Sousarion Reacts #3
Aristotle, Kazantzakis, Petrarch — on knowledge, uncertainty, sorrow, and longing
We begin with a theory of knowledge. We end with music. This is a journey through certainty, doubt, and longing.
Philosophy
Aristotle, Posterior Analytics (ca. 330 B.C.E.)
This book is the immediate sequel to Prior Analytics, which I sketched in the last two Reacts posts. That earlier work lays out Aristotle’s system of logic.
Here, he shifts to a deeper question:
When — and how — do we truly know something?
Or, to put it differently: we live, we act, and through experience, we form beliefs. Some of these are true, others false. So how do we sort them? Is there a solid method to discard the false and retain the true? If so, how do we apply it?
And even then, how do we move from a belief that happens to be true to something we can call genuine knowledge?
Aristotle’s answer lies in his method of demonstration. Very generally speaking, a demonstration is a kind of syllogism, grounded in first principles that are necessarily true, universal, and grasped by the intellect.
Yes, that’s abstract. It’s loaded with contestable terms. But it’s the most succinct summary I can offer of the book’s intention. And once you pause to consider the ambition behind it, it’s radical:
“I, Aristotle, am going to demonstrate how to prove whether you know something or not.”
Now, he doesn’t mean any and all knowledge. This isn’t a manual to unlock God-mode for living your life.
He’s after a specific kind: knowledge that can be demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt. This is what he calls episteme, i.e., scientific knowledge. If something can’t be demonstrated, it may still be true, but it doesn’t qualify as knowledge. It remains belief — even true belief — but not knowledge in his strict sense.
Aristotle would say (and I’d agree): most of us act as though we know things. But at bottom, we trust what we believe is true. We can’t prove it, can’t demonstrate it, but it’s worked so far, it holds up to surface-level scrutiny, so we go with it.
Most of us don’t live lives suited to the rigorous examination of truth claims. We live lives of belief and trust. And for Aristotle (here, I’d mostly agree) only the contemplative life, the slow, calm, methodical, necessarily rational and intellectual life, is the one through which genuine episteme is attainable.
The Posterior Analytics is a difficult treatise. It doesn’t present the task of demonstration as something easily grasped or readily attainable.
Still, here’s my quick attempt at a sketch.
We begin with the foundation: first principles. These cannot themselves be demonstrated, not because they’re mysterious or evasive, but because they are self-evident. They are grasped directly by the intellect (Aristotle’s word is nous) and intuited as true.
First principles lie deeper than ordinary assumptions. For example, someone might assume that outcomes are what matters most in life and then build an ethical theory around achieving the best results for the greatest number. That’s a typical assumption, often associated with utilitarianism or consequentialism. There are so many more examples.
But Aristotle’s first principles are more basic: they are the conditions that make intelligibility possible at all. Like the ability to recognize meaningful language. Or the intuitive understanding that another person is capable of being communicated with.
These are not built from argument — they are what argument builds on. And they enable us to construct demonstrations: reasoned accounts of why something must be the way it is.
All demonstrations aim to explain why something is the case, not just that it is.
And to answer a “why” question, we must identify the cause.
Aristotle outlines his famous four causes: material, formal, efficient, and final. (For a full discussion of Aristotle’s causes, check out Book B, Chapter 3, of his Physics.) To oversimplify, a cause is the answer to why something is the case. A proper demonstration seeks to uncover one or more of these underlying causes.
Take language. We recognize an innate human capacity for it. But what’s its cause? We might say: to communicate thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. To bond with others. To build communities. To raise children. To express the soul. There are multiple valid reasons, and we might intuit most of them.
But is that enough? If we want a scientific understanding of language — if we want to explain why we have this capacity, and what it is — then we need to investigate it in full. Not just its utility, but its nature. Its logic, structure, and ontology.
To ask why we speak is to ask what it means to be human.
These questions are worth exploring in their own right.
But they also serve a deeper purpose: when we take the logical tools from the Prior Analytics — deduction, induction — and apply them systematically to causal inquiry, we begin to move toward the essence of the thing we’re investigating. Its necessary features. Its internal structure. And eventually, a complete and coherent explanation of what it is — and why it must be so.
That’s the goal of all philosophical inquiry. And it’s why episteme stands as one of the fundamental pillars of philosophy itself.
The Posterior Analytics outlines how the philosophical inquirer might attain genuine knowledge, a kind of perfect certainty. But it offers no shortcuts. The path must be walked slowly, carefully, and alone. And anyone who begins to walk it will, inevitably, encounter problems, paradoxes, and doubt.
It’s this uncertainty, not as theory, but as lived struggle, that we turn to next.
Literature:
Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ (1952)
I have nothing but praise and admiration for this novel.
I’m going to set aside the ingenious way Kazantzakis threads the episodic events of the Gospels into a naturally flowing narrative of Jesus’s life. I’m also not interested here in the various points of contention between his account and particular Gospel verses. These topics are fascinating, but not my focus.
I also won’t be going over the plot. I’m not concerned with evaluating the validity of Jesus’s teachings, analyzing the shocking contradictions, or interpreting his parables. Nor will I offer private reflections on the doctrines themselves.
Because I don’t think that was Kazantzakis’s aim, either.
This novel is not trying to substantiate, delegitimize, or proselytize Jesus. Yes, it attempts (quite successfully in my view) to arrange the known events of Jesus’s life into a coherent narrative. But its exploration runs much deeper.
As I see it, Kazantzakis has written a novel about uncertainty. About the absence — even the impossibility — of episteme. And therefore, a novel about struggle.
The world of this novel is saturated with uncertainty. Life choices abound, but no outcomes are guaranteed. Characters make decisions they believe, or at least hope, will prove to be for the best, whether out of selfish instinct or love for others. But the consequences remain mysterious.
Everyone is caught in their own struggle. Everyone battles their demons. Everyone suffers in body and spirit. Uncertainty and suffering are among the book’s first principles.
And yet decisions must be made. Even without certainty, the characters choose. Sometimes rationally, sometimes instinctively. But always in the dark.
Life in this novel is depicted as a journey into the unknown. Not entirely blind, but dimly lit at best. Each step forward reveals new ambiguities. The uncertainty is never overcome. But something else begins to grow: self-understanding. Through the process of struggle and choice, the characters learn who they are — and just as often, who they are not.
They also learn that they are not fully in control. Circumstances impose themselves. Forces greater than them shape their paths. They are drawn toward certain fates, pushed away from others. There is no pure autonomy here.
This is a novel of coming to terms with the unknowable — and finding the strength to act anyway. To believe, even in the face of danger, doubt, and darkness. To take the leap of faith into the unknown — not because the leap solves anything, but because life still demands it.
Life will remain mysterious. But trust is placed in a teaching for how to live, conduct oneself, and treat others.
And then, hope against hope, the choices made will prove to have been good — for oneself, and for one’s neighbor.
That’s a rough-and-tumble distillation of a book I think is exceptionally written.
Kazantzakis has studied the biblical and apocryphal texts, as well as commentary both theological and historical, to construct a portrait of perhaps the most important individual in human history. But more than that, he has, in earnest, confronted and wrestled with life’s most fundamental questions.
He offers a beautiful and profound meditation on the gravity of choice, on the weight of responsibilities that follow, and the necessity of living and dying by those choices, even when their ultimate consequences remain uncertain.
It might sound ironic to say this about a novel steeped in uncertainty, but one of the main reasons I love The Last Temptation of Christ is that Kazantzakis is utterly in control as a writer. He navigates the intersection between the divine and the human, yet never dissolves into a belief system, never collapses the mystery into doctrine, never imposes a tidy moral conclusion.
The divine remains mysterious. Miracles don’t resolve; they disrupt. Each one raises more questions than it answers. And the answers we do receive — when they come — arrive in the form of parables. Stories that move us but resist certainty. They illuminate without clarifying. They’re not proofs. They’re revelations of something that cannot quite be known.
And yet the parables are moving accounts. They connect the suffering of the noble and the peasant, the Roman and the Jew, the rabbi and the prostitute — they all pass through the same fire. Each life reveals something. Not everything, but something.
And perhaps that’s enough.
Philosophy is the attempt to overcome uncertainty — through rigorous inquiry, the use of reason, and the disciplined pursuit of knowledge. When successful, it lifts the philosopher toward the superhuman — toward something like God-mode.
By contrast, theology begins not with the conquest of uncertainty, but with its acceptance. The world is fundamentally mysterious. And so we place our trust in a teaching — in the words of a spiritual teacher. A Jesus. A Buddha. Someone who shows how to live.
Their teachings are not proofs. They are practices.
This is the disjunction non plus ultra.
Poetics
Petrarch, Il Canzoniere (ca. 1330-1374) , 1-100
The Canzoniere, or Songbook, is a collection of 336 poems written over the final four decades of Petrarch’s life — from around 1330 until his death in 1374. Most of the poems are lyrical and compact, composed in his distinctive 14-line sonnet form. But the collection also includes longer pieces — 29 canzoni, which give the collection its name.
The poetry is exquisitely crafted. Formally rigorous, but rich in feeling. Its language is direct, musical, and full of emotional complexity.
As a young man, Petrarch fell hard for an impossible love — a woman named Laura. He idealizes her throughout the collection. The concept isn’t far from Dante’s Beatrice and, in many ways, Petrarch borrows that idealization from his poetic forebear. But Laura wasn’t a child or a heavenly figure — she was already married. And she died prematurely. Which made his love not only impossible, but deeply, irrevocably sad.
Reading the Canzoniere genuinely shocked me. I was not prepared for a 14th century text to be so openly and intensely personal, almost confessional. Petrarch reveals his inner life without flinching. His bleeding heart, his wounds, the ache of unrequited love. His poems don’t resolve the pain — they report it. He lusts, he loves, he despairs, curses his fate, and he sings beautifully of his longing.
And yet this is no mere diary. Petrarch stands at a crossroads in Western thought. He is both a child of the medieval tradition of philosophical inquiry and a Christian. And what makes him truly important, beyond the sweetness of his language or the accessibility of his forms, is a genuine innovation: he applies the Christian emphasis on the motions of the heart to the literary and philosophical life.
That is, he insists that our inner experiences — our feelings, beliefs, opinions — arise from within and define who we are. They shape how we act. They matter, decisively.
And he gives them voice.
Aside from Augustine’s Confessions, and Socrates’ passing references to his daimonion (cf. Apology, Phaedo, Charmides), Petrarch is among the first in the Western tradition to truly explore the inner life. He treats it as a category of consequence, as something that must be listened to, shaped, and expressed. He precedes Pascal by three hundred years; Kierkegaard by five.
In the Canzoniere, as in his prose, Petrarch lets us overhear that interior conversation. He writes from within his own soul, and we listen as he struggles with longing, despair, hopelessness. The feeling of being trapped in a love he cannot relinquish. A love that weighs him down — and yet he cannot do otherwise.
Petrarch knows Laura is unattainable, just as he knows that time, memory, and death will undo even what he holds most dear.
Yet he continues — not in despair, but in a strange, luminous sorrow.
His resignation is not anchored in a faith that all will be redeemed; of this, he is certain, especially after Laura’s untimely death. And though his sorrow persists, he persists as well.
Why?
Because he knows there is beauty in the sadness of his expression. And he must carry that beauty forward, even as he loses everything.
There’s something profoundly honorable in the face of the certainty of failure.
There is no Aristotelian syllogism Petrarch can use to wriggle out of his fate. In fact, the opposite abides. Want the demonstration? Countless lines from his poetry. Metered conversations with himself about the longings and sorrows of his life. These simply reaffirm the certainty of loss.
Petrarch belongs to the unhappy many — the ones for whom redemption is not extended.
And yet he does not fall into nihilistic despair.
Instead, he writes.
He gives his suffering form.
He transforms it into music.