The serpent Ouroboros: or the paradox of the sceptical outlook

I show you doubt, to prove that faith exists. 
The more of doubt, the stronger faith, I say, 
If faith o'ercomes doubt.

Thus Browning’s Bishop Blougram speaks of the strangely intimate, if not quite symbiotic (“If faith o'ercomes doubt“), relationship of “faith” and “doubt”. “Faith” is to be understood here not as uncomplicated and unequivocal assent - a state scarcely conceivable outside the most childlike innocence or blissful ignorance - but as the precarious result of a strenuous act of will. The result is “precarious” and the act “strenuous” because, in this endeavour, the will may find the intellect an inconstant ally and a reluctant conscript. I have often wondered whether a similar relationship might not be said to exist between scepticism and superstition.  

Before we can fully grasp this proposition, we must draw an important distinction. Scepticism is a double-edged sword: one edge - the one pointing away from us - is the familiar scepticism of the Socratic kind, rational and reasonable, and sustained purely by the intellect (or rather that part of it formerly called “the understanding“); but the nearer edge represents scepticism of a different order; drawing its strength from the imagination, and from the unconscious and irrational forces with which that peculiar hybrid faculty - part power, part sensibility - is allied, it is not content with casting rational doubts on irrational beliefs, but is impelled inexorably to challenge and undermine the clear and unencumbered world view of the sceptic himself: like the serpent Ouroboros, it devours its own tail. It is this second kind of scepticism - let us call it “reflexive scepticism” (not to be confused with the social science methodology) - which fosters that strange dialectic between scepticism and superstition we sometimes find even in, or perhaps especially in, those of an aggressively sceptical outlook.

Take the case of the arch-sceptic, Sigmund Freud. He wrote a widely influential essay, 'Das Unheimliche' ('The Uncanny'), where he described the "uncanny" (insofar as his concept overlapped with our ordinary ideas of the supernatural) as the effect arising from a "conflict of judgement as to whether things which have been "surmounted" [e.g. belief in ghosts, witches or fairies] and are regarded as incredible may not, after all, be possible". Freud evidences a keen interest in the subject, particularly its depiction in art and literature, but never seems seriously to entertain the thought that it could ever arise in real life, other than through some sort of misunderstanding or delusion. And yet, privately, Freud was notoriously superstitious, obsessed by numerology and omens.

I suppose I'm of a similarly sceptical cast of mind to Freud, and yet, like him, I'm certainly not immune to the influence of “the uncanny” or the supernatural. This subject has always held a peculiar fascination for me, and - these necessary preliminaries now being addressed - I propose to explore it at greater length in future posts.