The Fight For Reality

It all begins with Descartes, in a sense. It all begins with Descartes' innocence. He was the man who said, "I think, therefore I am" — cogito, ergo sum — and thus unleashed the howling demons of unbelief. For Descartes, in the process of finding a sure foundation on which to base his philosophy of knowledge, found it in the concept of doubt. No matter how doubtful a doubter may be, he cannot doubt his own act of doubting. To doubt everything makes doubting anything a useless exercise.

But from this doubtful foundation, it is indeed possible to build an edifice of philosophical principle. Ask yourself: are you for the supremacy of abstraction or substance? Are you for free will or fatalism? And are you for ultimate meaning or none at all? These three questions, asked subconsciously, determine many of our answers to the question of life and life's questions.

For example, do you prefer Chesterton or Yeats? Instinctively, people offered this choice will polarise around two dynamic opposites — the substantial free will with ultimate meaning of Chesterton's vision of humanity, or the abstract fatalism with only fragments of temporal meaning which belongs to the twilight vision of Yeats.

Chesterton is redemptionist, almost muscular in his advocacy that man is not only the measure of all things, but must measure all things. In The Man Who Was Thursday, Anarchy and Law are brought face to face. At the end of it all, it becomes obvious that anarchy and all forms of lawlessness must be rejected in principle or converted in practice — for the world must have either empty deception or actual meaning as its foundation, and deception turns on itself at the very last. Yet, this meaning which Chesterton raised to the light never needed to be known; it was always the unknowable, deliberately encouraging of free will.

Yeats is the opposite - there is no eternity save the 'drawing-down of blinds' which Wilfred Owen saw. Even the great artifice of Yeats, his contribution to the Irish literary renaissance, was merely a recrafting of faded stories to serve a political need. Yeats' poetry was a poetry designed to anchor a maze of shifting identities, a tentpeg of gold to keep upright the flimsy edifice of Irish nationalism — like the Scots, the Irish have always found it easier to fight each other. In the end, the 'centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.' Yet, that anarchy always had a crafted determinism about it — a rough beast would slouch its way to Bethlehem to be born, and nobody would be able to stop it.

We may fancy ourselves as authoritarian or liberal; as humanist or pragmastist or environmentalist; as red, green, blue, black or white; or of whatever faction or fiction. But in the end, these are our naked choices: to accept and adopt reality as if we have free will, in the hope and faith that there is an ultimate meaning; or to deny the world, resign ourselves to fate and the vagaries of an inscrutable destiny. It is time for us to take the fight to the enemy on the darkling plain. It is time to choose a reality and live for it — or die for it.