meaning of doubt essay

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“I think, therefore I am”: Descartes on the Foundations of Knowledge

Author: Charles Miceli Category: Historical Philosophy , Epistemology Word Count: 994

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If you are reading this, then you are probably looking at a screen or a piece of paper. Think to yourself: “I have some paper in my hand,” “I am in front of a computer” or whatever fits.

Is your belief here certain ? Is there any way that you could believe this, yet your belief be false? Is there any possibility that you are mistaken about this belief? René Descartes (1596-1650) argues you could: this belief, and almost all other beliefs, are not certain.

Descartes argues that there is one clear exception, however: “I think, therefore I am.” [1] He claims to have discovered a belief that is certain and irrefutable . Perhaps there is no saying more famous in philosophy than this phrase, often known as the “Cogito” after its Latin phrasing, cogito ergo sum . [2]

This essay explores the meaning of the Cogito, its importance to Descartes, and its legacy for philosophy up to the present day.

1. Doubt and Skepticism

The phrase “I think, therefore I am” first appears in Discourse on the Method (1637) . [3] But Descartes changes the wording to “I am, I exist” [4] in his most famous (1641) work, Meditations on First Philosophy [5] (called the Meditations for short).

In the Meditations , Descartes reflects on the fact that he has had many false beliefs, and he sets out to address that problem, with the hope of finding a way to ensure he only has true beliefs and even that scientific research yields only truths as well.

His strategy is to doubt, or not believe, any claim that is false or could be false. He recognizes that his senses might be deceiving him now, since they have deceived him before; he might also be reasoning erroneously now, since he has reasoned badly before. He thereby doubts all beliefs from his senses and from his faculty of reasoning, since those beliefs could be false.

Descartes then considers the most extreme reason for doubt: there may exist an evil demon (sometimes translated ‘genius,’ ‘genie,’ or ‘spirit’) who has the power to control all of his thoughts, tricking him into believing anything. [6] Descartes cannot prove that this demon does not exist. So he acknowledges that it’s possible that all his beliefs about the world external to his own mind are illusions caused by the demon, corresponding to nothing at all, and so all his beliefs about the external world are false.

Descartes is usually thought of as considering skepticism , the view that we lack knowledge or justified belief. [7] Here skepticism is considered because we lack certainty : what we believe might be false, so our beliefs aren’t knowledge. As we will see, Descartes argues that the Cogito enables him to defeat skepticism and show that we have knowledge, with certainty.

2. The Cogito and Certainty

After considering the evil demon, Descartes soon discovers the Cogito. He realizes that thinking “I am, I exist,” withstands the evil-demon test! Even if all the beliefs and types of beliefs that Descartes reviews are false, or could be false, at the least, he must exist to be deceived. Even if one doubts one’s own existence, one must exist at that moment, since there must be something, or someone, doing the doubting. Doubting is a way of thinking, and one’s existence is required to doubt or think in the first place: it is impossible to doubt and yet not exist.

So, the “I think” element in the Cogito implies the direct, immediate, certain knowledge of one’s own existence. Thought requires a thinker and this is known with certainty , since not even the demon could deceive someone who doesn’t exist. Descartes thereby found what he was looking for: some certain, indubitable, irrefutable knowledge. [8]

3. Defeating Skepticism

Once the Cogito is discovered, Descartes argues it can serve as a foundation for how to find other truths that are certain.

Descartes proposes that the Cogito is undeniably true because it is clear and distinct . About clarity, Descartes explains, “Some perceptions are so transparent and at the same time so simple we can never think without believing them to be true…” [9] When something is distinct , the mind has an unclouded vision of what is most essential about that object. These qualities become the standard against which all other beliefs can be evaluated.

Descartes argues that the clarity and distinctness rule, derived from the Cogito, can justify our beliefs about the external world. But what verifies the clarity-and-distinctness rule? God’s existence, Descartes argues. By reflecting on his idea of God, he argues that God exists. [10] Descartes then argues that a truthful, good God would not allow us to be deceived when we understand objects clearly and distinctly, and so God would not allow us to routinely have false beliefs.

The Cogito then serves as the foundation for a series of claims that build upon each other. According to Descartes, his reasoning establishes that, what he originally doubted, he actually knows, with certainty. [11] He thereby defeats the skeptical concerns that he considered earlier.

4. Conclusion: Knowledge without Certainty

Descartes was impressed by the Cogito because he had found a belief that is certain and so, when believed , cannot be false. He thought that certainty was necessary for a belief to be known. While he argued that, fortunately, we can ultimately be certain of much of what we think we know, [12] most philosophers following him have denied that.

Contemporary theorists of knowledge tend to deny that knowledge requires certainty: they tend to be “falliblists,” arguing that we can know some claim, yet not be certain that it is true. [13] The problem with Descartes’ standard for knowledge is that almost no beliefs meet it. Descartes thought he could show how our ordinary knowledge claims are ultimately based on the Cogito, but most philosophers have not been convinced by his case.

The epistemic lesson of the Cogito is that if certainty is a necessary requirement for knowledge, we are left with very little knowledge indeed. The challenge, however, is that if certainty is not required for knowledge, what is? [14]

[1] For a discussion of the whole of Descartes’ Meditations , see Marc Bobro’s Descartes’ Meditations 1-3 and Descartes’ Meditations 4-6 .

[2] It should be noted that although the idea expressed in cogito ergo sum is usually attributed to and associated with Descartes, it was not an entirely new idea. For instance, over a 1000 years earlier, St. Augustine, in The City of God (Book XI, 26), wrote “ergo sum si fallor,” which is often paraphrased as fallor ergo sum : “I make mistakes, therefore I am.”

[3] Cottingham, John, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes: Volume 1 . Cambridge University Press (2012) (AT VI 32: CSM I 127).

[4] It’s instructive to consider why Descartes changes the wording from the Discourse on the Method to the Meditations . Unlike in the Discourse , Descartes employs strict tests of doubt in the Meditations , where even simple inferences are put in question. In other words, in setting the stage for the Cogito, the meditator is unsure that logic is reliable, and so cannot legitimately argue from premises to a conclusion that she exists. Another way to account for the missing ergo in the Cogito of the Meditations is to point out that Descartes seeks a foundational belief upon which to provide justification for other beliefs and therefore ground knowledge, and that for a belief to be properly foundational it is in no need of justification itself.

[5] Cottingham, John, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes: Volume 2. Cambridge University Press (2012) (AT VII 25: CSM II 17).

[6] The 1999 science-fiction film The Matrix is an update on this idea: one’s beliefs may be caused by the Matrix, not the physical world, and so they are false: e.g., someone “plugged into” the Matrix believing she is riding a bicycle is not actually riding a bicycle, so that belief is false.

[7] There are different kinds of skeptics. Some skeptics are “global” skeptics, who deny that we have any knowledge at all, about anything: Descartes seems close to a global skeptic, at least before he reaches the Cogito. Other types of skepticism are more limited: e.g., someone might be a skeptic about knowledge claims about the future (“Nobody really knows what will happen in the future”), or a skeptic about claims to religious knowledge, or moral knowledge, or skeptics about knowledge claims based on testimony, and more.

[8] What follows from the certainty of the Cogito is the nature of Descartes himself: he must be a thing that thinks. The Cogito does not prove that Descartes has a body or a brain, or even that other minds exist: these can all be doubted. Only thought is certain: Descartes says, “ I am, I exist , that is certain. But for how long? For as long as I think. It might perhaps even happen that if I stopped thinking, I should at once altogether stop being.” Cottingham, John, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes: Volume 2. Cambridge University Press (2012) (AT VII 27: CSM II 18).

[9] Cottingham, John, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes: Volume 2. Cambridge University Press (2012) (AT 7, 145-6, CMS 2, 104).

[10] Descartes argues that his idea of God is such that it could only have been caused by God: Descartes couldn’t have created that idea on his own or from any of his own experiences. Descartes also offers a distinct ontological argument for God’s existence: see The Ontological Argument for the Existence of God by Andrew Chapman

[11] Thus, Descartes is clearly a foundationalist. See e.g. Hasan, Ali, “Foundationalist Theories of Epistemic Justification,” in E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Fall 2018 edition.

[12] Something unclear is whether each individual would have to go through the thought processes that Descartes engaged in to have knowledge, or else they lack knowledge, or whether Descartes (or anyone’s, or enough people’s) engaging in these meditations would contribute to everyone’s having knowledge.

[13] See e.g. Unger, Peter. Ignorance: A Case for Scepticism (Oxford, UK and New York, NY: Oxford University Press), Chapter III.

[14] For discussion of some challenges facing theories of knowledge that deny that certainty is necessary for knowledge, see The Gettier Problem by Andrew Chapman and Epistemic Justification: What is Rational Belief? by Todd R. Long.

St. Augustine, The City of God (412)

Cottingham, John, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes: Volume 1 . Cambridge University Press (2012)

Cottingham, John, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes: Volume 2. Cambridge University Press (2012)

Hasan, Ali, “Foundationalist Theories of Epistemic Justification,” in E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Fall 2018 edition.

Unger, Peter. Ignorance: A Case for Scepticism (Oxford, UK and New York, NY: Oxford University Press), Chapter III.

Related Essays

Descartes’ Meditations 1-3 by Marc Bobro

Descartes’ Meditations 4-6 by Marc Bobro

al-Ghazālī’s Dream Argument for Skepticism by John Ramsey

Epistemology, or Theory of Knowledge by Thomas Metcalf

External World Skepticism by Andrew Chapman

The Gettier Problem and the Definition of Knowledge by Andrew Chapman

Epistemic Justification: What is Rational Belief? by Todd R. Long

Seemings: Justifying Beliefs Based on How Things Seem by Kaj André Zeller

The Ontological Argument for the Existence of God by Andrew Chapman

Modal Epistemology: Knowledge of Possibility & Necessity by Bob Fischer

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Acknowledgments

The editors are grateful to Marc Bobro for his review of this essay.

About the Author

Charles Miceli teaches philosophy in New Jersey and in Asia. He received an MA from Fordham University and reads novels in his spare time. micelicharles @ yahoo.com

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Definition of doubt

(Entry 1 of 2)

transitive verb

intransitive verb

Definition of doubt (Entry 2 of 2)

distrustfulness
dubitation [ archaic ]
incertitude
mistrustfulness
reservation
uncertainty

uncertainty , doubt , dubiety , skepticism , suspicion , mistrust mean lack of sureness about someone or something.

uncertainty may range from a falling short of certainty to an almost complete lack of conviction or knowledge especially about an outcome or result.

doubt suggests both uncertainty and inability to make a decision.

dubiety stresses a wavering between conclusions.

skepticism implies unwillingness to believe without conclusive evidence.

suspicion stresses lack of faith in the truth, reality, fairness, or reliability of something or someone.

mistrust implies a genuine doubt based upon suspicion.

Examples of doubt in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'doubt.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

Verb and Noun

Middle English douten , from Anglo-French duter, douter , from Latin dubitare to be in doubt; akin to Latin dubius dubious

13th century, in the meaning defined at transitive sense 3a

13th century, in the meaning defined at sense 2a

Phrases Containing doubt

a shadow of (a) doubt
beyond a reasonable doubt
beyond a shadow of a doubt
beyond doubt
call into doubt
cast doubt on
cast / throw doubt on
no doubt about it
no doubt in someone's mind
self - doubt
the benefit of the doubt
without (a) doubt

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doubly ruled surface

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“Doubt.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/doubt. Accessed 11 May. 2024.

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Descartes’ method of systematic doubt

Diana asked:

Descartes gives a list of things he had previously believed. What are these?

Answer by Craig Skinner

Short answer: his method entails his suspending belief about absolutely everything except one thing, namely,

* because he is doubting, he is thinking, and therefore must exist (‘I think therefore I am’, or, in Latin, ‘cogito ergo sum’).

He hopes to argue his way back to most of his former beliefs by sound reasoning from this single, clear and distinct, indubitable belief, thereby establishing a ‘firm and permanent structure in the sciences’.

Although he makes mention of his method of doubt in Rules for the Direction of the Mind and in Discourse on Method, the definitive account is in his Meditations, specifically Meditation 1 subtitled ‘Of the things which may be brought within the sphere of the doubtful’.

First, he says he must doubt everything learned through the senses (all empirical or a posteriori knowledge as we would say). For the senses can deceive, and also, at any given moment, he can’t be certain he is not dreaming, or that his mind is nor controlled by an ‘evil genius’ which deceives him about everything.

Secondly, he must doubt all truths of reason (rational or a priori knowledge). He feels that, even if dreaming, he knows that 2+3 = 5, but he considers that an evil genius could deceive him about mathematical truths, interfering in his thought every time he adds 2 and 3 so that he is sure (wrongly) that the sum is 5.

The nearest he gets to a list is towards the end of this Meditation, when he says:

‘I shall consider that the heavens, the earth, colours, figures, sound, and all other external things are nought but… illusions and dreams… I shall consider myself as having no hands, no eyes, no flesh, no blood, nor any senses, yet falsely believing myself to possess all these things.’

Having done all this doubting, the only certainty remaining, the Archimedean fixed point as he calls it, was ‘I think therefore I am’ (this exact wording is actually given in his Discourse on Method, but formulations in Meditations are equivalent)

Of course, he didn’t really doubt that there is a world out there, or that he had a body. His scepticism was a ploy (methodological scepticism) to try to put his views on a rational footing. However his arguments back from the cogito to belief in the physical world of concrete things, other people and his own body (with God as the bridge, so to speak), are widely considered unsound or invalid. So the upshot is that one of his main legacies is scepticism rather than its resolution, and strong philosophical scepticism (about matter, the external world, causation and selves) later emerges, for example in the views of Berkeley and Hume.

Craig Skinner at PhiloSophos.com

Published by Geoffrey Klempner

Founder member of the International Society for Philosophers (ISFP) View all posts by Geoffrey Klempner

2 thoughts on “ Descartes’ method of systematic doubt ”

Okay so what reasons does Descartes give for engaging in systematic doubts? What it supposed to accomplish? What are Descartes view regarding how much reason can tell us about the world?

33 Doubt and Belief in Literature

Roger Lundin is the Blanchard Professor of English at Wheaton College (Illinois). He has written and edited ten books, including Believing Again: Doubt and Faith in A Secular Age; Invisible Conversations: Religion in the Literature of America; and Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief. He has been a visiting professor at Calvin College, Regent College, and the University of Notre Dame, and has received major research fellowships from the Erasmus Institute, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Evangelical Scholarship Initiative. Lundin has an MA in Theological Studies from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and earned his MA and PhD in English at the University of Connecticut.

Published: 03 February 2014
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The story of belief and doubt in modern literature begins with the emergence of open [CE1]unbelief at roughly the midpoint of the nineteenth century. For the first generation of writers—including such greats as Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Fyodor Dostoevsky—the sense of conflict and uncertainty was palpable, as they grappled on new ground with classic questions concerning the nature and existence of God, the problem of evil, and the meaning of human life. In the generations that followed, from the rise of naturalism to the heights of modernism into the postmodern, eclectic age we call our own, the overtly Christian nature of the question of belief began to recede from view, and a politically oriented understanding took center stage. To a significant extent, on matters having to do with the relationship between literature and belief, the twentieth century was to witness an ever-widening gap between the view of those matters from the ivory tower and the perspective from the pews and the private regions of the heart. As a result, while powerful theoretical developments were fueling academic skepticism about the role of religion within the academy, outside the academy’s walls men and women continued to grapple with God and to record their struggles for others to read, to hear, and to heed. Given the infinitely diverse and widely dispersed nature of modern culture, these individual accounts of faith and doubt perhaps have not had the same cultural resonance that the explosive explorations of the nineteenth-century writers did. Yet at the same time, they testify to the ongoing vitality of belief, and unbelief, in contemporary literature and experience. At their best, such works are marked by a creative pugnacity, and in their willingness to mention the unmentionable, they continue to serve as a counter-cultural force challenging the pieties of the modern literary and theoretical establishments.

In the summer of 1870, Henry Adams sat in London and wondered what direction his hitherto aimless life might possibly take. Although this 28-year-old grandson and great-grandson of presidents had shown seeds of promise in his early years, his life experiences had yet to bear much fruit. Henry had no desire to pursue the public life that had engaged his family for generations, but he also found it hard to imagine what profession or vocation might command his attention and satisfy the needs of his mind and spirit.

As Adams mulled over the possibilities, devastating news reached him in a telegram from Italy. His brother-in-law reported that Henry’s sister, Louisa, had become gravely ill as a result of an infection that had followed upon a minor accident. Henry rushed to be at her side, making the journey from London to Tuscany in a little over a day. Yet by the time he arrived, tetanus had already clamped its deadly grip upon his sister’s body. “Hour by hour,” he wrote years later, “the muscles grew rigid, while the mind remained bright, until after ten days of fiendish torture she died in convulsions.”

Henry was appalled by the contrast between the lavish beauty of the Italian landscape and the barren torments of Louisa’s sickroom. In excess and splendor, nature played with death and toyed with torture as his sister succumbed to its sinister power. “Never had one seen her so winning,” Adams wrote of the visage nature wore in the vista from his sister’s room. The “vineyards…bursting with midsummer blood” and the sweet hum of “the soft, velvet air” gave hints of a seductive but destructive force: “For many thousands of years, on these hills and plains, nature had gone on sabring men and women with the same air of sensual pleasure.”

This was Henry Adams’s first intimate encounter with death, and he later claimed the shock of it all set him permanently and implacably against religious belief. As he contemplated the ruthless efficiency of nature, his “mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless energies.” To his despondent spirit, “society became fantastic,” and “the usual anodynes of social medicine became evident artifice.” Of all possible sedatives, “religion was the most human” but also the most unthinkable. How could anyone believe that “any personal deity could find pleasure or profit” in the torture of a woman as vibrant and dynamic as his sister? “For pure blasphemy,” Adams concluded, “it made pure atheism a comfort. God might be, as the Church said, a Substance, but he could not be a Person.” 1

Although it was unique in the sense that every experience of grief and doubt has its own particular provenances and consequences, the crisis Henry Adams underwent was hardly uncommon in his day. He came of age in the era of Darwin—he was 21 when On the Origin of Species was published—and during his undergraduate years at Harvard, the battle lines were already being drawn between the broadly evangelical moralists and the newly emerging materialists. Like many artists and intellectuals who lived through the Civil War and rose to positions of cultural authority in the following decades, Adams greeted the future with equal measures of apprehension and elation. “You may think this all nonsense,” he wrote to his brother in 1862, “but I tell you these are great times. Man has mounted science, and is now run away with.” 2

The frisson of excitement felt by many in those days had to do with the fact that for the first time in the modern experience, open unbelief had suddenly become an intellectually viable and socially acceptable option across the cultures of the North Atlantic. 3 This nineteenth-century challenge to belief combined elements of epistemology and ethics in its critique of Christianity, and Adams drew on both sources to analyze the role his sister’s death played in his own loss of faith. On the ethical front, the difficulties centered on the question of God’s character. Enlightenment standards of fairness and equality made it hard to reconcile the arbitrariness of individual suffering with any idea of “a personal deity” who might take pleasure in inflicting “fiendish cruelty” upon the body, mind, and spirit of Louisa Adams Kuhn.

At the epistemological level, for Adams and others, philosophical naturalism put forward a compelling alternative to the traditional narratives of providential design and destiny. The Darwinian system provided a comprehensive account of the whole of life, and it did so without recourse to any concept of God. With Darwin there was no need for a divine designer to call life into being or to spin it through its endless permutations. The principles guiding nature’s development were seen as unrelenting forces working their way within living organisms rather than as transcendental powers creating and sustaining life from without. When On the Origin of Species appeared in 1859, the time for it was ripe, for “Darwinism dropped into a cultural configuration already aligned to accommodate it. Its fitness was generally appreciated before its rightness was generally established.” 4

33.1 The Shifting Nature of Belief

By the time that unbelief emerged as a potent cultural phenomenon in the mid-nineteenth century, the meaning of belief itself had already undergone a dramatic transformation. From the medieval period well into the seventeenth century, belief had a meaning that differed substantially from the one we assign to it today. It had to do primarily with relationships of trust rather than with states of mind. In English, the word belief dates to the late twelfth century, and it originally carried the sense we now ascribe to faith. Belief was bound up with matters of loyalty, promise, and obligation; it involved an action of the whole person that encompassed the willingness to trust and confide in others and in God. Until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, belief also entailed participation in liturgical life and communal ritual, and it had relatively little to do with individual struggle and personal assent as we understand them.

Powerful changes were afoot, however, in the early modern era. Under the impetus of the Reformation, the word faith, with its Latin root of fides, gradually came to stand for the disposition of trust, and belief began to shade into our modern meaning of the term, which focuses upon the mental act of acceptance and affirmation. In the understanding of belief that developed over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the mind is pictured as perceiving a fact or receiving a proposition purported to be true. It then weighs the evidence of the senses, proceeds to judge arguments through the reasoning process, and finally decides whether what it has perceived deserves to be believed.

On the specific question of belief in God, a tension between affirmation and denial—between belief and doubt—did not exist in any meaningful sense until the Enlightenment period. Even then avowed unbelief proved to be the sensational exception rather than the conventional rule. Heterodox opinions and lax beliefs dotted the spiritual landscape of early modern Europe, but until the late nineteenth century, “the existence of God remained so interwoven with understandings of man and nature as to be close to indubitable.” 5

Nevertheless, as smooth and seamless as the cultural terrain may have appeared to be in early modernity, tremors had begun to ripple beneath the surface, and the intellectual ground had begun to buckle under the pressure of new ideas about nature, about the self, and about the very meaning of ideas themselves. In good measure, from the time of Socrates to that of Shakespeare—a span of two thousand years—ideas had been taken to be the joint property of minds and objects together. Only in the early modern era did “thought and feeling” gradually come to be considered as being “confined to minds” alone. This relocation of ideas uncoupled the strong links that the Christian faith had established between the lordship of Jesus Christ and the Greek concept of the Logos, the Word to which the prologue to John’s gospel pays moving tribute. Sustained and nourished by this association, Christian thought had long considered minds and objects to be bound together mysteriously in an intricate, ordered system of meaning. But by the end of the eighteenth century, the mind had come to stand alone, brimming with ideas but facing an endless array of mindless objects. In this new epistemological order, the mind’s central task became that of judging what is to be believed or doubted about that world of objects and about the power that may or may not be at work behind it. 6

So it was that by the nineteenth century, the center of belief had shifted from the realm of relationships of trust and promise to the vast domain of human consciousness. John Milton’s Paradise Lost captures brilliantly the dynamics of this shift. Composed in the 1660s, Milton’s epic has a prophetic quality about it, and in the speeches of Satan in particular, we hear a voice that sounds uncannily like our own. The Devil believes in the virtues of self-fashioning, and as he calls together the fallen angels in hell, he boasts of the ability they have to transform their hellish conditions through the powers of the mind:

Hail horrors, hail Infernal world, and then profoundest Hell Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time. The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n. 7

We might think of this and other speeches by Satan in Paradise Lost as pointing to the timbers with which the cultural home of unbelief was to be framed and finished over the course of the next two centuries. It was, after all, in the decades immediately following Milton’s death (in 1674) that a series of bracing ideas began to call Christian orthodoxy into question. New conceptions of history, nature, and knowledge raised vexing questions about the authority of the Bible, the reality of miracles, the efficacy of the sacraments, and the deity of Christ. For some, the struggle over such issues led to a chastened and deepened renewal of their Christian beliefs. Yet for others, the challenges threatened to separate them forever from those beliefs.

Such crises spurred some of the late eighteenth century’s finest minds to seek new ways to renew the ancient faith. Having discovered that holding on to scripture and tradition “required some other evidence than those things themselves, [for] the authority of tradition and established religion was no longer self-evident or self-certifying,” many romantic poets and idealist philosophers looked for fresh sources of authority to support the spiritual riches and cultural legacy of historic Christianity. 8

On both sides of the Atlantic, the quest for new sources and better evidence drew some intrepid explorers ever deeper into nature and into the unfathomable self. To William Wordsworth in his more rapturous moments, nothing within or beyond creation, including “Jehovah—with his thunder, and the choir / Of shouting Angels,” could fill him with “such fear and awe” as “the Mind of Man, / My haunt, and the main region of my Song.” For Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the answer to the threat posed by materialism and the critical spirit was “a transcendental idea of the mind,…which actively shaped experience and had access to spiritual dimensions beyond rational ‘Understanding.’” And as far as their American counterpart Ralph Waldo Emerson was concerned, the essence of Christianity could be saved only if its dross—i.e., the scriptures and sacraments—could be discarded. “Dare to love God without mediator or veil,” he told a group of Harvard divinity students in 1838, asking them to preach “the true Christianity,—a faith like Christ’s in the infinitude of man. None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed.” 9

For a few decades—in England from the late 1780s to the early 1800s and in America from the late 1820s to 1850 or so—the romantic enterprise provided pillars that seemed sturdy enough to support the new edifices meant to house the faith. Yet these structures could not stand for long, for their foundation was a sanguine view of human nature that could not bear the weight of the evidence against it. (Half a century ago, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wryly said he concurred with the judgment that “the doctrine of original sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith.”) 10 On the English side, the mayhem and terror that marked the French Revolution dashed romantic hopes, while in America the abominations of slavery and the collapse of utopian ventures unsettled the dreams and undid the schemes of what were meant to be halcyon days.

33.1.1 Nimble Believing

The loss of this romantic hope left many writers in the second half of the nineteenth century feeling empty-handed and bereft of spiritual comfort or assurance. A representative figure on this score was Herman Melville, who wondered aloud in Moby Dick (1851) about what, or who, it is that lurks behind the “pasteboard masks” of the visible world. Melville’s Captain Ahab moves back and forth incessantly between the belief that behind every phenomenon “some unknown but still reasoning thing” may be at work and the apprehension that perhaps “there’s naught beyond.” Yet whether Moby Dick is the “agent” of a hidden, malicious power or is himself the unsponsored “principal” of that power, Ahab will wreak his vengeance upon this creature in a desperate search for relief for his anguished spirit. “I own thy speechless, placeless power,” the captain cries out at one point, addressing the “clear spirit of clear fire” that burns at the heart of reality, “but to the last gasp of my earthquake life [I]‌ will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here.” 11

A decade before Darwin, Melville’s Ahab found himself facing a mechanistic world in which every reality outside the human mind seemed to project a visage of bleak, blank indifference. In this situation, only consciousness, the play of the mind and language, can articulate a view of reality as being infused with spiritual purpose, but to do so it must trick itself into believing in a truth of its own making. The crisis of the alien spirit housed in an indifferent universe more or less defines unbelief in the late nineteenth century, and although this vision predates Darwin, his theories richly filled in the details and firmly buttressed the arguments for it.

By the second half of the nineteenth century, then, the shift from the medieval to the modern understanding of belief was complete. Belief and doubt as Melville and others in his generation had come to view them had everything to do with the mind’s struggle to assent to claims of truth and little to do with relationships of trust or rituals of participation. This view of truth hinges on an individual’s specific apprehension of nature, history, and human experience. In the literature of the late nineteenth century, the drama of belief takes on an overwhelmingly inward orientation, as doubt and faith do battle within the divided mind and restless spirit of the isolated individual. “The devil is struggling with God,” Mitya Karamazov tells his brother in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel, “and the battlefield is the human heart.” 12 Melville’s heart and mind provided a large stage for conflicts of this kind, as Nathaniel Hawthorne explains in an account of his final meeting with his friend and fellow novelist:

Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated”; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists…in wandering to-and fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. 13

This analysis of the Melvillean malady resonates with a self-assessment Dostoevsky put forward in a letter written at the same time in the mid-1850s. To explain the renewal of faith he had undergone during his recent imprisonment, he spoke of himself as a “child of the century, a child of disbelief and doubt.” His “thirst for faith” had cost him “much terrible torture,” but it had also brought him, as a gift from God, “instants” of complete “calm.” During such times of peace, he had fashioned a personal Credo : “to believe that nothing is more beautiful, profound, sympathetic, reasonable, manly, and more perfect than Christ.” Dostoevsky went so far as to say that “if someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth,…then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.” 14

Dostoevsky’s oppositional formula establishes a radical distinction between the demands of the mind and the desires of the heart. The heart longs for God but the mind has lost its way. As a result, the self finds itself shuttling between Christ and the truth, between belief and unbelief. In a letter written in 1882, Emily Dickinson observes that “on subjects of which we know nothing, or should I say Beings —…we both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an Hour, which keeps Believing nimble.” 15 In this letter, as in the Melville and Dostoevsky passages, the act of believing in God is represented as an endless toing-and-froing between the poles of affirmation and denial. Like others in her day—including Friedrich Nietzsche and Thomas Hardy, as well as Dostoevsky and Melville—Dickinson took this ceaseless experience to be a distinctly modern phenomenon:

Those—dying then, Knew where they went— They went to God’s Right Hand— That Hand is amputated now And God cannot be found— The abdication of Belief Makes the Behavior small— Better an ignis fatuus Than no illume at all— 16

While it does not flatly deny the possibility of a heavenly destiny for the human race, Dickinson’s poem holds out little hope for finding the vanished God. As was the case with Nietzsche’s declaration of the death of God—published in the same year Dickinson wrote this poem—hints of violence and images of bloody hands greet the one who seeks after that God. Nietzsche took the loss of God to be a call to the lofty labors of self-deification, while to Dickinson the task was to adjust to a world in which “the abdication of Belief” had made “the Behavior small.” God’s absence leads to life’s emptiness, and as Dickinson said in a moving tribute to novelist George Eliot, “Life’s empty Pack is heaviest, / As every Porter knows—.” 17

Melville, Dostoevsky, and Dickinson were complex and singular artists. They founded no literary movements, belonged to no intellectual schools, and certainly exercised no influence on each other. Nevertheless, one senses in their work a solidarity of shared anxieties and aspirations. And what made such writers particularly influential was that their religious restlessness manifested itself not only in their thematic concerns but in the forms and methods of their art as well.

In the case of Dostoevsky and Melville, for example, the quest for belief was tied to the dialogical techniques they employed in their fiction. As Dostoevsky was wrestling with his profound doubts, he was also furiously at work developing a new form of fiction, which Mikhail Bakhtin was to call the dialogical novel . According to Bakhtin, in fiction of this kind, the author cedes control of the thoughts and discourse of his characters and permits them to embody and promote ideas profoundly antithetical to his own. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky presents Alyosha as his hero, even as he allows Ivan to espouse countervailing views with great force and clarity. In like manner, in Moby Dick Melville clears a space in which two dramatically conflicting visions—the grim idealism of Captain Ahab and the good-humored pragmatism of Ishmael—flourish side by side. Propelled by these opposing visions, the novel repeatedly shifts from deadly serious assertions to comically absurd asides and back again.

For Dickinson the new, fluid status of belief and unbelief played directly into her poetic vision and practice. It led her to conceive of individual poems as provisional explorations of multi-faceted human experience. Many of her poems offer the feel of life as a believing mind or trusting heart might experience it, but just as many or more offer the texture of experience as a deeply doubting or openly disbelieving person might know it. No single poem or any small ensemble of poems can represent Dickinson’s settled view of the issue at hand, for the affirmation one poem may give with the right hand in one verse is likely to be snatched away by the left hand in another. The dashes that punctuate her lines, the pronouns that stand alone without a hint of antecedents, and the metaphors that alternately entice our interest and spurn our inquiries—all are signs of the tantalizing ambivalence of Dickinson’s mind as it explores the possibilities of belief and unbelief.

33.2 Into the Twentieth Century

In England and America, vigorous, open unbelief emerged in the four decades bounded by the publication of Moby Dick in 1851 and Melville’s death in 1891. More often than not, the religious struggles depicted in the poetry and fiction of those decades were marked by a stark contrast between the pieties that had been in place when these writers were children and the hard-edged skepticism that pervaded their adult world. Like Dostoevsky and Dickinson, such writers as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Lord Alfred Tennyson came into their maturity just as unbelief was emerging from the cultural shadows. They found themselves face to face with a world in which a vast body of new ideas began to overturn longstanding beliefs and to point the way to previously unimaginable possibilities, both cultural and religious.

To some, the initial shock proved all but overwhelming. “There never yet was a generation of men,” John Ruskin wrote, “who, taken as a body, so woefully fulfilled the words, ‘having no hope, and without God in the world’, as the present civilized European race.” 18 To others, the situation seemed hardly so dire, and over time, the conflict between faith and doubt lost its aura of crisis and doom. Philosophical naturalism came to reign over the intellectual and cultural life of the late nineteenth century, and that being the case, writers increasingly felt little pressure to reconcile new insights with established beliefs. Instead, they considered themselves free of concern over the fate of what they took to be an outmoded creed. In a study of the American reception of Darwin, historian Jon Roberts locates “a host of factors in the cultural milieu of the United States” that led at the end of the nineteenth century to a “growing tendency among literate Americans to ignore the categories of Christian theology in interpreting their experience.” Having conceded so much ground to scientific determinism, many Protestants “found themselves defending a very attenuated view of God’s role in the universe,” and the thinned-out forces backing the God of liberalism could mount little more than a token defense against the assaults of naturalism. 19

In the universities that were developing at a rapid pace in that era, the study of literature was increasingly promoted as a means of securing the benefits of a religious sensibility without the burdens of a creedal belief. At Harvard, for example, President Charles Eliot vigorously promoted an ideal of “liberal culture” in which Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare were pressed into service to promote “human spiritual growth” as a “substitute for the Christian drama of the biblical canon.” 20 As Eliot explained, the study of nature and culture inevitably “fills men with humility and awe” by bringing them “face to face with inscrutable mystery and infinite power.” By his reckoning, such an encounter need not lead to dire consequences that had undermined the faith of Henry Adams. Instead, borrowing the words of James Russell Lowell, Eliot urged students and professors alike to embrace

Whatsoever touches life With upward impulse; be He nowhere else, God is in all that liberates and lifts, In all that humbles, sweetens, and consoles. 21

On matters having to do with the relationship between literature and belief, the twentieth century was to witness an ever-widening gap between the view of those matters from the ivory tower and the perspective from the pews. Perhaps few things could give us a better sense of this distance than a sermonic assessment that the frenetic evangelist Billy Sunday made of Charles Eliot and his educational vision. With his vision of literary culture as a nimbus-giving surrogate for a departed God, Eliot had shown himself to be, in Sunday’s words, a man “so low-down he would need an aeroplane to get into hell.” 22

Despite their personal and social significance for millions, neither fundamentalism of Billy Sunday’s kind nor traditional Catholicism had a significant impact upon American or British literature from the Civil War to the Great Depression. In this period, on matters of religious belief, literature assumed a valedictory air, as poets, novelists, and essayists found themselves bidding adieu to a no-longer forbidding deity. Some writers of this period, such as Edith Wharton and Stephen Crane, took the loss in stride. Throughout most of her adulthood, Wharton took the “late nineteenth-century scientific rationalism” of her youth to be her guide, while Crane found what shelter he could under the cover of cosmic irony. 23 Others, such as Theodore Dreiser and Jack London, readily embraced the liberating potential of materialism; in a deterministic world, sin became an empty concept and guilt its rapidly diminishing consequence.

At the same time, other writers at the close of the century, Henry Adams and Mark Twain among them, found themselves torn between their disdain for traditional Christianity and their dismay over the heartlessness of a God-less world. While Adams wrote in sorrow, Twain masked his pain with sarcasm. “ Nothing exists; all is a dream. God—man—the world—the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars: a dream, all a dream—they have no existence,” he wrote in The Mysterious Stranger. “Nothing exists save empty space and you .” 24 Consciousness and the empty void made for a lonely, mismatched pair, and Twain eventually came to believe life would be unendurable, were it not for the gift of death. “Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.” 25

Twain’s plaintive desperation proved to be the exception rather than the rule for many authors in the early twentieth century. Following the lead of Flaubert and Baudelaire, a number of English and Irish writers turned instead to the ideal of a self-contained aesthetic realm sealed off from the turmoil of ordinary life. For many, the passion for aesthetic development and cultural criticism proved too all-consuming to allow for more than a fleeting concern for the passing of belief. In England, in Ireland, and in exile, William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce were busy breaking new literary ground and forsaking the cultivation of overtly Christian concerns. Denis Donoghue sums up this state of affairs with his description of Yeats as a “residual Christian” and a “Protestant of an unexacting theological persuasion” who propounded ideas that were “heterodox indeed but not entirely a scandal to Christians.” 26 With certain exceptions, the modernist poets and novelists had little sympathy for religious orthodoxy, and they took the legacy of Christian belief to be a curious, albeit resonant, remnant of a vanquished faith and a vanished era. Because many of the modernist writers came into their prime almost half a century after “the convulsions of the nineteenth century,…there was no formal agony of religious belief” in most of the writers of the early twentieth century. 27

Across the Atlantic, American culture appeared too preoccupied with the acquisition of wealth and the pursuit of pleasure to have time for rummaging in the ruins of the European and Christian past. In the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, “America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history and there was going to be plenty to tell about it.” 28 Malcolm Cowley, who was both a keen participant in that spree and a gifted chronicler of it, described the turmoil of the post-World War I generation as “a moral revolt,” and he was convinced that “beneath the revolt were social transformations.” The “young men and women” of that era “had a sense of reckless confidence not only about money but about life in general.” They were determined to break with the beliefs and values of past generations, and in this time of rapid change, what Cowley calls the “puritanism” of the culture and the “Protestantism” of its religion were “under attack.” 29

33.3 Critical Establishments

By the middle of the twentieth century, it was clear that on matters of belief and doubt, literary criticism and theory were content to follow the lead of poetry and fiction. Over the first half of the century, criticism had gradually migrated from its home in the literary magazines and quarterlies to its new abode in the university. Once it had become securely housed within the academy, criticism quickly developed a symbiotic relationship with imaginative literature. Because the modern academic enterprise is driven by nature to search for new paradigms and provocative interpretive schemes, the alliance of criticism and literature had immediate and extensive consequences in the second half of the twentieth century. Innovations in verse and fiction began to fuel revolutions in theory, and influential theoretical movements in turn served to validate and promote the work of key writers.

The shift of criticism from the magazines to the universities coincided with the collapse of the spiritualized humanism that had informed the work of Charles Eliot and countless others in the late nineteenth century. Whatever was left of what George Santayana in 1913 memorably called the “genteel tradition” withered and vanished during the First World War. Out of that collapse and at the close of that war, a sweeping, transformational theological movement arose in Europe, spurred by the work of Karl Barth and a host of others, including Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. However much they varied in their approaches, these figures shared a deep desire to recover facets of the historic faith that had been discarded or dismissed by the liberal tradition.

Although their work—particularly that of Barth and his great Catholic counterpart, Hans Urs von Balthasar—has exercised a profound influence on the theology and ecclesiology of recent decades, it has had scant impact upon literature or theory, save in isolated instances. In the main, on matters religious, modern criticism has followed literature’s lead by making its peace with philosophical naturalism. Twentieth-century theories of literature accepted as a given the materialist narrative that had come to the fore in late nineteenth-century literature and science. To flesh out their systems, critics and theorists often turned to poets and novelists for their dominant images and narrative patterns.

To see how this relationship of literature and theory functioned, we can examine the close ties that bound one of the century’s greatest poets, Wallace Stevens, to one of its most distinguished critics, Frank Kermode. Stevens broke upon the scene during the First World War and continued to write poetry until his death in 1955, while Kermode’s critical studies spanned six decades, from the early 1950s to the first decade of the twenty-first century.

From the start, Stevens promoted poetry as the inevitable successor to religion in general and Christianity in particular. For him, life was hardly a struggle between belief and doubt, because the battle was already over, and unbelief had won. Like most modernists, Stevens took that unbelief to be a given, and to him the only real question was, in the words of Robert Frost, “what to make of a diminished thing.”

“To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences,” Stevens wrote near the end of his life. These gods had not disappeared or fallen victim to craftier, more powerful deities. No, they simply “came to nothing,” and although “it was their annihilation, not our ours,…it left us feeling that in a measure we, too, had been annihilated.” To Stevens, to live in the modern age was to stand alone, “feeling dispossessed and alone in a solitude, like children without parents.” 30

In “Sunday Morning,” Stevens depicts unbelief as a whirling agent of change that has brought about “an old chaos of the sun, / Or old dependency of day and night, / Or island solitude, unsponsored, free.” In our state of spiritual poverty and confusion, we must call upon poetry to assist us in writing the script for our otherwise plotless lives:

The poem of the mind in the act of finding What will suffice. It has not always had To find: the scene was set; it repeated what Was in the script. Then the theatre was changed To something else. Its past was a souvenir.

We write, that is, to articulate our lives by fabricating the connections that impart meaning—or at least the illusion of it—to our lives. “From this the poem springs,” Stevens explains: “that we live in a place / That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves / And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.” 31

Images of dispossession and abandonment sound a somber note in these accounts of belief’s decline, but Stevens’s oracular tributes to poetry are often marked by a good measure of brio and bravado as well. It is hard to lose the gods, these aphorisms concede, but it is also good that poetry can take their place and play their roles. In the collection of these aphorisms, titled “Adagia,” Stevens seats poetry securely on the throne so recently abandoned by the gods:

The poet makes silk dresses out of worms. After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption. It is the belief and not the god that counts. The mind is the most powerful thing in the world. Poetry is a means of redemption. The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly. 32

Kermode published The Sense of an Ending a decade after Stevens died, and although that work rarely mentions the poet’s name, it bears the imprint of his thought on every page. Kermode’s elegant study of narrative reads, in fact, like one long gloss upon Stevens’s claim that “the final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else.” Deprived of metaphysical solace, we desperately need fictions, for “our poverty—to borrow that rich concept from Wallace Stevens—is great enough, in a world which is not our own, to necessitate a continuous preoccupation with the changing fiction.” 33 Fictions clothe us in the illusions of truth, without which we could not survive in a world as hostile and forbidding as the one we inhabit.

Like many theories of literature generated in the past century, Kermode’s account rests upon a strong set of tacit assumptions about belief. It takes as a given a radical distinction between myths , which Kermode fears, and fictions , which he champions. This distinction matters for ethical and political reasons. “Fictions are for finding things out,” he argues, and we can adapt them to serve our purposes and meet our needs. They do not require our assent, nor do they have the power to compel us, or anyone else, to any specific course of action. “Myths,” on the other hand, come to life when fictions “degenerate.” That is, “whenever [fictions] are not consciously held to be fictive” they becomes “myths,” i.e., dogmas. Myths are meant to establish “stability,” while fictions are “agents of change. Myths call for absolute, fictions for conditional assent.” 34

Kermode was a largely apolitical critic, but his “fiction-myth” distinction tells us a good deal about the political transformation of the question of belief and doubt in modern literary studies. The virtues he touts in fictions—having to do with the malleability of their claims and the modesty of their assumptions—are theoretical commonplaces that grew out of nineteenth-century romanticism and pragmatism.

The story of how literary romanticism led to theoretical fictionalism was told repeatedly, and lucidly, in the essays and books of Richard Rorty. One of his pivotal works, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, opens with a bold declaration about the political transformation of religious belief: “About two hundred years ago, the idea that truth was made rather found began to take hold of the imagination of Europe.” The French Revolution taught us that language and social institutions could be overturned and transformed “almost overnight.” As a consequence, what Rorty calls “utopian politics” became the rule for the intellectual and artistic elites of the cultures of the North Atlantic. On the matter of belief, “utopian politics sets aside questions about both the will of God and the nature of man and dreams of creating a hitherto unknown form of society.” 35 Rorty claims that the central argument of modernity no longer concerns the existence or character of God. Instead, the only question of belief that now matters has to do with the possibilities of dramatic, even radical, social and political change.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Rorty claims, the romantic view of history and language had given way to a tightly focused, pragmatic understanding of them. Figures such as Nietzsche and William James concluded that instead of providing access to the truth, language is useful as a tool that can “help us get what we want.” The pragmatists are content to live without “metaphysical comfort,” and they do not agonize over religious questions of the kind that had bedeviled the likes of Dickinson, Dostoevsky, and their cohort. To be a pragmatist of the Rortyan kind is to be willing, even eager, to abandon belief and discount doubt as they have been defined in the history of Judaism and Christianity. 36

In the closing decades of the twentieth century, a hybrid version of Kermode’s fictionalism and Rorty’s pragmatism came to exercise considerable influence over literary theory and criticism. This perspective recast the debate about faith and doubt by changing it from an epistemological and theological struggle into an ethical quest. Fixed beliefs, which buttressed established practices, became anathema, and for many the goal of literature and criticism became that of envisioning a world in which flexible definitions of the good, the true, and the beautiful would be free to flourish without impediment or harm. A belief in the unassailable virtue of self-definition and self-construction became an all but unquestioned article in the humanist creed by the end of the twentieth century.

As problematic as certain elements of this shift to the political have been, salutary consequences have followed upon it as well. The foregrounding of ethical questions, for example, led to a long overdue reappraisal of the African American literary tradition and of the rich religious traditions that had fed into it. From the slave narratives of the nineteenth century to the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance and the fiction of such major writers as Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin, that literature has had its share of powerful accounts of the struggle between belief and doubt.

But in this tradition, more often than not, questions of belief and doubt have been driven by a concern for justice and righteousness rather than by a passion for matters epistemological and metaphysical. In the “Appendix” to his own slave narrative, Frederick Douglass spoke openly of his crisis of faith. That crisis was fueled by the contrast between the ideals of biblical religion and “the slaveholding religion ” of the United States. “I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ,” Douglass explains. “I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.” 37 Douglass struggled to distinguish between the Christianity of the nation and the Christianity of Christ, but even as he was writing Narrative of the Life, he was beginning to part ways with the faith of his youth. In the words of his biographer, “Douglass found that he could not marry the two religions, Christianity and antislavery, though the one led to the other.” He severed his ties to the church and “was now committed to a new faith, one for which he would speak the word.” 38

“He could not marry the two religions…though the one led to the other”—with this description of Frederick Douglass’s struggles, William McFeely deftly traces the narrative arc of belief and doubt in modern literature. The story begins, we have seen, with the emergence of open unbelief at roughly the midpoint of the nineteenth century. For the first generation of writers—including such greats as Melville, Dickinson, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky—the sense of conflict and uncertainty was palpable, as they grappled on new ground with classic questions concerning the nature and existence of God, the problem of evil, and the meaning of human life. In the generations that followed, from the rise of naturalism to the heights of modernism into the postmodern, eclectic age we call our own, the overtly Christian nature of the question of belief began to recede from view, and a politically oriented understanding took center stage.

33.4 Pugilists and Poets: The Modern Literature of Belief

Still, while these developments were unfolding within the academy, outside its walls men and women continued to grapple with God and to record their struggles for others to read, to hear, and to heed. Given the infinitely diverse and widely dispersed nature of modern culture, these individual accounts of faith and doubt perhaps have not had the same cultural resonance that the explosive explorations of the nineteenth-century writers did. Yet at the same time, they testify to the ongoing vitality of belief, and unbelief, in contemporary literature and experience. At their best, such works are marked by a creative pugnacity, and in their willingness to mention the unmentionable, they continue to serve as a counter-cultural force that challenges the pieties of the modern literary and theoretical establishments.

An incident from the life of Flannery O’Connor captures brilliantly the oppositional power of this modern literature of belief. Several years after the fact, O’Connor wrote to a friend to describe a sharp exchange she had had with the novelist Mary McCarthy at a dinner party. It turned out to be a dispute, albeit a brief one, about the relationship of religion and literature. “She departed the Church at the age of 15 and is a Big Intellectual,” O’Connor wrote of McCarthy, and it was clear that the vaunted public intellectual intimidated her younger, fiction-writing guest.

The dinner began at eight, and by one in the morning, O’Connor reported, “I hadn’t opened my mouth once, there being nothing for me in such company to say.” She felt like a dog “who had been trained to say a few words but…had forgotten them.” Then, “toward morning,” the conversation turned to the subject of “the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend.” McCarthy said that whenever she received the Host in her childhood, she had liked to imagine “it as the Holy Ghost,” that “most portable” person of the Trinity. But now, she explained, she took it to be nothing but “a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, ‘Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.’” That was the only defense that a weary O’Connor could mount in the middle of the night, but in her words, “I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.” 39

In a letter written in the final months of her life, Emily Dickinson described herself as being both “Pugilist and Poet.” Like Jacob, who told the angel, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me,” Dickinson would not let go of God, nor would Flannery O’Connor. And as the stories of Walker Percy, John Updike, Toni Morrison, and Saul Bellow bear witness and the poems of Richard Wilbur, Denise Levertov, and Czeslaw Milosz attest, many of the modern world’s most accomplished writers have continued to refuse to relax their grip as they have pressed ahead with their restless quests to believe, and rest, in God.

1. Henry Adams , The Education of Henry Adams, in Novels, Mont Saint Michel, The Education , ed. Ernest Samuels and Jayne N. Samuels (New York: Library of America, 1983), 982–83 .

2. Henry Adams , The Letters of Henry Adams , vol. 1: 1858–1868 , ed. J. C. Levenson et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982), 290 .

3. For the intellectual and cultural background to the emergence of unbelief, see James Turner , Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985) , and Louis Menand , The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001) .

Louis Menand, Metaphysical Club , 140.

James Turner, Without God, Without Creed , 27.

6. Charles Taylor , Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 184–92 .

7. John Milton , Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, ed. Christopher Ricks (New York: New American Library, 1968), 54 ; Book I, ll. 250–55.

8. Terry Pinkard , German Philosophy, 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 10 .

9. William Wordsworth, “Preface” to The Excursion, in M.H. Abrams , Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), 467 ; Richard Holmes , Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804–1834 (New York: Pantheon, 1999), 393 ; Ralph Waldo Emerson , “The Divinity School Address,” in Emerson: Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), 88–89 .

10. Reinhold Niebuhr , Man’s Nature and His Communities: Essays on the Dynamics and Enigmas of Man’s Personal and Social Existence (New York: Scribner, 1965), 24 .

11. Herman Melville , Moby Dick, 2nd ed., ed. Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford (New York: Norton, 2002), 140 , 382.

12. Fyodor Dostoevsky , The Brothers Karamazov , trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 108 .

13. Nathaniel Hawthorne , quoted in Hershel Parker , Herman Melville: A Biography , vol. 2, 1851–1891 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 300 .

14. Fyodor Dostoevsky , quoted in Joseph Frank , Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850–1859 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 160 .

15. The Letters of Emily Dickinson, vol. 3, ed. Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958), 728 .

16. The Poems of Emily Dickinson, reading edition, ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 582 .

Letters of Emily Dickinson, vol. 3, 770.

18. John Ruskin , Modern Painters , vol. 3 (New York: 1859), 258 .

19. Jon H. Roberts , Darwinism and the Divine in America: Protestant Intellectuals and Organic Evolution, 1859–1900 (1988; repr., Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 238 .

20. George M. Marsden , The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 191 .

21. Charles William Eliot , Educational Reform: Essays and Addresses (New York, 1898), 43 .

22. Upton Sinclair , The Goose Step: A Study of American Education (Pasadena: Self-Published, 1923), 103 .

23. R. W. B. Lewis , Edith Wharton: A Biography (New York: Harper, 1975), 510 .

24. Mark Twain , quoted in Alfred Kazin , God and the American Writer (New York: Knopf, 1997), 192 . Emphasis in original.

25. Mark Twain , Pudd’nhead Wilson , in Mississippi Writings , ed. Guy Cardwell (New York: Library of America, 1982), 929 .

26. Denis Donoghue , Adam’s Curse: Reflections on Religion and Literature (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 119 .

27. James Wood , The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (New York: Random House, 1999), xvi .

28. F. Scott Fitzgerald , quoted in Malcolm Cowley , A Second Flowering: Works and Days of the Lost Generation (1973; repr., New York: Penguin, 1980), 25 .

29. Cowley, Second Flowering , 26, 25. By “Protestant churches” Cowley meant the mainline churches, not the fundamentalist ones that were supplanting them. Of modernism, Alfred Kazin wrote: “Modernism would become its own tradition after the 1920s, the only chic tradition left in the academy. But modernism as the expression of an elite that believed in nothing so much as freedom and venerated nothing but the individual personality.” An American Procession (New York: Knopf, 1984), 395 .

30. Wallace Stevens , Collected Poetry and Prose , ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997), 842 .

Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry, 56, 218, 332.

Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry , 900–903.

33. Frank Kermode , The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 4 .

Frank Kermode, Sense of an Ending, 39.

35. Richard Rorty , Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 3 .

36. Richard Rorty , Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972–1980 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 150–51 .

37. Frederick Douglass , Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, in Autobiographies: Narrative of the Life, My Bondage and My Freedom, Life and Times , ed. Henry Louis Gates (New York: Library of America, 1994), 97 .

38. William S. McFeely , Frederick Douglass (New York: Norton, 1991), 84–85 .

39. Flannery O’Connor , The Habit of Being, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 124–25 .

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Delbanco, Andrew . The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil . New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1995 .

Donoghue, Denis . Adam’s Curse: Reflections on Religion and Literature . Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001 .

Franchot, Jenny . “ Invisible Domain: Religion and American Literary Studies. ” American Literature 67 ( 1995 ): 833–42.

Jeffrey, David Lyle . People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture . Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996 .

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Turner, James . Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985 .

Wood, James . The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief . New York: Random House, 1999 .

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On Doubt and Not-Knowing in Fiction

In his 1980 essay “ Of Doubt and Dreams ,” Samuel Delany notes that the art of writing necessarily requires the act of self-doubt:

A unique process begins when the writer lowers the pen to put words on paper—or taps out letters onto the page with typewriter keys. Certainly writers think about and plan stories beforehand; and certainly, after writing a few stories, you may plan them or think about them in a more complex way. But even this increased complexity is likely to grow out of the process of which I’m speaking. The fact is, almost everyone thinks about stories. Many even get to the point of planning them. But the place where the writer’s experience differs from everyone else’s is during the writing process itself. What makes this process unique has to do directly with doubting.

What strikes me about this passage and Delany’s essay more largely is its insistence that this paradox of simultaneously following a clear direction and permitting the work to dictate the route is a problem particular to writers of fiction. And he might be right. While one can imagine the lyric impulse of the poem or the meandering logic of the essay easily fits with the notions of doubt and not-knowing, the question lingers: what of fiction, the genre that is conventionally thought of as “plotted”? Should writers of fiction come to a story or narrative with a conceit or concern already crafted, or does writing through, around, and among the consciousnesses, characters, and languages of fiction reveal to these writers their ultimate uptake?

In her 1987 essay, titled (with, importantly, scare quotes) “ Where Do You Get Your Ideas From? ” Ursula K. Le Guin addresses the question posed to her time and again at the conclusion of readings and lectures by arguing fiction does not originate from our conventional sense of “ideas” at all:

The process may not involve ideas in the sense of intelligible thoughts; it may well not even involve words. It may be a matter of mood, resonances, mental glimpses, voices, emotions, visions, dreams, anything. […] I don’t believe a writer ‘gets’ (takes into the head) an ‘idea’ (some sort of mental object) ‘from’ somewhere, and then turns it into words and writes them on paper.

She goes on to articulate that the maturity of good stories is founded on a careful balance of writers first embracing control and later abandoning it “when the work takes off on its own and flies farther than they ever planned or imagined, to places they didn’t know they knew.”

For Le Guin, rich fiction surfaces when the writer permits herself to work beyond the plan or plot she may have first imagined her work would be “about.” I put “about” in quotes here because I believe Le Guin and Delaney would agree with Maurice Blanchot’s notion that fiction’s meaning comes not in its being written, but in its being read. Whether that reading happens by a critic or a colleague, a fellow writer or a library browser, the writer herself several years later or someone yet to be born, Blanchot claims that a work’s meaning is released when the work meets a set of reading conditions and circumstances, not when the writer commits it to the page. With this in mind, it strikes me that to argue a work of fiction is “about” anything at all during the act of that piece’s coming to be is perhaps an already flawed endeavor. Perhaps it is not an incident that writers of poetry are called “poets” and writers of creative nonfiction are called “essayists” and writers of fiction are called—you see where I’m going here.

The same year that Le Guin published her essay to quiet that question from her fans, Donald Barthelme published his short meditation on the art of doubt, “ On Not Knowing .” In the essay, Barthelme echoes Delany’s theories when he claims that writing fiction is founded on the art of embracing the unknown:

Without the scanning processes engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention. […] The combinatorial agility of words, the exponential generation of meaning once they’re allowed to go to bed together, allows the writer to surprise himself, makes art possible, reveals how much of Being we haven’t yet encountered.

So here’s where I’m going with this: Despite Delany, Le Guin, and Barthelme’s claims, some thirty years later there still seems to be a pervasive understanding that writing a story first requires an “idea”: whether it is a character, circumstance, or conflict. I see this at work when my students use fiction as a safe mechanism for composing what are essentially essays; when my poet colleagues claim they don’t write stories because there is too much pre-planning involved; and in the slush pile of the literary journals on which I work, where short stories practically announce their theses by the end of the second page.

What is consistent across Delany, Le Guin, and Barthelme’s theories of embracing doubt and not-knowing in the writing process is this: that the claim that a writer has an “idea for a novel” or a hint of knowing what their short story is “about” before having written it is not only restrictive, but perhaps the wrong way of endeavoring in the enterprise of fiction. For fiction is never about character and plot; it is about time’s relationship to order and disorder and how a consciousness enters and conveys the interworkings of a world. It may be that we tell ourselves fiction requires a scaffolding at the onset, but because of fiction’s inherent commitment to ambiguity, there is a consistent and ongoing collapsing and reconstructing of that edifice. As such, our scaffolding—our “idea”—is really just a comfortable tool we writers of fiction use to convince ourselves (and others!) we are not always cloaked in doubt and not-knowing. For I am here to tell you, dear writers of fiction! We are very much cloaked in doubt and not-knowing; this is the womb in which good fiction incubates.

“To be a writer, you must write,” Delany tells us as he begins to break down that oft-cited tautology posted on the cork boards of creative writers everywhere. “You must write not only to produce the text that is the historical verification of your having written; you must write to project yourself, again and again, through the annealing moment that provides the neg-entropic organization which makes a few texts privileged tools of perception. Without this moment, this series of moments, of doubts about language shattered by language, the text is only a document of time passed with some paper, of time spent pondering a passage through a dream.”

Or, to put it in fewer terms but, arguably, less clearly—Karl Kraus: “A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.”

Image: “Airplane of 1909” from Ernest L. Jones Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog.

Dreaming Evacuation: A Review of “Wunderkammer” by Cynthia Cruz

A Moving House of Mourning

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The Certainty and Doubt Relationship Essay

Introduction, the relationships between doubt and certainty.

The Notion of an Optional Certainty

Certainty and doubt are important factors in psychology as they are polar opposites that influence one’s life course. Certainty is a system of approaches whereby a person is completely sure of one’s ideas or beliefs. On the other hand, doubt refers to ambiguity about any opinions, ideas, or beliefs. However, there is some relationship between these two notions, for example, the absence of certainty generates doubt, and the absence of doubt promotes certainty. By the examples given in the paper, one can also notice that these factors influence taking decisions affecting the fate of people. The purpose of the work is to analyze the relationship between certainty and doubt from several examples and points of view on these concepts.

The notions of doubt and certainty are essential as they influence the fate of people, and decisions made under their influence can lead to significant consequences. The Crucible by Arthur Miller shows that invalid certainty may provoke even the death of guiltless people. Thereby, the Reverend Hale, the logical minister, was sure of the truth of the following statement: “The devil is alive in Salem…” (Miller, 1976). Thus, due to external testimonies, Hale formed a certainty, which later turned out to be wrong. However, at the end of the play, the character repents that innocent victims were sentenced, which was the result of false certainty.

The following example clearly shows the relationship between certainty and doubt, namely how one can get rid of any doubt and give rise to false certainty. Thus, in The Crucible, Cheever had doubts about the Elizabeth’s being the witch, however, after seeing the “evidence”, doubt was transformed into certainty (Miller, 1976). It confirms the close relationship between certainty and doubt, namely that the absence of one gives rise to the other. Similarly, in Arthur Miller’s play, the doubt vanished because of the controversial evidence, and the certainty emerged instead. However, this certainty was erroneous and has led to negative consequences for innocent people. It formulates the following feature of doubt and certainty, namely their relativity.

Nowadays, there are many things which one can be sure of from any point of view. Thus, people who have strict certainty are less likely to consider alternative points of view or analyze them (Schaefer, 2018). It constitutes an essential feature of doubt and certainty, namely their relativity. It is formulated by the fact that a person who has certainty about any fact sees it differently than one without certainty. In other words, an individual who believes in a fact because of one’s own point of view may not notice the facts that indicate an alternative point of view. Accordingly, a person without certainty spots this fact with some aspects that denote a disjunctive. Thereby, certainty, in some cases, makes an individual blind, moreover, different people can observe distinct sides of the fact.

This principle, similarly, may be applied to the notion of a doubt, namely its relativity from the points of view of different people. For example, one person doubts a certain fact, and from one’s point of view, the fact does not have any confirmation of its truth. The other person, who has no doubt about the fact, sees it with clear signs of its verity. Thus, one can notice that doubt and certainty are relative factors that may look different for different people. In addition, sometimes certainty can dazzle one and prevent people from seeing facts that point to untruths or alternatives.

The Notion of an “Optional Certainty”

Besides, there is a notion of an “optional certainty”, which may be applied to most of the facts about the world. For example, the case that the world is more than two minutes old (O’Hara, 2018). Everyone knows that the world was created several billion years ago, however, the evidence confirming this fact is the optimal truth. In other words, one knows this information from such sources as scientific films, lectures, scientists’ testimonies, etc. However, these testimonies are not solid enough for one to claim that they are 100 percent true. On the one hand, one is sure that the world is more than two minutes old, and on the other hand, the facts are not indisputable. In this regard, this fact is the “optional certainty”, in other words, one is sure about the fact, however, not completely.

This principle also shows the relationship between doubt and certainty. Thus, in a fact in which one is sure, there is a share of doubts, in other words, there always is a share of doubt in certainty. This shows the inseparability of these concepts and the principle of their interaction. Moreover, this model can be applied to many facts about our lives, if not to all. After all, nowadays, science has advanced far enough to explain many things on the one hand, but on the other hand, to question their true nature.

To conclude, the concepts of certainty and doubt are close and intertwined in many things in one’s life. Further, as one remarked in the example of the play The Crucible, the wrong certainty can lead to irreparable consequences. Furthermore, it was found that according to the “optional certainty” model, doubt is part of the certainty and vice versa. Finally, analyzing all of the above, one established the relationship between these two notions.

Miller, A. (1976). The Crucible . Penguin Publishing Group.

O’Hara, N. (2018). Moral certainty and the foundations of morality . Springer.

Schaefer, M. A. (2018). The certainty of uncertainty: the way of inescapable doubt and its virtue. Wipf and Stock Publishers.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Literature Review — “Doubt” by John Patrick Shanley’s

"Doubt" by John Patrick Shanley’s

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Doubt: A Parable

By john patrick shanley, doubt: a parable summary and analysis of “doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty.”.

The film opens with a series of montage shots that depict the centrality of the Catholic church. A young white boy wakes up early in order to fulfill his responsibilities as an altar boy. When the boy begins making preparations for the church service, he is hastily greeted by Donald Miller , his black peer. After the two divide their responsibilities for the morning, Donald asks the other altar boy if he appears “fat.” Meanwhile, a couple strolls across the street discussing their after-mass plans. The diegetic soundtrack of church hymnals accompanies the shots of the cathedral as it reaches capacity.

Father Flynn , the priest, begins his sermon at the altar. Flynn urges the congregation to think about the assassination of President Kennedy the year before. He explains that although Kennedy’s death elicited feelings of disorientation and despair, people inevitably unified and responded compassionately when confronted with tragedy. As Father Flynn begins recounting the story of a sailor who is tortured by his doubt at sea, a nun walks around chastising ill-behaved children.

Father Flynn concludes by explaining that “doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty. When you are lost, you are not alone.” At the end of the sermon, Donald Miller’s attention turns to a bird that is flying above the altar. He later follows Father Flynn to the bathroom, where he compliments him on his powerful sermon. After Donald tells Father Flynn that he has inspired the boy to become a priest, Flynn gives Donald a gift of a toy dancer.

The scene cuts to before daybreak. In a house, Sister James , a young nun, prepares for the day. In the following scene, it is revealed that Sister James is a teacher at the parish school. As she ushers her students into class, we watch as Father Flynn cracks jokes and pokes fun at many of the young students. In contrast, Sister Aloysius, the strict and uptight principal of the school, calls the students to order.

Sister Aloysius singles out one particular misbehaving student and orders him to her office. Father Flynn notices and comments on her behavior, telling Sister James that “the dragon is hungry.” As Sister James conducts class, it is clear that her students do not respect her authority. When Sister Aloysius enters the room, she again usurps control. She yells at two students, one for wearing a hair barrette and the other for wearing headphones in class.

Later that night, Sister James, Sister Aloysius, and the other nuns eat dinner in their shared home. After eating in awkward silence, Sister Aloysius asks her colleagues about Father Flynn’s most recent sermon. While Sister James innocently replies that the sermon was about “doubt,” Sister Aloysius presses the nuns to consider the theme’s personal relevance to their priest. Sister James becomes visibly uncomfortable at Sister Aloysius’s suspicion. Sister Aloysius then urges everyone to be aware of Father Flynn’s conduct, specifically regarding his behavior towards students.

Inside the church, Father Flynn gazes at a stained glass image of a biblical eye. We also see that the student that Sister Aloysius has previously chastised has faked a nosebleed in order to skip class and smoke cigarettes. During lunch, Sister Aloysius directly addresses Sister James’s naivety. While Sister James believes that the student’s nose started to bleed spontaneously, Sister Aloysius is certain that it was self-induced. This comment causes Sister James to reflect on her naive assumptions.

The film’s first scenes powerfully establish the setting and characterization of the principal actors. In this working-class community in the Bronx, it is apparent that the Catholic church signifies ritual, sanctuary, and tradition. However, among these signifiers of stability, the opening moments begin to reveal the changes to the church and, more broadly, the changes to American society. We are briefly introduced to Donald Miller, the church’s sole black student and altar boy. At this point in the plot, the audience knows little about Donald and his individual circumstances. However, the presence of a black boy in a historically white space during the year 1964 first-handedly introduces the film’s themes of adversity, progress, and change.

The behavior of the film’s main characters indicates both the resistance and the acceptance of the church’s changes. Father Flynn’s opening sermon demonstrates his adoption of progressive ideals. In his sermon, Flynn recognizes the world around him and understands that as a religious leader, he has the platform to inspire others to think critically about the confines of tradition. He encourages his congregation to embrace what is uncomfortable in order to challenge, learn, and grow.

On the other hand, Sister Aloysius stands in stark contrast to Father Flynn. While Father Flynn maintains playful and joking relationships with the students at the school’s parish, Sister Aloysius is clearly feared by both students and teachers. From the opening shots, it is apparent that Sister Aloysius is a strict disciplinarian. While she takes her job seriously, we also learn that she has a complex relationship to the church. Though she is comfortable in the church’s traditions, she is also skeptical of the church’s gender and power structures. She possesses a keenness and awareness that distinguishes her from her colleagues.

Finally, Sister James is portrayed as naive and impressionable. Her amiable demeanor causes the students at the parish school to see her as a pushover. Sister James finds the positive attributes of every situation and is trusting of the church as an institution. However, as she grows closer with Sister Aloysius, it becomes clear that Sister James begins to question her general senses of certainty and trust. This initial characterization of Sister James is incredibly important, as she is one of the characters that undergoes an intense transformation as the film progresses.

When we see Father Flynn give Donald Miller the gift of a toy dancer, we begin to understand the importance of their relationship to the film’s plot. Although Father Flynn is playful with the other students, he seems to treat Donald with specific care and attention. At the conclusion of Father Flynn’s sermon, Donald focuses his attention on a bird that flies in the church. This indicates that the church represents comfort, hope, and possibility for Donald. Though the toy dancer is rather effeminate, the audience is prompted to question whether its presence demonstrates the sensitive and supportive nature of Father Flynn or hints at a homosexual subtext.

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Doubt: A Parable Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Doubt: A Parable is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

What is Father Flynn's reaction to the surprise interrogation in Sister Aloysius's office?

Father Flynn feels uncomfortable and explains that he merely talked with Donald Miller about private matters. After Sister Aloysius presses him for more information, Father Flynn attempts to leave the office in a huff. However, before he gets to...

doubt a parable

After listening to Father Flynn's sermon, Sister Aloysius is certain that the priest is involved in an inappropriate relationship with the school's first black student, Donald Miller. When Sister Aloysius calls a meeting with Mrs. Miller, Donald's...

As the title suggests, doubt is the film's central theme. The story begins with Father Flynn's sermon about the nature of doubt, which in turn prompts Sister Aloysius to "doubt" the priest's actions and intentions. While Father Flynn urges the...

Study Guide for Doubt: A Parable

Doubt: A Parable study guide contains a biography of John Patrick Shanley, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

About Doubt: A Parable
Doubt: A Parable Summary
Character List
Director's Influence

Essays for Doubt: A Parable

Doubt: A Parable essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Doubt: A Parable by John Patrick Shanley.

Persuasion & Credulity in Institutional Conflicts

Wikipedia Entries for Doubt: A Parable

Introduction
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Doubt: A Parable

John patrick shanley, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Moral Responsibility

In Doubt , a play about a catholic nun who suspects a priest of sexually abusing an altar boy, John Patrick Shanley suggests that people conceive of their moral responsibilities in different ways. Sister Aloysius , for one, sees it as her duty to find out whether or not Father Flynn has had inappropriate relations with the Catholic school’s only black student, Donald Muller . Although she lacks concrete evidence, she refuses to dismiss the…

Power and Accountability

The characters in John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt exist in a strict and hierarchal chain of command. This, Shanley implies, makes it difficult for moral people like Sister Aloysius to question authority, even when it’s glaringly obvious that her superiors are protecting each other from being held accountable for their actions. More specifically, Shanley suggests that the structures of power in the Catholic Church enable people like Father Flynn to take advantage of their status without…

Doubt and Uncertainty

As made evident by the title, Doubt is a play that examines how people deal with feelings of uncertainty and skepticism. Considering that the play takes place in a Catholic parish, the most obvious manifestation of doubt is the kind that arises when people question their religious faith. In his sermon during the first scene, Father Flynn implies that people ought to trust their beliefs even when there’s no evidence to support them. Interestingly enough…

Tradition vs. Change

In Doubt , John Patrick Shanley surveys the Catholic Church’s commitment to tradition, showcasing the institution’s internal struggles regarding change. Sister Aloysius , for her part, is committed to preserving an older, more traditional style of running a Catholic school, believing that teachers ought to be strict, fearsome, and authoritative. Sister James , on the other hand, wants her students to be comfortable when they’re in her class. Similarly, she likes the idea of breaking…

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A Catholic grade school could seem like a hermetically sealed world in 1964. That's the case with St. Nicholas in the Bronx, ruled by the pathologically severe principal Sister Aloysius, who keeps the students and nuns under her thumb and is engaged in an undeclared war with the new parish priest. Their issues may seem to center around the reforms of Vatican II, then still under way, with Father Flynn ( Philip Seymour Hoffman ) as the progressive, but for the nun I believe it's more of a power struggle. The pope's infallibility seems, in her case, to have descended to the parish level.

Some will say the character of Sister Aloysius, played without a hint of humor by Meryl Streep , is a caricature. In my eight years of Catholic school, not a one of the Dominican nuns was anything but kind and dedicated, and I was never touched, except by Sister Ambrosetta's thunking forefinger to the skull in first grade. But I clearly remember being frightened by Sister Gilberta, the principal; being sent to her office in second or third grade could loosen your bowels. She never did anything mean. She just seemed to be able to.

Sister Aloysius of "Doubt" hates all inroads of the modern world, including ballpoint pens. This is accurate. We practiced our penmanship with fountain pens, carefully heading every page "JMJ" -- for Jesus, Mary and Joseph, of course. Under Aloysius' command is the sweet young Sister James ( Amy Adams , from " Junebug "), whose experience in the world seems limited to what she sees out the convent window. Gradually during the autumn semester, a Situation develops.

There is one African-American student at St. Nicholas, Donald Miller ( Joseph Foster II ), and Father Flynn encourages him in sports and appoints him as an altar boy. This is all proper. Then Sister James notes that the priest summons the boy to the rectory alone. She decides this is improper behavior, and informs Aloysius, whose eyes narrow like a beast of prey. Father Flynn's fate is sealed.

But "Doubt" is not intended as a docudrama about possible sexual abuse. Directed by John Patrick Shanley from his Pulitzer- and Tony-winning play, it is about the title word, doubt, in a world of certainty. For Aloysius, Flynn is certainly guilty. That the priest seems innocent, that Sister James comes to believe she was mistaken in her suspicions, means nothing. Flynn knows a breath of scandal would destroy his career. And that is the three-way standoff we watch unfolding with precision and tension.

Something else happens. The real world enters this sealed, parochial battlefield. Donald's mother ( Viola Davis ) fears her son will be expelled from the school. He has been accused of drinking the altar wine. Worse, of being given it by Father Flynn. She appeals directly to Sister Aloysius, in a scene as good as any I've seen this year. It lasts about 10 minutes, but it is the emotional heart and soul of "Doubt," and if Viola Davis isn't nominated by the Academy, an injustice will have been done. She goes face to face with the pre-eminent film actress of this generation, and it is a confrontation of two equals that generates terrifying power.

Doubt. It is the subject of the sermon Father Flynn opens the film with. Doubt was coming into the church and the United States in 1964. Would you still go to hell if you ate meat on Friday? After the assassination of Kennedy and the beginnings of Vietnam, doubt had undermined American certainty in general. What could you be sure of? What were the circumstances? The motives? The conflict between Aloysius and Flynn is the conflict between old and new, between status and change, between infallibility and uncertainty. And Shanley leaves us doubting. I know people who are absolutely certain what conclusion they should draw from this film. They disagree. "Doubt" has exact and merciless writing, powerful performances and timeless relevance. It causes us to start thinking with the first shot, and we never stop. Think how rare that is in a film.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Doubt (2008)

Rated PG-13 for for thematic material

104 minutes

Philip Seymour Hoffman as Father Flynn

Meryl Streep as Sister Aloysius

Amy Adams as Sister James

Joseph Foster II as Donald

Viola Davis as Mrs. Miller

Directed and written by

John Patrick Shanley

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Doubt: A Parable

48 pages • 1 hour read

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Summary and Study Guide

Doubt: A Parable is a 2005 play by John Patrick Shanley that analyzes an instance of doubt and suspicion in a Catholic school in the Bronx in the 1960s. In nine scenes, the play tells the story of principal Sister Aloysius’s suspicions about an inappropriate relationship between a priest, Father Flynn , and a young male student.

The play opens with Father Flynn giving a sermon, utilizing a parable about a young sailor whose ship sinks and crew dies, leaving him alone on the sea. After he fashions a boat and sets a course by the stars, a storm rolls in and the sailor is unable to see the stars for the next twenty days and begins to doubt his navigation. Father Flynn explains that the congregation is full of members experiencing similar spiritual doubts, but says, “Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty. When you are lost, you are not alone” (6). The next scene shows the principal, an older woman, Sister Aloysius , meeting with a young nun, Sister James . Sister Aloysius cautions Sister James to distrust her students, and to be more distant with them. Sister Aloysius also asks Sister James what she thinks of Father Flynn, whom Sister James describes as brilliant. The meeting concludes with Sister Aloysius saying that she is concerned about matters at the school, and asking Sister James to stay alert.

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Sister Aloysius and Sister James meet in the garden, where Sister Aloysius reveals that she was married before taking her vows, and is a widow whose husband died in World War II. She also accuses Monsignor Benedict , the leader of the school, of being oblivious to the goings-on there. The two nuns then talk about a new student, Donald Muller (the school’s first and only African-American student) and how he is fitting in. Sister Aloysius asks if the other boys have hit him, which Sister James denies, saying he has a protector in Father Flynn. Sister Aloysius becomes rigid as they talk about the relationship between Father Flynn and Donald. At first, Sister James asserts that she has no evidence that this relationship is inappropriate, but Sister Aloysius insists that they don’t have time to gather any, and must act. Sister James then informs her that Donald Muller and Father Flynn met alone in the rectory, after which Donald looked frightened, and smelled of alcohol. Sister Aloysius says that they must confront Father Flynn themselves, for the Church’s hierarchy and the Monsignor’s obliviousness will not protect them or the boy.

Father Flynn, Sister Aloysius, and Sister James meet in the next scene under the pretense of discussing the Christmas pageant. Sister Aloysius redirects the conversation by saying that they must be careful not to show any special treatment for Donald Muller in the pageant, as he has already gotten special treatment during his one-on-one meeting with Father Flynn. Father Flynn stiffens and becomes defensive. When pressed, he says that his discussion with Donald was a private matter, and that he doesn’t like the tone of the nuns’ questioning. Father Flynn tells Sister Aloysius to take up her suspicions with Monsignor Benedict, until she confronts him with the knowledge that there had been alcohol on Donald’s breath. Father Flynn says that this was because he had caught Donald sneaking altar wine, and that he had discussed it with the boy privately to avoid publicly singling him out, which might have resulted in Donald being removed from the altar boys. Sister James is relieved, believing that this solves the matter, while Sister Aloysius retains her suspicions.

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Father Flynn gives a sermon about the harmful nature of rumors in the next scene before meeting with Sister James in the garden. She says she can’t sleep due to a bad dream where her reflection is sheer darkness. Father Flynn presses Sister James to agree that Sister Aloysius is poisoned against him, and that she is trying to take the joy out of their profession and to “destroy [his] spirit of compassion” (41). Sister James comes to believe his version of the encounter with Donald.

Sister Aloysius meets with Donald Muller’s mother in her office. Mrs. Muller says that she is grateful for Father Flynn’s attention and protection of her son. When Sister Aloysius says she thinks their relationship might be inappropriate, Mrs. Muller says that she would prefer not to see it that way, and that it’s only until June in any case, when Donald will go off to a better high school and a chance at college. When Sister Aloysius pushes her, Mrs. Muller says that she thinks her boy might be “that way” and wants to be “caught” (48). In any case, she sees Father Flynn as doing more good than harm to her son, and says that any public confrontation about the matter would end in her husband killing their son. Mrs. Muller leaves and Father Flynn enters, demanding that Sister Aloysius stop her campaign against him. She says that she became suspicious of him on the first day of the year, when he reached for William London’s wrist and the student recoiled. She declares she has spoken with a nun at a former parish of Father Flynn’s and will not stop calling until a parent confirms her suspicions. She tells him to ask for a transfer, or she will continue her campaign.

The final scene is between Sister Aloysius and Sister James. They discuss Father Flynn’s departure, and his promotion at his new school. Sister James asks if the principal ever found proof, but Sister Aloysius says she had only her own certainty, as she had lied about calling Father Flynn’s former parish. Though firm to the end, in the final line of the play Sister Aloysius cries: “I have doubts! I have such doubts!” (58).

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Overcome self-doubt (once and for all?): 8 tips to move forward

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What is self-doubt?

The cause of self-doubt, types of self-doubt, 4 signs that you're doubting yourself, how to overcome fear and self-doubt in 8 steps.

We all experience feelings of self-doubt from time to time, whether we're starting a new job, taking a test, or playing a sport. That's perfectly normal.

The definition of self-doubt is experiencing feelings of uncertainty about one or more aspects of yourself.

A certain low level of self-criticism can be a good source of motivation. It use may inspire you to work harder and hone your skills to increase your confidence . But too much doubt and fear can hold you from performing well and reaching your full potential.

Though it does take time, you can overcome your doubts. BetterUp is here to help you do that. Through dedication and hard work, we give you the tools you need to embrace your beautiful, authentic self .

Self-doubt is a lack of confidence regarding yourself and your abilities . It’s a mindset that holds you back from succeeding and believing in yourself. Humility is a healthy character trait to have, but if it's at your own expense, it's no longer beneficial.

William Shakespeare once said, “Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.” Basically, that means doubt makes us quit.

Pensive-and-doubtful-student-doing-homework-and-studying-overcoming-self-doubt

There are many things that can cause a person to doubt themselves. Although the most useful thing is to learn how to work around your self-doubt, it can be helpful to understand what causes it.

Here are some of the common factors that lead to self-doubt. Think of these as possible explanations to help you stop beating yourself up for having doubt. For most people, trying to pinpoint exactly why they have doubt is less important than overcoming it.

1. Narcissistic parents

Often, we’re scared of repeating our parents’ mistakes and might be overly cautious in specific decisions as a result. But if your parents are narcissistic or arrogant, you may swing to the extreme. In response to your parents’ characteristics, you may become too modest or unconfident . You may question your own actions. This makes it hard to accept praise.

2. The "drill sergeant approach"

Showing yourself “tough love” can be an effective motivator as it urges you to work harder the next time. But repeatedly criticizing yourself does far more harm than good. Self-sabotage from overworking and a fear of becoming lazy or “soft” can arise if this behavior continues.

3. Past experiences

There’s truth to the saying “the past can haunt us.” Our experiences shape who we are and how we see others and the world. Lots of us struggle to let go. Failures and setbacks from the past can leave us overwhelmed with self-doubt.

4. Fear of failure and fear of success

The fear of falling short and disappointing others is just as real as the fear of being unable to replicate our past successes. We might think it was luck that got us this far instead of our talents if we’re filled with doubt.

Doubtful doctor at hospital taking over phone-overcoming-self-doubt

Self-doubt often manifests in three forms.

The first is imposter syndrome , or the illogical fear of others seeing you as a fraud or undeserving of your accomplishments.

Next is self-sabotage, which refers to undermining yourself, your values, and your goals.

The third is indecisiveness or struggling to make big and small decisions due to worries that whatever path you choose will be wrong.

All of these things erode your self-esteem over time, and the negativity with which you view yourself increases.

Common indications that you may be dealing with self-doubt in your personal or professional life include:

1. You can’t accept compliments from others, and you can’t give yourself credit

2. You constantly seek reassurance

3. You have low self-esteem

4. You feel like you’re never good enough

man listening music with earphones but filling tired sad and depressed-overcoming-self-doubt

Here are some good habits for you to keep in mind to stop doubting yourself:

1. Practice self-compassion

Self-doubt means that you’re holding yourself back. It arises from the fear of making a mistake , but mistakes are how we grow and improve our own abilities. Look at yourself in the mirror and say three positive affirmations at the beginning of every day.

2. Think back to your past achievements

Self-reflection is a fantastic tool; it reminds us that we’re capable of what we want to achieve. But living in the past can take away from the present moment. Learning from what’s happened — not dwelling on the bad — and focusing on using the lessons you’ve learned from those times to improve the present is what truly matters.

3. Try not to compare yourself to others

Self-doubt can also arise when you measure yourself up against a family member, colleague, or even a celebrity. Everyone’s life is different, and someone else excelling doesn’t mean you don’t have any strengths. Instead of comparing yourself to others , focus on yourself — it’s one of the best ways to stay happy and accomplish your dreams.

4. Spend your time with supportive people

Being around people who put us down is one of the worst things for our mental health. Some people won’t support you, but others absolutely will. Spend your time with people who make you feel good; they can build you up when you’re struggling to encourage yourself.

Three-happy-friends-hugging-after-dinner-overcoming-self-doubt

5. Remember, you are your biggest inner critic

No one holds us to a higher standard than ourselves. You wouldn’t put down your mother for not being chosen for a job or your sister for not receiving top marks on her school essay, so why do that to yourself? Apologizing to yourself is one of the most important steps toward healing and moving forward.

6. Seek professional help

It’s okay to ask for help, especially if self-doubt is a persistent obstacle that you’re facing. Talking about our feelings and insecurities allows us to unburden ourselves and be heard.

7. Start journaling

Make an effort to record what you’re thankful for and what you’re proud of doing each day. Your journal may cover everything from earning a promotion at work or remembering to do the dishes. The more frequently you practice loving yourself, the easier it gets.

8. Be skeptical of your thoughts

You aren’t your thoughts. Question how accurate or helpful they are. Negative thinking is a mental habit that consumes us more than it should. You can undo your habits, too. It just takes patience and commitment.

BetterUp is a human transformation company that champions personal growth, social connections, and mental fitness. We emphasize a conscious shift in thinking, from reactive to proactive, to open up a realm of opportunities. We won’t sugar coat it — it takes work to improve, but the effort is worth it. We’re here to guide you and empower you into becoming the very best person you can be.

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Elizabeth Perry, ACC

Elizabeth Perry is a Coach Community Manager at BetterUp. She uses strategic engagement strategies to cultivate a learning community across a global network of Coaches through in-person and virtual experiences, technology-enabled platforms, and strategic coaching industry partnerships. With over 3 years of coaching experience and a certification in transformative leadership and life coaching from Sofia University, Elizabeth leverages transpersonal psychology expertise to help coaches and clients gain awareness of their behavioral and thought patterns, discover their purpose and passions, and elevate their potential. She is a lifelong student of psychology, personal growth, and human potential as well as an ICF-certified ACC transpersonal life and leadership Coach.

Building resilience part 6: what is self-efficacy?

25 positive affirmations to defeat imposter syndrome, when you are the obstacle: how to overcome self-sabotage, the hidden benefits of self-compassion, leveraging humanistic psychology to achieve self-actualization, 33 self-esteem journal prompts for confidence & self-compassion, what self-love truly means and ways to cultivate it, 7 tips on how to deal with rejection, self-esteem isn't everything, but these 5 tips can give you a boost, similar articles, perfectionism isn't a virtue (and doesn't help well-being, either), fear of success: why we’re sometimes afraid of being our best, 7 ways to overcome fear of failure and move forward in life, when purpose is hard to find, how to move forward with intent, 7 signs of decision fatigue (and how to defog your brain), don't let limiting beliefs hold you back. learn to overcome yours, how to stop self-sabotaging: 5 steps to change your behavior, stay connected with betterup, get our newsletter, event invites, plus product insights and research..

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Detroit court began cash bail reforms a year ago. Here's how they're working

Detroit — It's been a year since Detroit's 36th District Court implemented a legal settlement with the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan calling for it to sharply reduce the use of cash bail in misdemeanor and nonviolent felony cases.

So far, according to the ACLU, defense attorneys and the court's judges, the agreement is working as intended, with far fewer defendants being required to post a monetary bond to not have to await trial sitting in jail. Chief Judge William McConico says that's benefiting defendants who can't afford to pay a cash bail, and is not causing an increase in crime.

"People are no longer losing jobs because they're incarcerated over traffic offenses," McConico said. "People aren't having child care issues because of low-level misdemeanors and things of that nature. So we've come a long way."

The Detroit court is among those in Michigan seeking to lessen its use of cash bail, which typically is imposed with the twin goals of assuring public safety and ensuring that defendants appear in court as scheduled.

Detractors argue that requiring cash bail in misdemeanor and less serious felony cases is punitive toward poor people and minorities, the basis of a federal suit the ACLU filed against 36th District Court in 2019.

ACLU senior staff attorney Philip Mayor said the civil liberties organization is "quite pleased" with the progress they have seen under the court's new policy, which took effect May 1, 2023. Mayor said implementing it has been "something of a learning process."

"In particular, we have seen that cash bail has, appropriately, become extremely rare in misdemeanor cases and in cases classified in Felony B (less serious felonies) under the agreement," Mayor said. "We are actively working with the court to analyze and assess the use of cash bail in other types of felony cases."

As part of the settlement, the court began conducting redetermination hearings in cases where a defense attorney argues that a cash bond set at arraignment is unaffordable.

Under the settlement, the court's goal is to release 97% of misdemeanor defendants on a personal recognizance bond, 90% of defendants in class B felonies — crimes punishable by up to 20 years in prison like second-degree child abuse, second-degree arson and production of child pornography — and 80% of defendants in class A felonies — crimes punishable by up to life in prison, like murder. People with personal recognizance bonds do not have to pay anything to be released from jail, but are responsible to pay the bail amount if they fail to show up for court.

One of those who still got cash bail in a misdemeanor case was a woman charged with misdemeanor assault and battery who allegedly struck someone with her fist. Magistrate Laura Echartea said in the woman's April 17 arraignment that she initially was considering a personal bond, but after the woman started ranting about the crime and admitting to pulling the victim’s hair, she became concerned about the defendant being a danger to the community.

She gave her a $5,000 cash bond, of which 10% would need to be paid.

In another case, Echartea gave a man being arraigned in April 2023 on a retail fraud case from 2021 a personal bond.

“You’re getting one chance,” Echartea said, imposing a $1,000 personal recognizance bond. “Because it’s non-assaultive and from 2020, and your other cases don’t have monetary bond, I’m going to take a chance on you, sir.”

Changing the court's way of thinking

Judges and magistrates used to think they were not protecting the community if they did not give cash bail, McConico said. But cash bail does not make the community any safer, he said. It only jails people who cannot pay to get out.

McConico said data shows that crime in Detroit has decreased, and recidivism rates have not gone up since the court began granting more personal bonds.

"We are giving people who are who are accused of felonies, personal bonds with certain monetization, and they're not committing crimes and they're coming back to court. The system is working," McConico said. "We have processes here that the citizens of Detroit should be proud of. The city of Detroit has taken the lead in this state on bail reform ... and we're trying to have the best and most fair system in the country."

The ACLU agreement states that unaffordable cash bail will only be imposed in rare cases. Cash bail won't be used unless the defendant creates a danger to the victim or the public, or if they are a flight risk.

The court will issue a public report this summer. Mayor declined to release information sooner. While the agreement says the ACLU could provide general information on release and redetention rates, Mayor attributed this denial to the learning curve around the implementation of the agreement.

Detroit-based defense attorney Arni Chambers said he has seen the court grant personal bonds in the majority of nonviolent cases.

“Detroit is more so paying attention to the fact that these are nonviolent accusations to begin with and that individuals very well may not be able to afford these cash bonds,” Chambers said. “People shouldn’t be held on these nonviolent offenses … without real good cause showing they’re threats to the community.”

Defense attorney Lillian Diallo, who is the vice president of the Wayne County Criminal Defense Bar Association, said that for less serious felonies, she is definitely seeing a difference in the bond amounts and personal bonds magistrates give.

But she said she still sees extremely high bonds — $1 million to $2 million — in cases where magistrates appear to be influenced by serious allegations. Defendants need some kind of bond in serious cases, she said, but millions of dollars is "just a ransom."

"They will not give you the benefit of the doubt on certain cases," Diallo said.

Diallo said she gives an "A plus" to the bond redetermination hearings, which must happen with 48 to 72 hours of the arraignment if bond is deemed to be unaffordable. She said those hearings are more deliberate, less emotionally based and give attorneys time to argue their case effectively.

"There's rational, that's the safe gap," Diallo said. "We have more information and arguments from both sides. ... It's a way better system than it used to be."

Prosecutor, police objections

Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy said in a statement she has no issue with personal bonds for lower-level, nonviolent offenses but that such decisions should never be made based on a defendant's ability to pay. She said she is still seeing defendants in violent felony cases given "inappropriate" bonds.

"I continue to be concerned that this is a deeply flawed solution for defendants with serious felonies," Worthy said.

Detroit Police said in a statement Friday that reducing the use of cash bail has "clearly had an impact on crime as the Detroit Police Department has seen serious crimes committed by individuals out on bond or under tether restrictions."

"Accordingly, this raises concerns about the erosion of community confidence in the criminal justice system, particularly by those who are participating in the process as witnesses," according to the statement. "The DPD will continue its work to protect those who live, work, and visit the city of Detroit, and relentlessly pursue those who victimize our community to make them accountable for their actions."

Three hours before this statement, however, DPD said it "cannot draw any conclusions on the impact that cash bail has on crime." A spokesperson said they "evaluated the statement and more information and updated the statement."

The benefit of the doubt

Before setting a personal bond, magistrates warn they will be less lenient if a defendant violate their release conditions, which often include no drinking or using drugs, no assaultive behavior and staying away with the complainant in the case.

But they often give them the benefit of the doubt.

Echartea granted a personal recognizance bond in April 2023 to a man being arraigned on a retail fraud case from 2020 despite expressing hesitancy because of his history of violating bond conditions. Prosecutors asked for a cash bond.

Magistrate Malaika Ramsey-Heath gave a man charged with attempted murder a $100,000 personal bond, noting that she thought a GPS tether would address the concern of danger to the victim and the community.

When a man at the Wayne County Jail found out Chief Magistrate Jeffrey Kleparek was giving him a personal bond, he pumped his fist.

“That fist pump is only worthy if you show up, sir,” Kleparek said.

“I’ll be there, I’ll be there,” he promised.

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Guest Essay

China’s Dead-End Economy Is Bad News for Everyone

By Anne Stevenson-Yang

Ms. Stevenson-Yang is a co-founder of J Capital Research and the author of “Wild Ride: A Short History of the Opening and Closing of the Chinese Economy.”

On separate visits to Beijing last month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen bore a common message : Chinese manufacturing overcapacity is flooding global markets with cheap Chinese exports, distorting world trade and leaving American businesses and workers struggling to compete.

Not surprisingly, China’s leaders did not like what they heard, and they didn’t budge. They can’t. Years of erratic and irresponsible policies, excessive Communist Party control and undelivered promises of reform have created a dead-end Chinese economy of weak domestic consumer demand and slowing growth. The only way that China’s leaders can see to pull themselves out of this hole is to fall back on pumping out exports.

That means a number of things are likely to happen, none of them good. The tide of Chinese exports will continue, tensions with the United States and other trading partners will grow, China’s people will become increasingly unhappy with their gloomy economic prospects and anxious Communist Party leaders will respond with more repression.

The root of the problem is the Communist Party’s excessive control of the economy, but that’s not going to change. It is baked into China’s political system and has only worsened during President Xi Jinping’s decade in power. New strategies for fixing the economy always rely on counterproductive mandates set by the government: Create new companies, build more industrial capacity. The strategy that most economists actually recommend to drive growth — freeing up the private sector and empowering Chinese consumers to spend more — would mean overhauling the way the government works, and that is unacceptable.

The party had a golden opportunity to change in 1989, when the Tiananmen Square protests revealed that the economic reforms that had begun a decade earlier had given rise to a growing private sector and a desire for new freedoms. But to liberalize government institutions in response would have undermined the party’s power. Instead, China’s leaders chose to shoot the protesters, further tighten party control and get hooked on government investment to fuel the economy.

For a long time, no one minded. When economic or social threats reared their heads, like global financial crises in 1997 and 2007, Chinese authorities poured money into industry and the real estate sector to pacify the people. The investment-driven growth felt good, but it was much more than the country could digest and left China’s landscape scarred with empty cities and industrial parks, unfinished bridges to nowhere, abandoned highways and amusement parks, and airports with few flights.

The investment in industrial capacity also generated an explosion in exports as China captured industries previously dominated by foreign manufacturers — mobile phones, television sets, solar panels, lithium-ion batteries and electric vehicles. Much of the Chinese economic “miracle” was powered by American, European and Japanese companies that willingly transferred their technical know-how to their Chinese partners in exchange for what they thought would be access to a permanently growing China market. This decimated manufacturing in the West, even as China protected its own markets. But the West let it slide: The cheap products emanating from China kept U.S. inflation at bay for a generation, and the West clung to the hope that China’s economic expansion would eventually lead to a political liberalization that never came.

To raise money for the government investment binge, Beijing allowed local authorities to collateralize land — all of which is ultimately owned or controlled by the state — and borrow money against it. This was like a drug: Local governments borrowed like crazy, but with no real plan for paying the money back. Now many are so deep in debt that they have been forced to cut basic services like heating, health care for senior citizens and bus routes . Teachers aren’t being paid on time, and salaries for civil servants have been lowered in recent years. Millions of people all over China are paying mortgages on apartments that may never be finished . Start-ups are folding , and few people, it seems, can find jobs.

To boost employment, the party over the past couple of years has been telling local governments to push the establishment of new private businesses, with predictable consequences: In one county in northern China, a village secretary eager to comply with Beijing’s wishes reportedly asked relatives and friends to open fake companies. One villager opened three tofu shops in a week; another person applied for 20 new business licenses.

When mandates like that fail to create jobs, the party monkeys with the employment numbers. When monthly government data revealed last year that 21 percent of Chinese youth in urban areas were unemployed, authorities stopped publishing the figures. It resumed early this year, but with a new methodology for defining unemployment . Presto! The number dropped to 15 percent.

But Mr. Xi’s policy options are dwindling.

With the real estate market imploding, the government can no longer risk goosing the property sector. It has begun touting a revival in domestic consumption , but many Chinese are merely hunkering down and hoarding assets such as gold against an uncertain future. So the government is again falling back on manufacturing, pouring money into industrial capacity in hopes of pushing out more products to keep the economy going. With domestic demand anemic, many of those products have to be exported.

But the era when China was able to take over whole industries without foreign pushback is over. Many countries are now taking steps to protect their markets from Chinese-made goods. Under U.S. pressure, Mexico’s government last month reportedly decided it would not award subsidies to Chinese electric vehicle makers seeking to manufacture in Mexico for export to the U.S. market; the European Union is considering action to prevent Chinese electric vehicles from swamping its market; and the Biden administration has moved to encourage semiconductor manufacturing in the United States and limit Chinese access to chip technologies, and has promised more actions to thwart China.

China won’t be able to innovate its way out of this. Its economic model still largely focuses on cheaply replicating existing technologies, not on the long-term research that results in industry-leading commercial breakthroughs. All that leaves is manufacturing in volume.

China’s leaders will face rising economic pressure to lower the value of the renminbi, which will make Chinese-made goods even cheaper in U.S. dollar terms, further boosting export volume and upsetting trading partners even more. But a devaluation will also make imports of foreign products and raw materials more expensive, squeezing Chinese consumers and businesses while encouraging wealthier people to get their money out of China. The government can’t turn to economic stimulus measures to revive growth — pouring more renminbi into the economy would risk crushing the currency’s value.

All of this means that the “reform and opening” era, which has transformed China and captivated the world since it began in the late 1970s, has ended with a whimper.

Mao Zedong once said that in an uncertain world, the Chinese must “Dig tunnels deep, store grain everywhere and never seek hegemony.” That sort of siege mentality is coming back.

Anne Stevenson-Yang ( @doumenzi ) is a co-founder and the research director of J Capital Research, a stock analysis firm. She spent 25 years in China as an entrepreneur, analyst and trade advocate.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

I Guess I Can Do It With a Literal Broken Heart

As the Eras Tour resumes today, one ELLE editor shares how a song from Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department had an unexpected connection to his health.

The other week, I felt like Taylor Swift.

No, I haven’t been in the recording studio writing an album, touring the globe, or raking in dough. I wasn’t shimmering in a body suit or performing to millions of fans. I didn’t break Spotify records with The Tortured Poets Department. Instead, I filled the holes in my busy week by listening and dancing to “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” over and over again, claiming the track as my own.

Whenever I’m in a rotten head space, I lose myself to the music. Whether there are people around or not, I dream of flouncing around a dance floor on my wedding day or performing in front of a stadium to thousands of fans. It’s therapy, the light at the end of my day, and often, what I look forward to the most: a 10 P.M. dance break.

This past December, when I was in Los Angeles for our annual Women in Hollywood event, I ended one particularly stressful day with a tango. I strutted through my hotel room in my black, tiny underwear and took a few minutes to perform my greatest living room hits, culminating with “Breathless,” by the Corrs.

I started dancing, hitting each body roll and ass shake, giving the performance of a lifetime. Then, at the end of the song, I pumped my hand into the sky like I was holding a microphone. A sharp pain shot across my chest and body. Within a matter of seconds, my tour came to an end. I was on my bed, almost immobile and worried about what I had just done. The pain slowly subsided. I drifted off to sleep and hoped the next day would bring healing.

The following morning, I thought all was fixed. I went to a boxing class, hit a punch, and the pain came right back. I convinced myself I was having a heart attack. I looked up the symptoms on WebMD, talked with some coworkers, and then thought it was all over. I tracked down the nearest hospital, called my family, and tried to talk it through with a provider on the phone. After my anxiety came down, and I got some professional advice, I realized it was most likely a pull. I decided to power through. I could still move.

I went through the rest of that week in Los Angeles assisting with our event with a dull pain in my chest. When I got back to New York, my primary care provider confirmed my suspicions: I had pulled a muscle. It would take some time to heal. He still wanted to run an electrocardiogram (EKG) to be safe.

After being hooked up to the machine as if I were a science experiment, my doctor came back. He recommended I see a cardiologist as soon as possible. I had pulled my chest, but something else was, in fact, wrong.

Six doctor’s appointments, two weeks on a heart monitor, and an ultrasound later, I was diagnosed with a congenital heart defect called Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome (WPW). Essentially, I have an extra pathway in my heart where signals sometimes travel. My resting heart rate can skyrocket to 200 beats per minute. When not treated properly, WPW can lead to sudden cardiac arrest and death in children and young adults.

.css-1aear8u:before{margin:0 auto 0.9375rem;width:34px;height:25px;content:'';display:block;background-repeat:no-repeat;}.loaded .css-1aear8u:before{background-image:url(/_assets/design-tokens/elle/static/images/quote.fddce92.svg);} .css-1bvxk2j{font-family:SaolDisplay,SaolDisplay-fallback,SaolDisplay-roboto,SaolDisplay-local,Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:1.625rem;font-weight:normal;line-height:1.2;margin:0rem;margin-bottom:0.3125rem;}@media(max-width: 48rem){.css-1bvxk2j{font-size:2.125rem;line-height:1.1;}}@media(min-width: 40.625rem){.css-1bvxk2j{font-size:2.125rem;line-height:1.2;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-1bvxk2j{font-size:2.25rem;line-height:1.1;}}@media(min-width: 73.75rem){.css-1bvxk2j{font-size:2.375rem;line-height:1.2;}}.css-1bvxk2j b,.css-1bvxk2j strong{font-family:inherit;font-weight:bold;}.css-1bvxk2j em,.css-1bvxk2j i{font-style:italic;font-family:inherit;}.css-1bvxk2j i,.css-1bvxk2j em{font-style:italic;} I’d feel a heftier heart rate when I had anxiety or was listening to fast-paced music. ... I had convinced myself that was something everyone experienced. They told me it was not.”

Every doctor I saw asked if I felt this high heart rate. I commented that I did, but I thought it was normal. I’d feel a heftier heart rate when I had anxiety or was listening to fast-paced music. I’d quickly lose my breath while running or feel pressure in my chest at my weekly Barry’s classes. I had convinced myself that was something everyone experienced. They told me it was not. Some patients don’t catch this condition until they’re elderly; apparently I was lucky I caught it now. We could fix it with a simple surgery, an ablation, which had a 96 percent success rate. I said yes to the procedure, and we got a date on the calendar.

The night before the surgery, I couldn’t help but play a mental supercut of the moments in my life that had made me pause, moments that made me, in reference to the song that caused me to catch the problem, breathless. I thought about the gorgeous weddings I’d attended. I thought about hearing the overture of Merrily We Roll Along played by a full orchestra for the first time. I thought about kissing a beautiful boy with cherry lips under a disco ball. I thought about the devastating end of The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai and when Parvati, Cirie, Amanda, and Natalie convinced Erik to give up individual immunity on Survivor . I thought about a recent meet cute and my first bite of the crab rangoon pizza at Fong’s in Des Moines, Iowa. I thought about my night at MetLife Stadium at Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. I thought about seeing my dad cry when the Chiefs won the Super Bowl. I thought about my mom caucusing in 2016 to support her politically active son and the year I won my family’s annual Christmas board game competition. I thought about the first time seeing my name on the masthead or in a byline in ELLE Magazine. I thought about my roommate Alex, who helped me through every doctor’s appointment and was slated to go with me to the surgery the following day. I thought about my other friends who offered to take care of me, too. I thought about every single person I loved.

And then, I had the surgery. It seemed to go well. I scheduled a follow-up.

Just a few days before The Tortured Poets Department dropped, I went into my doctor for the final A-OK. I had felt better, and I was convinced the surgery worked. He told me it did not. It would take a second surgery to fix. I was in the 4 percent.

I may not be performing in front of millions of fans, but Taylor’s ability to create music that’s relatable while speaking about her extraordinary situations is unmatched. To learn that even the world’s biggest pop star has powered through her own private battles made me feel more connected to her. Many of my colleagues and friends, each carrying on with their own silent struggles, have commented how this song has been their recent anthem, and it’s become a standout topic on social media.

To learn that even the world’s biggest pop star has powered through her own private battles made me feel more connected to her.”

We shuffle along to the beats of many drums. We are sometimes asked for more and we do it, all while haunted by paralyzing thoughts, yearning for a break and sleep. Internally we are miserable, but we peddle forward. It’s a side effect of the human condition. Of course, we need to take time for ourselves too, but I have gotten through my most challenging moments, terrifying times, and biggest heartbreaks by picking myself up and forcing myself to get back out there. And I’m sure I’m not alone.

I have to remind myself often that little Sam would be in awe of me right now. He would be astounded by all I’m accomplishing and the shows I’ve attended. Little Sam would love my unabashed queerness and my recent body confidence. But he wouldn’t be able to handle my very full plate: health complications, boy problems, and a sometimes challenging (but also rewarding) career. I’m sure little Taylor would feel the same way about big Taylor right now too.

So yes, I guess I can really do it with a literal broken heart. Taylor and I have that in common. I have my second surgery in late May. Hopefully, in June, Taylor’s song will remind me of a time when I was stronger than I had ever been before.

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The WNBA doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt when it comes to charter flights

C harter flights have long been a problem for the WNBA. Specifically, the lack of them and why teams aren’t allowed to use them on a regular basis, like just about every other professional sports league in the U.S.

And that history is part of the reason why the WNBA doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt now, as the league says it will start regularly using charter flights "as soon as [it] can."

Players repeatedly have shared stories about the inconveniences of flying commercial — from not having enough space in seats as players fold themselves in half to being harassed in airports or being stranded for hours due to flight delays. In 2018, a game between the Las Vegas Aces and Washington Mystics was canceled because of travel woes.

This is something that simply does not happen in the 21st century in the NFL, MLB, NHL or NBA. Most Power Five women’s college basketball programs charter flights for games that are out of their state. When most players leave college for the WNBA , travel often becomes more complicated.

Charter flights became more of a public headache for the WNBA two years ago. Casual fans and folks in the mainstream media took notice in March 2022, when Howard Megdal reported a story for Sports Illustrated about the New York Liberty’s owners providing charters for the team for the second half of the 2021 season. Seen as a competitive advantage for the Liberty, the franchise was fined a league-record $500,000. The WNBA even threatened to take draft picks from the Liberty and terminate the franchise. Seriously .

This tug-of-war between owners who are forward-thinking and willing to spend and those of the old guard became even more complicated during the 2023 playoffs, when it appeared that the league’s promise at the 2023 draft of “charter flights for all postseason games” didn’t totally hold true . Also, during the 2023 season, All-Star Phoenix Mercury center Brittney Griner was harassed at the Dallas Fort Worth International Airport just months after being freed from unlawful detainment in a Russian prison.

Last week, talk of charter flights bubbled up again when the Indiana Fever and stars Caitlin Clark and Aliyah Boston arrived in Dallas and were met with paparazzi-like attention as people followed them through the airport — by baggage claim and all — snapping photos and taking videos.

This long preamble — a necessary one to understand the excruciating recent history of the saga surrounding charter flights in the 28-year-old women’s professional basketball league — sets up what happened Tuesday, when WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert blurted out to a room of sports editors in New York that charter flights are coming to the WNBA “ as soon as we can get the planes in place .”

Sure. Great. Awesome. In my best Anakin-Skywalker-goes-pod-racing voice, “ Yippee !”

But what does that mean? The regular season starts in literally one week. What’s the plan?

(A brief aside here: The WNBA continues to have a problem with disseminating meaningful information, from timing to forum to who that news is dispensed through. Why was an announcement like this made at an Associated Press Sports Editors meeting a week before the season starts? Why wasn’t a press release ready to go? Why wasn’t a formal press conference scheduled? Why wasn't this made into an event? The way it all unfolded reeked of unpreparedness, which is, unfortunately, something people who cover the WNBA can say about it far too often.)

About two hours after folks started tweeting about Engelbert claims, the Associated Press published a story that offered some details but left a lot of questions unanswered too.

Let’s break it down.

“We intend to fund a full-time charter for this season,” Engelbert said Tuesday in a meeting with sports editors.

She said the league will launch the program “as soon as we can get planes in places.”

Sure. How long does it take to do that?

Engelbert said the program will cost the league around $25 million per year for the next two seasons.

Alrighty. Who is paying for that? Furthermore, if it’s only $25 million per year — which equates to a bit more $2 million for each owner — why has this taken so long? For most professional sports owners, that’s pocket change.

USA TODAY had more. Here’s Engelbert again:

"We're going to as soon as we can get it up and running. Maybe it’s a couple weeks, maybe it’s a month … We are really excited for the prospects here."

A couple weeks? A month? Which is it? What are we doing here?

Charter flights coming to the WNBA is, of course, great news and long overdue, but fans and folks following the league shouldn’t be so quick to celebrate something that seemingly has no implementation plan.

In its history, the WNBA has rarely done the right thing at the right time when it comes to players’ travel. We shouldn’t be giving Engelbert and the league the benefit of the doubt that Clark, A’ja Wilson and Breanna Stewart will be flying charter regularly within the next month. Simply put, Engelbert and the league have not earned that. Everything the WNBA says around charter flights should be treated with a grain of salt until players are traveling that way on a regular basis.

I’ll believe it when I see it.

WNBA players are hyped the league is finally chartering flights for every team

The aces set up a joke shrine to candace parker on her old locker to celebrate her retirement, how a grainy cell phone livestream of the sky and lynx wnba preseason game got nearly 1 million views.

This article originally appeared on For The Win: The WNBA doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt when it comes to charter flights

Jordan Henderson and Steven Bergwijn’s Ajax futures in doubt with prospect of no European football next season

BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND - MARCH 14: A dejected Jordan Henderson of AFC Ajax during the UEFA Europa Conference League 2023/24 round of 16 second leg match between Aston Villa and AFC Ajax at Villa Park on March 14, 2024 in Birmingham, England.(Photo by James Baylis - AMA/Getty Images)

The futures of Ajax players such as Jordan Henderson and Steven Bergwijn have been cast into doubt as the club count the cost of missing out on Champions League qualification for the second consecutive season.

Henderson arrived as a free agent in January having terminated his contract at Saudi Pro League side Al Ettifaq, signing until June 2026.

The 33-year-old England international joined the likes of Bergwijn as one of Ajax’s highest earners, but financial problems at the Johan Cruyff Arena mean that both of them are among those facing an uncertain outlook.

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There is no specific desire from the four-time European champions to part with either man — or vice versa — and if there was a preference it would be to trade out other squad members.

However the reality of Ajax’s situation is that these steps must be considered in a bid to help balance the books during the summer market.

There is also a feeling that prominent players including Henderson and Bergwijn, who was acquired form Tottenham Hotspur in July 2022, were enticed by a project which is yet to show signs of materialising during a turbulent period.

The Amsterdam side — currently fifth in the table with two games left to play — will finish outside the top two in Eredivisie for a second successive season.

The top two teams in the Netherlands will go straight into the group stage of next season’s revamped Champions League, while third place will be enough for a place in the qualifying round.

UEFA forecasts suggest the Champions League’s new format will see an extra £372million ($477m) in prize money for the 36 teams involved for 2024/25, which Ajax stand to miss out on.

A fifth-place finish is Ajax’s only route into Europe next season, and they would still be required to go through the qualifying round to earn a place in the group stage of the 2024/25 Europa League.

The Athletic reported on Thursday that former Brighton & Hove Albion and Chelsea manager Graham Potter had turned down the opportunity to become the club’s next head coach.

The 36-time Dutch champions are searching for a new boss after sacking Maurice Steijn in October and appointing John van’t Schip on an interim basis.

Multiple openings have come his way post- Chelsea , but he continues to assess all options before returning to the dugout.

(Photo by James Baylis – AMA/Getty Images)

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David Ornstein joined The Athletic in October 2019 after 12 years as a sports journalist and correspondent at the BBC. In the role of Football Correspondent, he is responsible for producing exclusive and original stories and interviews, offering unique insight and analysis. He works across video, audio and the written word. Follow David on Twitter @ David_Ornstein

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Benefit of the Doubt: Meaning, Useful Examples with Synonyms List in
Doubt and the Acquisition of Knowledge Free Essay Example
DOUBT: Synonyms and Related Words. What is Another Word for DOUBT
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Doubt Full Movie Facts & Review in English / Meryl Streep / Philip Seymour Hoffman
DOUBT SESSION || 27 NOV 2022
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COMMENTS

"I think, therefore I am": Descartes on the Foundations of Knowledge
This essay explores the meaning of the Cogito, its importance to Descartes, and its legacy for philosophy up to the present day. 1. Doubt and Skepticism ... Descartes then considers the most extreme reason for doubt: there may exist an evil demon (sometimes translated 'genius,' 'genie,' or 'spirit') ...
Doubt Definition & Meaning
doubt: [noun] uncertainty of belief or opinion that often interferes with decision-making. a deliberate suspension of judgment.
Methodic doubt
methodic doubt, in Cartesian philosophy, a way of searching for certainty by systematically though tentatively doubting everything.First, all statements are classified according to type and source of knowledge—e.g., knowledge from tradition, empirical knowledge, and mathematical knowledge. Then, examples from each class are examined. If a way can be found to doubt the truth of any statement ...
The Philosophy of Doubt by René Descartes
Doubt is for Descartes is methodical way of seeking pure truth. He realizes that in doubting, there is only one pure truth. First he discover, the existence of his 'doubting'. He realizes that the more he in doubts, the more it really exist and he associated doubting as the work of the mind (thinking mind). He concluded that 'cogito er gu sum ...
Descartes' method of systematic doubt
Answer by Craig Skinner. Short answer: his method entails his suspending belief about absolutely everything except one thing, namely, * because he is doubting, he is thinking, and therefore must exist ('I think therefore I am', or, in Latin, 'cogito ergo sum'). He hopes to argue his way back to most of his former beliefs by sound ...
Doubt
Doubt is a mental state in which the mind remains suspended between two or more contradictory propositions, and is uncertain about them. [better source needed] Doubt on an emotional level is indecision between belief and disbelief.It may involve uncertainty, distrust or lack of conviction on certain facts, actions, motives, or decisions.Doubt can result in delaying or rejecting relevant action ...
33 Doubt and Belief in Literature
Roger Lundin is the Blanchard Professor of English at Wheaton College (Illinois). He has written and edited ten books, including Believing Again: Doubt and Faith in A Secular Age; Invisible Conversations: Religion in the Literature of America; and Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief. He has been a visiting professor at Calvin College, Regent College, and the University of Notre Dame, and has ...
Skepticism
The traditional issue of the structure of knowledge and justification, engendering Foundationalism, Coherentism, and Infinitism, can be seen as resulting from one main argument for what we will call Pyrrhonian Skepticism. In what follows we present these two forms of skepticism and assess the main arguments for them. 1.
Skepticism
skepticism, in Western philosophy, the attitude of doubting knowledge claims set forth in various areas. Skeptics have challenged the adequacy or reliability of these claims by asking what principles they are based upon or what they actually establish. They have questioned whether some such claims really are, as alleged, indubitable or ...
On Doubt and Not-Knowing in Fiction
In his 1980 essay "Of Doubt and Dreams," Samuel Delany notes that the art of writing necessarily requires the act of self-doubt: ... " in quotes here because I believe Le Guin and Delaney would agree with Maurice Blanchot's notion that fiction's meaning comes not in its being written, but in its being read. Whether that reading ...
The Meaning of Life
3. Naturalism. Recall that naturalism is the view that a physical life is central to life's meaning, that even if there is no spiritual realm, a substantially meaningful life is possible. Like supernaturalism, contemporary naturalism admits of two distinguishable variants, moderate and extreme (Metz 2019).
The Effects and Consequences of Doubt in one's Life
Doubt is defined as the uncertainty or to question something. Knowledge, on the other hand, is the acquaintance with fact, truth or principle. This essay will focus on how the former can affect the latter, how doubt can change people's knowledge and affect the way people see certain things.
Michel de Montaigne
The question is not who will hit the ring, but who will make the best runs at it. Given the huge breadth of his readings, Montaigne could have been ranked among the most erudite humanists of the XVI th century. But in the Essays, his aim is above all to exercise his own judgment properly.Readers who might want to convict him of ignorance would find nothing to hold against him, he said, for he ...
Certainty and Doubt Theme in Twelve Angry Men
Certainty and Doubt Theme Analysis. LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Twelve Angry Men, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work. The jury of Twelve Angry Men begins its deliberations with a vote of 11-1 in favor of guilty and ends 12-0 in favor of not guilty. From this, we might conclude that the jury started ...
The Certainty and Doubt Relationship
Certainty and doubt are important factors in psychology as they are polar opposites that influence one's life course. Certainty is a system of approaches whereby a person is completely sure of one's ideas or beliefs. On the other hand, doubt refers to ambiguity about any opinions, ideas, or beliefs. However, there is some relationship ...
"Doubt" by John Patrick Shanley's: [Essay Example], 901 words
In John Patrick Shanley's parable "Doubt" he introduces Father Flynn as a loved and talented priest, while introducing Sister Aloysius as a stern, intolerant, disciplinary of St. Nicholas Church School. Father Flynn's character becomes in doubt when Sister Aloysius makes allegations that Father Flynn had forced an inappropriate ...
Doubt: A Parable Summary and Analysis of "Doubt Can Be a Bond as
Doubt: A Parable study guide contains a biography of John Patrick Shanley, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. ... Essays for Doubt: A Parable. Doubt: A Parable essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Doubt ...
Doubt: A Parable Themes
Doubt and Uncertainty. As made evident by the title, Doubt is a play that examines how people deal with feelings of uncertainty and skepticism. Considering that the play takes place in a Catholic parish, the most obvious manifestation of doubt is the kind that arises when people question their religious faith.
PDF Cezanne's Doubt Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Cezanne's Doubt Maurice Merleau-Ponty It took him one hundred working sessions for a still life, one hundred- fifty sittings for a portrait. What we call his ... This meaning will not become any clearer in the light of art history—that is, by considering influences (the Italian school and Tintoretto, Delacroix, Courbet, and the impressionists ...
How Self-Doubt Keeps You Stuck (And How to Overcome It)
There are plenty of reasons behind self-doubt. We'll go through some of them here. 1. Past Experience and Mistakes. Past experiences can have a huge impact on how we react, especially if you have had bad experiences before, like being in an abusive relationship or being fired without a concrete justification.
Doubt movie review & film summary (2008)
Father Flynn's fate is sealed. But "Doubt" is not intended as a docudrama about possible sexual abuse. Directed by John Patrick Shanley from his Pulitzer- and Tony-winning play, it is about the title word, doubt, in a world of certainty. For Aloysius, Flynn is certainly guilty.
Doubt: A Parable Summary and Study Guide
Overview. Doubt: A Parable is a 2005 play by John Patrick Shanley that analyzes an instance of doubt and suspicion in a Catholic school in the Bronx in the 1960s. In nine scenes, the play tells the story of principal Sister Aloysius's suspicions about an inappropriate relationship between a priest, Father Flynn, and a young male student.
8 Ways to Overcome Self-Doubt Once and for All
1. Practice self-compassion. Self-doubt means that you're holding yourself back. It arises from the fear of making a mistake, but mistakes are how we grow and improve our own abilities. Look at yourself in the mirror and say three positive affirmations at the beginning of every day. 2.
Detroit court began cash bail reforms a year ago. Here's how they're
The benefit of the doubt. Before setting a personal bond, magistrates warn they will be less lenient if a defendant violate their release conditions, which often include no drinking or using drugs ...
Opinion
Getting out will mean more trade friction with the United States. ... Guest Essay. China's Dead-End Economy Is Bad News for Everyone. May 11, 2024, 7:00 a.m. ET. Video.
Connecting to Taylor Swift's "I Can Do It With a Broken Heart"
Then, at the end of the song, I pumped my hand into the sky like I was holding a microphone. A sharp pain shot across my chest and body. Within a matter of seconds, my tour came to an end. I was ...
The WNBA doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt when it comes to
And that history is part of the reason why the WNBA doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt now, as the league says it will start regularly using charter flights "as soon as [it] can." Players ...
Judicial Precedent and Constitutional Interpretation
The most commonly cited source of constitutional meaning is the Supreme Court's prior decisions on questions of constitutional law. 1 Footnote Michael J. Gerhardt, The Power of Precedent 147-48 (2008) ([I]t is practically impossible to find any modern Court decision that fails to cite at least some precedents in support.This essay's concept of judicial precedent is limited to prior ...
Henderson and Bergwijn's Ajax futures in doubt
The futures of Ajax players such as Jordan Henderson and Steven Bergwijn have been cast into doubt as the club count the cost of missing out on Champions League qualification for the second ...

“I think, therefore I am”: Descartes on the Foundations of Knowledge

1. Doubt and Skepticism

2. The Cogito and Certainty

3. Defeating Skepticism

4. Conclusion: Knowledge without Certainty

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Descartes’ method of systematic doubt

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33 Doubt and Belief in Literature

33.1 The Shifting Nature of Belief

33.1.1 Nimble Believing

33.2 Into the Twentieth Century

33.3 Critical Establishments

33.4 Pugilists and Poets: The Modern Literature of Belief

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On Doubt and Not-Knowing in Fiction

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