Blind leading the blind...
Jonnie Comet
22 April 2001
If I were to tell you that all your life experience is not really
as you have perceived it at all, but that you are actually a guinea-pig taking
a test in a clinic in which we have sealed you in a virtual-reality dome and
provided you with every sensation you’ve ever perceived, could you prove me
wrong?
The answer will depend on how you determine reality. Do you rely upon senses or thinking?
Rene Descartes and the other absolutists of his time accepted the
axiom that the cardinal nature of Man is to reason. The faculty of Reason is, after all, what
sets Man apart from lesser beasts. This
is all well, especially when we read or hear Descartes’ oft-repeated adage, ‘I
think; therefore I am’. It is so easy to
assume that this idea proposes that since we can think, or reason, we can
determine reality. But in this modern
and relevance-related world Descartes’ statement is highly misunderstood. Too many people, throughout all ages, but
especially now, tend to equate what they perceive with what is true. These are the same people who will claim that
any opinion is valid, and then rely so heavily upon their own assessments of
people and issues and events that they unknowingly erect a smoke-screen of
subjective ‘data’ entirely irrespective of the real facts. Sadly these people will be the last to ever
accept that their own application of reason may be inherently flawed.
When Descartes says, ‘I think; therefore I am’, he does not mean,
as the typical modern American relativist may claim, that perception determines
reality. Subscribing to this
misconception, it is all too easy to indulge the common logical fallacy of
assuming, ‘Since I think such-and-such about this, it must therefore be
true’. For example, if an individual
feels cold, he may believe that in fact it is cold– meaning that the ambient
temperature is less than it usually is– in spite of the equal likelihood that
he may simply have a fever and be unaware that his temperature-sensing ability
is compromised, and thus his awareness about the weather today. To debate this with him– hopefully without
agitating his illness! –will result in his frustrated declaration of ‘Well it’s
cold to me! What else is there?’
The first thing our misguided, suffering friend must realise is
that the philosophical axiom ‘I think; therefore I am’ is an absolutist one to
start with. And it does not defend any
reliance on personal relevance at all but does quite the opposite. It condemns the concept of a subjective
reality, suggesting instead that there is only one thing anyone can be sure of:
that he can be sure that is the only thing he can be sure of. In other words, I know I am thinking, since
to merely question whether or not I am thinking already proves that I am thinking. And Descartes’ point is that since that is
entirely internal, as if conceived in a vacuum, not affected by outside
circumstances, it can be considered logically pure, and therefore can be
accepted as true by virtue of being purely reasonable. It is only when I begin to involve
perceptions of outside circumstances in my thought processes that the
determination of what is or is not true becomes problematic.
Truth may or may not be hid from an individual, but surely he
will not be able to tell it by his physical senses, nor sometimes even by his
intellectual ones. Though Jefferson has it that truths will be self-evident, by
definition easily perceived as true, it does not automatically imply the
reverse, that the obvious must therefore be true. For example, I might perceive that the sky is
pink, since all round I see pink; but I may not know whether or not I am
wearing pink glasses. If it is true that
I am wearing pink glasses, it fundamentally alters the validity of my claim
that the sky is in fact pink. If in fact
I am not wearing those glasses, then perhaps the sky is pink after all; but
notice that it all depends on my awareness of some greater reality which may
have been kept from me, without my knowledge that such a fact could even be
possible. Therefore any claim to reality
I might make before I fully investigate the existence and status of all the
truth is therefore incomplete and probably invalid. The truly logical thinker will allow for the
possibility that he may not know all the facts, but allow too that absolute
truth does exist, however it may be beyond his perception for the moment or for
ever.
Now this may seem like an inane argument, because how often might
it be that I would be wearing pink glasses?
But take it a step further and consider how such a misunderstanding can
influence larger issues. The
archetypical misapplication of the Descartes idea is for one to use a
personally-perceived relevance as proof of a universal truth. A relativist politician may feel that a
certain plan for economy seems risky, but he measures risk by how it would
affect his own personal finances and so votes against it, claiming that it is
truly bad even though millions of others, about whose finances he knows
nothing, may actually benefit from it. A
relativist fairgoer might say that since a Ferris-wheel appears dangerous to
him, it must therefore actually be a material threat to life and limb. Yet his understanding of the physics of
Ferris-wheels, or the modern materials used in their construction, or the
safety ordinances governing amusement rides, or the fact that the Ferris-wheel
in question has just been thoroughly rebuilt and inspected, may be partly or
entirely incomplete or just plain false, and so his report that the
Ferris-wheel is unsafe may be precisely counter to fact.
And so far these examples might be attributed to mere idiocy on
the parts of the politician and the fairgoer, and easily dealt with or
overlooked; but consider how such an uninformed concept of reality can affect
one’s whole lookout on the rest of life.
For example, a certain butcher might perceive that his shop is being
boycotted by ethnic Semetarians. He has
not seen a Semetarian come in for five or six days, and whenever he rings up
some of his regular and satisfied customers who are Semetarians he gets their
answering machines. What this butcher
may not know– perhaps because he never bothered to think about it– is that this
week is a Semetarian religious observance, and there may be mores for
Semetarians about fasting and attendance at prayer services, for the term of
the holy week but not beyond. But based
on what he perceives, he concludes that Semetarians no longer wish to buy meats
from him; and since it seems that only Semetarians are doing this he forms an
opinion about the Semetarians’ buying habits and how they feel about
non-Semetarian butchers. His resentment
towards Semetarians appears justified to him based on what he perceives where
he is at the time. In other words, his personal perception, not his logical
reasoning, determines his working concept of reality.
The reality this butcher does not recognise, but easily could, is that his conclusions came from incomplete or even invalid information. He may never consider that his competitors are also missing their regular Semetarian customers. It may be that the Semetarians will return after their fast and buy twice as much meat as on other weeks. Others might have come through the shop this week and just not mentioned to him that they were Semetarian. But if this butcher is unwilling to grasp a reality that transcends any one butchery in town, any one week in time, or any one group of people, his immediate, relevant, and personal perception may fix for him that the Semetarians are deliberately choosing to avoid his shop in particular. Not understanding why, nor even comprehending that there may be a reason which has nothing to do with any subjective assessment of him or his shop, his reliance on personal perception alone can lead to an irrational resentment which could of course grow into something more socially reprehensible– and perhaps bad for his business, which would only exacerbate his resentment.
Of course it is entirely possible to prolong such a debate over
perceived reality and absolute truth to the point where the minutest points
about the concepts are bandied back and forth ad nauseum. The focussed, most applicable reality is that
thinking Man must accept that he might not have complete awareness of all
realities affecting his existence at all times.
Rather than to accept as truth only what he can perceive and to act upon
that assumption– for I cannot refer to it in any better terms– it is his duty
to seek more data, especially that which his personal judgements may deem
distasteful or disconcerting, before deciding what is and is not reality in the
given case. In the absence or
unavailability of such definitive data, his only logical recourse is to accept
that he simply cannot know for sure, no matter how discomforting that may be
for him to admit. It is when a man
allows his own comfort, whether physical or intellectual, to shield him from
acceptance of true reality that he casts off the one divinely-granted attribute
that makes him Man in the first place.
Without the deliberate exercise of that marvellous Reason in situations that call for it, he is no better than a brute.
The secondary ignorance that results from modern Man’s utter
dependence on his own personal perception would have irritated and incensed
Descartes himself. To show even the barest modicum of respect to his idea, the
least we can do is to stop misunderstanding or at least misapplying him– for
our insistence that we understand only proclaims to the better enlightened that
we certainly do not understand after all. As a certain more famous absolutist
has said,
‘If ye were blind, ye should have no sin: but that ye say, ‘‘We see”, therefore your sin remaineth.’ –John
9: 41
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