V: Thanks for “The World”: a penance

I have found myself slipping back into adversarial mode, endlessly finding fault with what you say, nitpicking where there has been nothing more substantial to pounce upon. This despite spotting this tendency in myself previously, and openly abjuring it. Such persistent behaviour has a simple reason: that your view of the world has important differences from mine. Instead of accepting difference, I let my emotions perceive it as a threat as a threat to my own world-view, a cobra poised to strike, which must be instantly scotched. These emotions reacted to the thought, “Bryan is trying to edge me into a corner: every time I give an inch of ground, he gains strength. I’ll find myself checkmate if I don’t fight back.” So I miss the gift you are offering, and in sniping from the metaphorical rooftops without revealing my own position any more than necessary, I oblige you to more vigorous defence and counter-offensive.

So now, I don’t just call a truce. I don’t surrender. I don’t claim victory. I shut my eyes and count to some adequate number. When I open my eyes again, I realize that there is no insurgency. It’s true that we’re armed to the teeth with words, but these skirmishes are merely exercises, and I don’t mean aggressive military ones: more like exercises for the good of our health.

By way of penance and reparation I intend to summarise in few words what I have learned, and not even bother with further wrangling. (Let us see how long this lasts!)

In “The World”, you elegantly and persuasively expounded a notion of Reality. Writing before dawn, you took your examples from immediate experience. A bird was singing. You didn’t know the name of its species but visualised that it predated man, so even before it was ever observed by man and given a name, it still had its unique form, part of an ongoing reality which didn’t need human observation to validate it.

You explored the contrast between reality and illusion, whilst pointing out that if we merely trust in subjective perception to give us a continuous feed of reality as it occurs, we easily fall victim to illusion.

You used the example of a road and vehicles on it as “evidence of the co-operation between reality and the mind”: demonstrating that reality is not just there to be observed, but can have intimate relations with mind, from which viable & useful offspring may be born.

You consider what happens when you doubt the authenticity of inferred reality. Some of it you cannot personally vouch for, but you rely upon the testimony of others. You don’t just rely on them not lying. You rely only on facts which have been used as building blocks over time, tested over again in so many ways and never found wanting.

Finally you devise a metaphorical thought experiment for dealing with doubt. You attempt to flee from the room through a door marked “doubt”. The room is the world. You go out the door but it leads back into the same room that you exited from, every time. (I think René Descartes visited you in a dream to teach this!)

I applaud the piece. I confess that I drafted a riposte, one which sniped from the rooftops at what I thought were suspicious military exercises threatening my future strategy. I may use them some time, because taken out of the adversarial context my sword might make a good ploughshare.

I shall continue with your other posts, working backwards, extracting the juice from what you have written, to take advantage thereof, as continuation of the penance.