Saint Augustine: Existence, Love, and Knowledge

Saint Augustine: Existence, Love, and the Pursuit of Knowledge

1. Existence and Love for the Sake of Knowledge

Saint Augustine indicates the first tendency of love as a style of life. All creatures tend towards life; there is a universal desire for life and an aversion to death. This tendency, whose common sense is a witness, manifests in one's own life, pointing to God as its creator. However, if one loves, one's love is will, and free will exists. To know is to love, and to love is to know. One loves and desires love, existence, knowledge, and power. This is unique to humans and not possessed by any other creature, as humans were created in the image and likeness of God.

According to Saint Augustine, everything desires to remain in its being or to conserve its existence. The concept of love in Saint Augustine has been influenced by the Stoics, who gave great importance to the first conservation of series concepts, which would later have success in holistic thought or the efforts of everything to preserve its being and will to live. One could say that Freud was preferentially influenced by Saint Augustine.

To know is to desire, and in pursuit of this desire, one loves and hates being deceived. Therefore, one enters into doubt to avoid falling into error. One prefers lucidity, as any madness is painful. Saint Augustine achieved this certainty by reflecting on his own knowledge: "To know in knowing how, I am not fooled, because I know I exist, and I also know that I recognize it."

From this certainty derives love and hate. If one loves false things, it is not false that one loves them, even though the things are false. Therefore, truth is the master, and my love results in being true. Eternal things or truths are known and loved only through the intervention of intelligence without the senses; they are made visible to intelligence by divine light. Through love, God created man in his image and likeness and possesses a core that allows him to receive wisdom and enlightenment. Regarding the relationship with love, Saint Augustine argues that the universal desire for happiness, like the desire to exist, presupposes existence.

2. Academic Skepticism and the Certainty of Existence

The use of critical academic skepticism that Socrates and Plato had employed in discussions with the Sophists extended to intellectual knowledge itself, reflecting the Platonic distrust regarding perceptual knowledge. Although skeptics did not completely deny knowledge, they maintained that nothing could be said to be true, but only likely or probable.

Skeptics argued that there was nothing to use as a reference to control the truth or falsity of our claims about things. It is written that they could, like the ancient Sophists, argue with equal determination for and against the same thing.

Saint Augustine, who had been a skeptical academic, rejected skepticism. He confirmed the theory that man is, knows, and loves. Through introspection, observation, and analysis of his conscience, he found a certainty against doubt: if I am mistaken, I exist. This truth is undeniable, a proof against doubts, because it is contained in the doubt, because it follows from the very act of doubting, because the error assumes existence.

For Augustine, the senses can be misleading about the nature of things, but not about their existence. Thus, he argues that if he is certain that he is a thinking being, then if he is mistaken, he exists. Could I be fooled if I did not exist? With this, Saint Augustine concludes that absolute skepticism is absurd.