Pranav Agarwal

Twenty-three years ago, when I was studying philosophy in Italy, one of the most interesting questions that occupied my mind was whether human beings genuinely arrive at truth through reason, or merely acquire a sufficiently sophisticated vocabulary to explain why they continue to deceive themselves. I remember a professor who, during a lecture on epistemology, declared with an entirely serious expression: “It is difficult to find black socks in a dark room, unless they smell!” I must admit that such a statement would hardly find a place in an academic treatise, but I immediately recognised in it an unexpectedly serious philosophical problem, formulated with an economy of means of which certain German idealists could only dream. Imagine Kant confronted with this situation. Before searching for the socks, he would probably begin by examining the conditions under which their existence could become an object of possible experience. Hegel would establish that darkness and the socks stand in a dialectical relationship, whose resolution is yet to be accomplished through the very movement of Spirit. And Heidegger would undoubtedly devote several hundred pages to the being-of-the-sock-in-darkness before raising the question of whether smell might not constitute an authentic mode of disclosing presence. And the professor would probably simply open the window. I remember how seriously we took philosophical distinctions in those days, how diligently we discussed the limits of sensory knowledge, the reliability of perception, and the relationships between essence and appearance, while life, with its characteristically unceremonious sense of humour, continually presented us with examples capable of ruining an entire seminar in less than five minutes. Because there is one detail in the story of the socks that deserves attention: sometimes the very quality we would prefer an object not to possess turns out to be the only reliable means of finding it. And this, of course, applies to considerably more than socks. After twenty-three years of reading, reflection, and quite a few encounters with people who hold an extraordinarily high opinion of their own intellectual importance, I am beginning to suspect that the professor demonstrated remarkable perceptiveness. Certain phenomena remain entirely invisible until they begin to reveal their presence in ways that no sophisticated terminology can conceal. To this day, I remember that lecture with particular pleasure, because a single pair of imaginary socks managed to call into question all our self-confidence as young philosophers, armed with Kant, Hegel, and the unshakeable conviction that human knowledge was an exceptionally serious business. Or we could simply have opened the window. In either case, philosophy would have made a certain amount of progress.