human mind, but there is no reason to believe that they are the highest form possible in the universe. If the images from the Hubble Space Telescope tell us anything, it is that human scales cannot begin to compare with universal scales.

I believe in universal truths, both scientific and moral. I don’t believe that as humans we are able to access very many of them. The universe is far bigger than us, and just as human society is too big for an ant to understand, the same can be said of humans and the universe. I am all for the pursuit of truth—I just spent four years at a liberal arts college—but we should never convince ourselves that we have found it. When we do, we close off our minds not only to each other, but to further education and progress. When we become certain that we’ve found the truth, we grow complacent in our unrecognized human mistakes. When we let go of the need for certainty, the search, as well as our spiritual and scientific growth, continues.

There are many who would disagree with me, including scientists in my own family who say that everything boils down to math and physics and can thus be theoretically discovered and learned. Don’t get me wrong: I have immense respect for science. We should trust the scientific method and the theories and laws it produces. What we should not do is assume that these are the only acceptable theories or laws. All evidence produced by the scientific method is trustworthy; not all trustworthy evidence is produced by the scientific method.

Liberal theologian Marcus Borg shifted away from a scientifically-bound modern worldview in his thirties when he “saw that most cultures throughout human history have seen things differently. I realized that there are well-authenticated experiences that radically transcend what the modern worldview can accommodate. I became aware that the modern worldview is itself a relative cultural construction, the product of a particular era in human intellectual history.”

I agree with Borg. It is one thing to say that all is knowable, but another to say that all is humanly knowable. There are things about this world and our existence that our scientific method can never discover. The scientific method is not the universe’s path, but the best path our minds have yet developed. To suggest otherwise is to ignore the lesson of the ants. Ants do not understand human society, make fire, or produce literature because their brains are too small. While our brains may be large enough to make fire, why do we assume they are large enough to do everything? If there is a universal brain size scale with ants on the bottom, what makes us think we are at its top? It seems likely to me that if our brains were three times their current size, we would not produce more with our current methods, but develop entirely new methods and worldviews instead.

Here is an example of non-scientific knowledge. In the’50s, American scientists began a large-scale irrigation project on Navajo lands, wiping out numerous prairie dog colonies. “If you kill off the prairie dogs there will be no one to cry for rain,” warned the Navajos. That may sound silly, but once the prairie dogs were gone, the rains stopped. It turns out that prairie dog burrows allow aquifers to release negative ions into the air, helping to create rain. Even though the Navajos couldn’t explain all this, their understanding was closer to the truth than the scientists’.

When people are certain in their beliefs and of their foundational worldview, they tend to block out all other voices. Even if their worldview is a respectable one and their beliefs true, they are still human. They will make mistakes, and in their certainty, they will not allow anyone to correct those mistakes. Certainty breeds arrogance. People may be correct in the foundations but still miss out on key details. Those are the irrigation scientists. Or they may actually be wrong in the foundations, and yet still certain. That’s the Religious Right.

I do not believe that members of the religious right are wrong because they use the Bible as their guiding light, but because they read the Bible the wrong way. They are certain that they are following the absolute truth of the Bible, yet in reality, they are only following their own interpretation of the Bible.

Scripture was not written in the 20th century. With historical context, the meaning of a verse as simple as, “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also” can change. In this verse, Christ specifically mentions the RIGHT cheek. The only way for a right-handed person to hit someone else on the right cheek is to backhand them—the treatment afforded slaves, children, and in 30 AD, women. Christ is not just saying avoid violence, but stand up for equality and justice. Show the Roman imperialist your left cheek to assert that you are his equal.

Literary techniques, translation errors, untranslatable cultural differences, hidden agendas, and lost passages also alter one’s ability to understand an ancient text in context. With so many twists, turns, and pitfalls, Christians should recognize that even though the Bible may be infallible, its readers are not, and they are almost certain to misunderstand portions of the text. This is true to some degree of all learning, whether religious or not.

And that’s okay. It’s okay to be small. It’s okay to be imperfect. It is okay to misunderstand the Bible and it is okay to misunderstand your professor’s lectures. As long as we are open to new knowledge, change, and correction, mistakes are just another shared part of life. Our inevitable misunderstandings only become a problem when we are certain in them. Certainty leads to the Soviet Gulags, the Crusades, terrorism, and the politics of the religious right. Belief without certainty opens the door to wonderfully deep relationships and the power of continual mystery.

You’ve got eighty years ahead of you; you don’t have to have it all figured out now. Nonetheless, giving up certainty is a scary thought for many. We want to be masters of the universe and let nothing stand in our way. While I join this search for truth, I also take joy in mystery. I know that I am small—and rather than fearing or denying this knowledge, I embrace it. I am free of the burden of being confident. It is wonderful to know that there will never come a day when I can’t grow or build on myself. I will never peak,
for there is always more to do, always more to learn.

Dartmouth has given me a great start. I’ve learned as much from my friends as I have from my professors, and am saddened by the thought of a year without late-night philosophy sessions or Ph.D. lectures as a routine matter of course. I’ve learned in the classroom, but I’ve grown in FoCo, the Glee Club, the College Democrats, DOC cabins, and a nearby monastery (where I came to hold the beliefs expressed in this article). When I arrived here four years ago, I was certain that I liked who I was, and was scared to change. Now when I look back on a term in New Orleans, the diversity of the student body, a week in the ICU with a sick parent, and an unexpected major (Native American Studies), I don’t recognize the old me. How silly and arrogant was my certainty.

“Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty. When you are lost, you are not alone.”

- Hoffman’s Fr. Flynn