This article examines the importance of doubt in Western philosophy, with particular attention to the work of Søren Kierkegaard and Miguel de Unamuno. Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous author Johannes Climacus ventures down the pathway of doubt, finds it perplexing and difficult and discovers that he is unable to return to his pre-doubting self. In despair, the meaningfulness of his life is called into question. Unamuno, a great admirer of Kierkegaard, acknowledges the suffering that accompanies doubt while affirming the pivotal role of uncertainty, despair and struggle in realising our humanity. From Unamuno, we can acquire a keener sense of the part education has to play in both forming us as doubting beings and allowing us to work constructively with the despair engendered by this formation.
Philosophy begins with doubt: this is the central proposition explored in Søren Kierkegaard’s posthumously published Philosophical Fragments (Kierkegaard, 1985). Through his pseudonym Johannes Climacus, Kierkegaard set out to consider the potentially destructive power of doubting in (modern) philosophy. His plan, as enunciated in the supplementary materials included with the book, was that Climacus would doubt everything, suffer greatly in doing so and, to his horror, find he is unable to return to his pre-doubting self. Life would lose its meaning for him, and he would fall into despair (pp. 234–235). The narrative that unfolds is more complex than this description suggests, but Kierkegaard remains true to his underlying idea: the principle of doubt, as interpreted, investigated and enacted by Climacus, appears to be debilitating rather than enabling. Climacus’s experience is illustrative of the connection between doubt as an epistemological matter on the one hand and doubt as an ontological and ethical matter on the other. This connection has important educational implications.
Doubt and despair have continued to feature as thematically linked concerns in Western thought following Kierkegaard, particularly among writers of a broadly existentialist frame of mind. There is little agreement among existentialists themselves as to what that term means, and many who have been located within this tradition by others have expressed discomfort if not outright hostility at having the label applied to them. It is nonetheless possible to identify some key concerns in this body of work. At the heart of existentialist enquiry, whether of a literary, philosophical or theological kind, is a cluster of problems relating to the meaning of our existence as human beings. Why are we here? How do we give our lives a sense of purpose and significance? What does it mean to exist as a human being? Does God exist? Is there life after death? If there is no God, is everything permitted? What ethical principles, if any, should guide our lives? What are our obligations to others? How do we come to understand ourselves and the world? (cf. Baggini, 2004; Barrett, 1990; Cooper, 1999; Flynn, 2006; Kaufmann, 1975; Marino, 2004; Webster, 2009.)
Among the thinkers who might be considered existentialists, one who addressed these questions with a special sense of urgency was the Spanish philosopher and novelist, Miguel de Unamuno. For Unamuno (1972), doubt and despair were central elements of what he referred to as the ‘tragic sense of life’. Our lives are tragic because we are beings endowed with both a longing for an immortality and the capacity to question such desires. Unamuno made it clear, however, that doubt need not be destructive; indeed, it is through uncertainty that hope arises and is given substance and significance. Seeing this more ‘positive’ side to doubt in Unamuno’s writings is, however, no easy matter; Unamuno makes us work to find this, and in this sense, his task is pedagogical in nature. To understand Unamuno’s position, it is helpful to have some idea of where he sits in the broader Western history of doubt as a philosophical orientation. This will be the focus of the first part of the article. The second part sketches some of Unamuno’s key ideas and explores their educational ramifications. Prompted by Unamuno, I argue that doubt, contrary to Johannes Climacus’s experience, can be seen in a constructive light as a pivotal element in any meaningful, worthwhile educational life.
Doubt has served as a fundamental principle underlying philosophical investigation in the West from the time of the ancient Greeks, as exhibited by the intellectual strategies of probing, questioning, challenging and debating. Socratic conversation, to which we still pay homage in our educational, parliamentary and legal institutions, rests on the assumption that if knowledge is to advance, we must be prepared to subject our perceptions, opinions and ideas to rigorous scrutiny. This is the form of philosophical exploration undertaken by Plato in dialogues such as The Republic (Plato, 1974). In seeking knowledge, we must come to appreciate what we do not know, and the trigger in starting that process is invariably the planting of a seed of doubt. In Plato’s dialogues, it was typically Socrates who assumed the role of questioner, probing persistently until views that had hitherto been taken for granted by his interlocutors were (ostensibly) left in tatters. At the same time, Plato also attempted to illustrate, most famously in the Meno (Plato, 1949), that if the right questions are asked, we may discover—recollect, as Plato would see it—knowledge we did not know we had.
Modern Western philosophy is often said to have started with Descartes, and Descartes begins with doubt. In his Discourse on Method, Descartes declares that he will ‘reject as absolutely false’ everything he could imagine might have any ground for doubt, to see whether anything would remain that was ‘entirely certain’ (Descartes, 1911, p. 101). This is the basis for his methodological scepticism, a form a philosophical enquiry still influential today. Descartes acknowledges that we can be deceived by our senses and fall prey to paralogisms in our reasoning. He resolves to treat everything that enters his mind as no more true than the illusions we construct in our dreams. ‘But immediately afterwards’, he says,
I noticed that whilst I thus wished to think all things false, it was absolutely essential that the ‘I’ who thought this should be somewhat, and remarking that this truth ‘I think, therefore I am’ was so certain and so assured that all the most extravagant suppositions brought forward by sceptics were incapable of shaking it, I came to the conclusion that I could receive it without scruple as the first principle of the Philosophy for which I was seeking. (p. 101)
Across the centuries, Descartes’ one apparent certainty has, of course, become rather less certain and there is now a substantial and complex body of scholarly work that calls his philosophical starting point into question. Some raise doubts about the ‘I’ element in the famous ‘I think, therefore I am’ dictum (suggesting, for example, that it might more properly be conceived as ‘we’); others focus on the thinking part and argue that in seeking to understand ourselves and the world, we might just as well say ‘I feel, therefore I am’ (see Roberts, 2000). Doubt prompted Descartes, but if he hoped to find a safe haven in one proposition that could be free from such doubting, the history of Western philosophy would suggest he was mistaken. Descartes has not freed philosophers from doubt; instead, he has played his part in creating further doubt.
On the face of it, it is perfectly possible to live with few or no doubts. We can point to those who appear so certain in their political, religious or lifestyle convictions that they either cannot or will not consider alternative views. Apparent certainty in belief may arise from faith, or from ‘brainwashing’, or from an inability to reflect on what one holds to be true. Proclamations of the kind ‘There can be little doubt …’ carry with them a tacit sense of epistemological superiority, as if it can be taken for granted that ‘knowing’ is always and necessarily better than ‘not knowing’ or ‘not being certain that one knows’. There is often a quality of excessive certainty evident in such examples that many philosophers and educationists find troubling. Freire (1994, 1997) regarded such cases of being too certain of one’s certainties as dogmatism and noted that this could be present among those on both the left and the right of the political spectrum. Ironically, a tendency towards excessive certainty of one kind—intellectual smugness—is not altogether unusual among those who profess to be sceptics. Scepticism, supposedly founded on doubt, can be brandished rather unreflectively as a kind of weapon, often involving a belittling of others: a sniggering attitude that betrays an underlying arrogance about the rightness of one’s own position.
But what might we mean when we use terms such as ‘doubt’ and ‘certainty’? It is not always clear where one ends and the other begins. Doubt suggests some kind of questioning and certainty implies some form of acceptance that is beyond questioning. But these thoughts invite questions of their own: What is being questioned (or not questioned)? By whom? Towards what end? If we take seriously the insights afforded by a variety of critical traditions of educational scholarship—Marxist, psychoanalytic, post-structuralist and postmodern, among others—it should be evident that the answers to such questions are seldom as straightforward as we would like to believe. If, as an expression of doubt, ‘I’ question, it is a matter for debate as to what constitutes the ‘I’. From a number of different critical perspectives, it can be argued that we are not the authors of our own intentions. We might probe further and ask whether doubt is best understood as an experience of questioning or as an expression of questioning. Indeed, expressing doubt through questioning can often lead to greater certainty of a kind: a sharper sense of clarity about what we believe we know and do not know.
Even if there are elements of certainty in a questioning frame of mind, such a mind can never fully settle. And this is perhaps the key feature of doubt: it implies some form of movement. Doubt tends to breed further doubt. From a methodological perspective, systematic doubt can become, as Langer (1929) puts it, a ‘treadmill’:
Everything must be doubted that possibly can be; and the really honest scholar, realising that every philosopher before him has been discredited by many competent persons, becomes wary, in the end, about believing anything, for he is no longer satisfied with the ‘self-evidence’ of his assumptions. He refutes his own ideas, and finally is faced with a choice between blind dogmatic beliefs, or no beliefs at all—between scepticism, or animal faith. (p. 380)
This characterisation of the ‘treadmill’ effect of constant doubting resonates with Climacus’s experience, but Kierkegaard wants to remind us that there is more at stake here than methodological frustration. Doubting, as an intellectual orientation, has moral consequences.
In subjecting everything to doubt, we change ourselves as human beings; we create a mode of being from which there is no escape. Once formed as a doubting subject, one cannot simply dispense with fresh doubts as they arise. Once developed, a doubting consciousness prods us whether we want it to or not; it will not leave us alone, and even if we manage to push it into the background temporarily, it often rears its head again precisely when we wish it would disappear. Doubt can inhibit the formation of virtues such as trust and acceptance and in so doing undermine our relationships with others. Doubt, when taken to extremes, can be utterly debilitating, harming not only the life of the doubter but also those with whom the doubter associates. These possibilities were both theorised and exemplified, in a highly personalised way, by Miguel de Unamuno. In Unamuno’s life and work, the connection between doubt and despair comes into particularly sharp focus. Doubt haunted Unamuno and exerted an influence on almost everything he wrote. But in Unamuno’s failure to ‘escape’ from his doubts, there are also some important lessons for educationists and these will be considered in the next section.
Unamuno held Kierkegaard in the highest esteem. Already multilingual, Unamuno taught himself Danish just so that he could read the man he considered an intellectual ‘brother’ in his original language. Kierkegaard’s (1985) dissatisfaction with the modern Western philosophical account of doubt is mirrored in Unamuno’s writings but expressed in more direct terms. Unamuno distinguishes between methodical doubt, as portrayed by Descartes, and passionate doubt—the ‘eternal conflict between reason and feeling, between science and life, between the logical and the biotic’ (Unamuno, 1972, p. 120). The former is a kind of theoretical game; the latter is crucial in defining us as human beings. For Unamuno, the quest to know, through philosophical enquiry among other means, is not merely an intellectual exercise; it is an important part of the process of giving our lives meaning, substance and purpose. Unamuno himself lived this way, desperately seeking to dispense with his doubts, but never quite succeeding in doing so. Unamuno’s doubts were expressed not just to amuse himself but as a manifestation of his searching for an answer to what he saw as the most pressing question of all: the possibility of immortality. In considering Unamuno’s views on doubt, then, it is also important to examine his pronouncements on matters of faith and belief.
In his classic work, The Tragic Sense of Life, Unamuno recognises in himself his will to believe in life after death, while simultaneously acknowledging the absurdity of such a belief from a purely rational point of view. He does not himself possess a simple faith that all will be well—indeed, he is driven more by nagging doubts—but he cautions against the development of a form of bitterness towards those who do see the world in these terms. He is highly critical of those rationalists who, in finding themselves unable to believe, lash out in anger at those who do have faith. This hatred, he observes, has led to the persecution of Christians, among others, and is fundamentally hypocritical. A professed commitment to rationalism can become profoundly irrational. There is also hypocrisy in the refusal among rationalists to admit that reason dissolves and disheartens (pp. 106–107). Unamuno’s disdain for rationalists who exhibit these characteristics is matched by his admiration for those who strive to believe in immortality but find, in all sincerity, that they cannot. This is, he says, ‘the most noble, most profound, most human and most fruitful attitude and state of mind’ (p. 107). Such an attitude captures what Unamuno understands by despair. Despair is seen not as a condition to be avoided; instead, in exercising our reflective capacities as human beings, we find we cannot avoid it and must face up to it.
Unamuno is wary of the attempt under Catholicism, and scholastic theology in particular, to make faith conform to the dictates of reason. This has arisen, he argues, from a sense of insecurity among those who profess to believe. Faith, no longer sure of itself, ‘sought to establish a foundation, not against reason, which is where it stands, but upon reason, that is, within reason itself’ (p. 84). Such an enterprise, Unamuno maintains, is doomed to failure. Reason, the ‘enemy’ of faith, turns back against those who seek to harness it (p. 83). Unamuno concedes that there is a price to be paid by those who believe—they must suppress what their intellect demands of them—but this is exaggerated by the ‘all or nothing’ approach to accepting religious dogma. To expect people to believe too much—to accept apparently absurd doctrines —not only invites scepticism but can lead to the opposite of what was intended: to the total rejection of belief. From Unamuno’s perspective, the danger lies not just in believing too much but in ‘attempting to believe with one’s reason rather than one’s life’ (p. 86). Attempting to ground dogmatic theology in reason ends up not only alienating disbelievers but also failing to satisfy reason. Unamuno maintains that faith and reason will always be in tension with each other; trying to force one upon the other is, as he sees it, a fruitless exercise.
According to Unamuno, all attempts to rationalise or scientise religious belief can be traced back to the key human attribute of intelligence: ‘a dreadful matter’. Intelligence ‘tends towards death in the way that memory tends towards stability’. Unamuno elaborates:
That which lives, that which is absolutely unstable, absolutely individual, is, strictly speaking, unintelligible. Logic tends to reduce everything to identities and genera, to a state where each representation has no more than one single selfsame content in whatever place, time, or relation the representation may occur to us. But nothing is the same for two successive moments of its being. My idea of God is different each time I conceive it. Identity, which is death, is precisely what the intellect seeks. The mind seeks what is dead, for the living escapes it. It seeks to congeal the flowing stream into blocks of ice. It seeks to arrest the flow. (p. 100)
He continues with these memorable words:
In order to understand anything it must first be killed, laid out rigid in the mind. Science is a cemetery of dead ideas, even though live ideas are born out of it. Worms, also, feed on corpses. My own thoughts, tumultuous and agitated in the recesses of my mind, once torn up by their roots from my heart, poured out upon this paper and here fixed in unalterable form, are already the cadavers of thought. (pp. 100–101)
For Unamuno, neither science specifically nor reason more generally can provide the sustenance we need in responding to our underlying longing for immortality. To the contrary, reason, bounded by its own limits, leads us to the conclusion that we cannot persist. Reason is in essence sceptical. Reason, in probing and enquiring, in seeking explanations, disrupts the flow of life. Unamuno argues that, as a destructive and dissolving force, it in effect turns back on itself, casting doubt on its own validity. Like Nietzsche before him, but in a very different way, Unamuno foreshadows a key theme in twentieth century philosophical debate: the question of relativism: ‘A stomach ulcer ends by causing the stomach to digest itself, and reason ends by destroying the immediate and absolute validity of the concept of truth and of the concept of necessity. Both concepts are relative: there is no absolute truth, no absolute necessity’ (p. 116). Absolute relativism, Unamuno suggests, is the ‘supreme triumph of ratiocinating reason’ (p. 117). In this sense, reason destroys itself and if it was possible for us to remain purely and exclusively in the embrace of reason, it would destroy us.
These claims have important educational implications. Few would deny that education is, or ought to be, concerned at least in part—and perhaps in large part—with the development of reason. This position has been well defended in educational philosophy, via the work of Peters, Hirst and Dearden (the ‘London School’), Israel Scheffler, Harvey Siegel and many others. Unamuno’s point, however, is that as living, feeling, willing human beings, we dwell not merely within the realm of reason but also outside it—in the domains of the irrational and contra-rational, the absurd and the uncertain (pp. 115–116). As Unamuno was fond of saying, ‘everything vital is, not only irrational, but anti-rational, and everything rational is anti-vital’ (p. 39). In his writings, Unamuno is not against reason; his point is rather that we must be aware of its limits. If we expect reason to ‘resolve’ the deepest problems we face as human beings, we will, Unamuno suggests, ultimately be disappointed. We must, he says, begin with ourselves—with how we exist in the world—and examine reason in relation to our longings, frustrations, hopes and interactions with others. As Unamuno puts it in commenting on Descartes:
The defect in Descartes’s Discourse on Method does not lie in the methodical prior doubt, in the fact that he begins by resolving to doubt everything, which is no more than a mere artifice; the defect lies in his resolving to begin by leaving himself out, omitting Descartes, the real man, the man of flesh and blood, the man who does not want to die, so that he can become a mere thinker, that is, an abstraction. But the real man reappears and works his way into the philosophy. (p. 39)
Unamuno sees great significance in Descartes’s confession that prior to subjecting his beliefs and interests to the rigorous scrutiny of science and reason, he loved poetry, delighted in mathematics, thought highly of eloquence and sought to go to Heaven. In these elements of his work, Unamuno sees the real Descartes, at odds with the method he seeks to apply to himself. For Unamuno, Descartes’s cogito ergo sum rests on a mistake: a confusion between knowing and being (in its fuller sense):
‘I think, therefore I am’ can only mean, ‘I think, therefore I am a thinker’; the being in the I am, derived from I think, is no more than a knowing; that being is knowledge, not life. The primary reality is not that I think, but that I live, for those who do not think also live, even though that kind of living is not a true life. So many contradictions, dear Lord, when we try to wed life to reason! … The truth is sum, ergo cogito—I am, therefore I think, though not everything that is, thinks.
As Unamuno sees it, Descartes could equally have said ‘I feel, therefore I am’, or ‘I will, therefore I am’. When trying to understand what it means to be a human being, then, we must see thinking, feeling and willing as intertwined. We do not merely think thoughts but also feel them. And to direct our thoughts, and bring them back on task when we stray, the will must find regular exercise. For Unamuno, each of these inner elements of the human being is ultimately directed towards self-preservation of one kind or another: a continuation of our being in some form.
Unamuno’s notion of continuation is directly connected to his own personal longing for immortality. He wants to survive, not in the abstract, not symbolically, not as an impersonal element absorbed into a greater divine wholeness; it is he, the man, Miguel de Unamuno, with all his shortcomings, his suffering, his fragilities, who wants to go on. In some respects, this is the great weakness of Unamuno’s work: his musings on immortality, on reason, faith and feeling can seem too idiosyncratically individualistic, too self-centred. Why, it might be asked, should we take him seriously as a thinker, a philosopher, when he is, by his own admission, concerned more with himself than with theoretical rigour? One answer is to say that this weakness is simultaneously a strength, for it is in showing us how deeply embedded our philosophical concerns are with the most fundamental questions of human existence, as lived, that his work gains its force and significance. Unamuno will not let us go. He shakes us from our slumbers, his obsession with immortality reminding us of just how important the question of death, and its relationship to consciousness, is to our sense of the meaning of life. In so doing, he teaches us, through his own example, through the ideas he conveys in books such as The Tragic Sense of Life, and via the dilemmas faced, decisions made and actions taken by his characters in his novels and short stories (Unamuno, 1972, 1996, 2000). Life, Unamuno teaches us, is a constant process of struggle.
Unamuno returns us to the Greek roots of the term ‘agony’. As Barrett (1972) points out, in contemporary English, this word is now used principally to refer to physical or emotional pain. But the Greek word agonia means a contest or struggle (p. 362). Agons were ‘endurance contests staged in ancient Greece in which combatants demonstrated their skill through arduous competitive games’ (Kuhlman, 1994, p. 31). Unamuno retains the idea of a battle that was implied by the Greeks, but turns this into something that speaks to the meaning of our existence as human beings. The element of pain that we still recognise in our current use of the term ‘agony’ becomes, for Unamuno, a constant in the process of life itself: to live is to be in agony. There is an important connection here with a point made in the first section of this article: to doubt is part of what it means to live as a human being, and doubt, like life itself, implies movement. Unamuno teaches us that we can never quite sit still; we must learn to live with an inner existential restlessness. For Unamuno, the process of searching never ends.
At first glance, these ideas may appear to hold little educational promise, but that is perhaps partly because in the West we have become so steeped in the language of reducing struggle and suffering. The aim in many contemporary educational circles often seems to be to make learning less difficult, less painful. Learning quickly and easily is typically regarded as highly desirable. Learning, we are told, should be enter-taining—it should be fun. Learning is expected to enhance happiness, not diminish it (see further, Roberts, 2013a). From Unamuno, however, we can come to appreciate that if education is, in one way or another, always a matter of learning how to live, this implies that we will also learn how to struggle. And through struggle, as Aeschylus (2003) recognised long before Unamuno, we learn. This does not mean all forms of struggle are equally productive or worthwhile from an educational point of view. But for Unamuno, the forms of learning that matter most—those connected with the existential questions identified at the beginning of this article—cannot occur without struggle. If the capacity for struggle no longer exists, if we no longer have to wrestle with doubt and despair, we are, in an important sense, no longer human (Barrett, 1972, p. 362; cf. Dienstag, 2006). Unamuno helps us in fulfilling this vocation, describing his task in uncompromising terms:
[T]he truth is that my work—my mission, I was about to say—is to shatter the faith of men, left, right and centre, their faith in affirmation, their faith in negation, their faith in abstention, and I do so from faith in faith itself. My purpose is to war on all those who submit, whether to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to agnosticism. My aim is to make all men live a life of restless longing. (Unamuno, 1972, p. 349)
The language here is unusually insistent, almost aggressive in tone. But this is something we must face, as kindred spirits to Kierkegaard’s Climacus, in going down a philosophical and pedagogical path. Education is a process of unsettling us as human beings. Doubt implies a kind of permanent restlessness, a state of disequilibrium and with this a sense of discomfort. In becoming educated, we learn to live with uncertainty and with suffering as well as joy. Indeed, Unamuno argues that faith, belief and commitment are not weaker but stronger through the experience of uncertainty.
Unamuno’s starting point in considering the potential value of uncertainty is simple acknowledgement of its existence:
[T]he fact that the sense of uncertainty, and the inner struggle of reason against both faith and the passionate longing for eternal life, together serve as the basis for action and a foundation for morals, this fact would, in the eyes of a pragmatist, justify the sense of uncertainty. But I must make clear that I do not seek out such a practical consequence in order to justify this uncertainty; it is simply that I encounter it in my inner experience. Nor do I wish nor would I wish to seek any justification for this state of inner struggle and uncertainty and longing: it is a fact, and that suffices. (p. 142)
‘The most robust faith’, Unamuno maintains, ‘is based on uncertainty’ (p. 205). Faith ultimately relies on trust in someone—whether this is a specific individual, or a group of people, or God as the personalisation of the Universe—who assures us of some-thing. Faith provides the basis, the substance, for hope. In this sense, it is hope that is the higher principle. We create faith, Unamuno wants to say, because we hope for the existence of a God, and we come to believe in God because this is consistent with our hope for eternal life. The question of whether Unamuno himself truly believed in God has been much debated (Baker, 1990), but arguably, he is best described as an agnostic. He perhaps did not even know himself whether he believed; but what he could not deny was that he doubted. Doubting for Unamuno is not antithetical to faith but utterly consistent with it: ‘Whoever believes he believes in God, but believes without passion, without anguish, without uncertainty, without doubt, without despair-in-consolation, believes only in the God-Idea, not in God Himself’ (p. 211).
From Unamuno, we can learn that our appreciation of all that life has to offer is, or can be, enhanced, not undermined, by our understanding of pain and despair. To begin to grasp how and why this is so, we must break away from the notion of education providing a ‘solution’ to the problem of despair. Hughes (1978), in reflecting on the educational significance of Unamuno’s work, poses the question: ‘But how does one overcome the tragic sense of life?’. Unamuno’s answer, he suggests, is that ‘one doesn’t; it can only be reaffirmed through perpetual doubt and struggle, and the goal of education is to “wake up the sleeping ones” to this essential human condition through the very language they speak’ (p. 137). Hughes continues:
[A]s Unamuno saw, the essence of education is in the question, not the answer. It is in uncertainty, not certainty; suffering, not happiness; pain, not joy. The triumphs of technology and the mass media are enough to put us all to sleep; education must lead not to security, but insecurity. This insecurity is not the garden variety found in psychological texts which inhibits the person’s ability to cope with modernity, but rather that which continually prods him onward through dissatisfaction and doubt, through paradox and contradiction, to seek true immortality, not the blissful promises of traditional Christian after-life. Essentially, Unamuno was of one mind with the poet Dylan Thomas: ‘Do not go gentle into that good night/Rage, rage against the dying of the light’. (p. 137)
In his 2009 book, Educating for Meaningful Lives, Scott Webster observes that ‘schooling in the western world has all too often been subservient to market and political demands’ (Webster, 2009, p. xiii). A concern with educative learning, keenly pursued as a philosophical question in the 1960s and 1970s, has given way to a dominant institutional and policy focus on training in competencies deemed ‘relevant’ to employment and economic advancement (pp. 3–4). Webster seeks to recover a form of educational thinking that takes ‘why’ questions seriously. The ‘why’ questions he has in mind are those relating to the meaning, significance and purpose of life. ‘It is not enough’, he points out, to claim that ‘you need to do such and such in order to continue to sustain your existence’ or ‘in order for us all to live at peace together’ because sooner or later we must confront a deeper question: ‘why do we even exist?’ (p. ix). This kind of enquiry, as we have seen in this article, is exactly what occupied Miguel de Unamuno. Webster argues that our endeavour as human beings to respond to the question ‘what is the meaning of life’ is ‘a matter of life and death’ (p. xii). Unamuno would have shared this view. Education, for Unamuno as for Webster, can be seen as the lifelong, social process of grappling with the meaning of our own existence.
Unamuno was not content with considering whether philosophy began with doubt. He wanted to ask who is doing the doubting, about what and why. Doubt, from Unamuno’s point of view, is not merely a prompt for enquiry but a condition for realising our humanity. For Unamuno, certainty and doubt are intertwined; both rely on each other for their intelligibility. We can only have doubts about some things if we hold, even if only temporarily, other things to be true. Education creates uncertainty, but uncertainty also creates us. Unamuno’s work allows us to speak of what might be called ‘educational agnosticism’: an orientation to the world, and to the process of learning through searching and struggle, that admits to doubts and to the forms of despair that go along with them (cf. Vernon, 2011). The reference to agnosticism need not imply a concern with spiritual questions, but has to do more with the ‘why’ questions identified by Webster. The agnosticism signalled here implies a willingness to question but also a recognition that we cannot question all things all the time. Against the excessive certainties of both dogmatic belief and dismissive scepticism, educational agnosticism demands a posture of radical openness. This form of openness is radical because it goes to the root of what it means to be human: if we are too quick to judge, or too ready to accept without question, or too insistent on finding ‘solutions’ to the problems that confront us, we cannot fulfil our task as beings who ask ‘why?’. To be open in this way requires humility but not servitude, acceptance but not resignation.
Kierkegaard’s answer to the despair engendered by doubt was to make a ‘leap of faith’ (Kierkegaard, 1987, 1989, 2009). Unamuno supported a certain kind of faith and theorised its connection with hope, but was never able to quite make the leap advocated by Kierkegaard. He wanted to believe, and most of all he wanted to live on, with all his faults and suffering. But he could not shake his uncertainties, and in the end, he came to see that they defined him and gave him hope. Unamuno came to accept, as far as he could accept anything, that he would always struggle. Hope for Unamuno resided not in the escape from doubt and despair but in the very possibility of these modes of human experience. Doubt and despair remind us that we are alive: restless, uncomfortable, moving. Education, as a process of ongoing searching, arises from doubt and creates new doubts. The ‘promise’ of education, or at least education of the kind implied by Unamuno’s work, is that it will make life not simpler and easier but richer, more complex and often more difficult than it was before. Education opens us up to both greater suffering and the possibility of better recognising and responding to such suffering in others. It brings with it new burdens and ethical responsibilities but also the prospect of experiencing more fully the beauty and goodness that is within and all around us (see further, Roberts, 2013b; Solomon, 1999, 2002). Like Kierkegaard’s Climacus, we find, in being educated, that there is no going back; we must learn to live with the new modes of understanding we develop on an educational journey. But the lenses through which we view ourselves and the world are not fixed; they continue to change and evolve as new educational experiences are integrated with those from our past. Western philosophy may begin with doubt, but Unamuno allows us to appreciate why, in committing to the process of education, we should not want that doubt to end.
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