On truth, reality and resistance

I can’t say I like philosophy.

It’s not something I chose to do because I find it to be a charming little diversion. A quaint pastime. Those colleagues and associates of mine who describe their occupation as “fun” or “stimulating”, I have no idea what they think they’re doing. It’s not fucking fun to gaze into the Nietzchean abyss or to actually contemplate the terrible mystery of transcendence. You don’t trifle with the infinite.

Yeah, I don’t like it. I do love it, though. Gruelingly and reluctantly, like how one learns to love a tried and true adversary, swords and blood drawn by the lonely seashore.

And unfortunately, the world has almost forgotten this divine mistress and her blade of immutable truth and relentless scrutiny. We’ve been pretty much despoiled by piss-poor metaphysics and popular sophistry for many generations now, and the last ones barely even know how to read amid this whirlwind of disjointed images and passionate noise. No wonder they’re authoritarians almost to a man. Any port in a storm.

It began in the Age of Empire, of course, whose merchant class and their bloodless worldview brought forth modern philosophy as an auxiliary ideology of capitalism. A system of ideas tending towards reproducing the relations of production inherent to industrial civilization and its colonial bacchanal.

That’s really the root cause of all the half-baked unwitting empiricists echoing warmed over David son of a bitch Hume in their sophomoric musings to the effect that “oh, there’s no complete truth, all we have are hypotheses that have not yet been falsified”. You think? Dry impartial light of nonsense. There’s at least three top-level truth-claims here, and if you dig into the grammar and the structure of the propositions, you find the whole edifice of logic.

Thing is, people with their heads full of this sort of muddled drivel will be just a plaything for the winds of opinion and authority, tossed to and fro with every gust of doctrine. They have nothing firm to hold on to, no ground in which to plant their spears and resist, and no motive to believe in their ability to know the truths before which all of us must supplicate, king or pauper.

But the one thing that our lady reason is capable of bringing home to our weary hearts, if we just court her properly, is an actual and robust anchoring in reality. Unrivalled except by faith, the inner eye of sustained reflection is perfectly capable of bringing our frail human natures into immediate contact with the realm of the changeless. The light of truth, in so many words.

All you need to do is imagine an experience. The sunset above a wooded shoreline, or the scent of the forest in summertime. Then recognize that you can think about this imagination in various ways. You can recall it, refer to it, you can ask questions about it and so forth.

Say that you imagined a yellow dog. Then you can form the proposition found in the statement “I thought about a yellow dog”. This proposition is something different than the imagination it refers to. It’s also true, because it affirms the actual reality of your imagination as such.

Boom. There you have an actual truth. Is it absolute? Yeah. How do we know that?

Well, if someone wants to cordon off this little yellow dog-truth and maintain that it’s only true for you and not for him, this in turn of course also amounts to a general truth-claim. I.e. your dog-truth is then really said to be relative as a matter of fact. In other words, you can only perform this conceptual bracketing by some other truth-claim.

So either the dog-truth is absolutely true (i.e. it’s absolutely true that you actually imagined it), or the sequestration of it is absolutely true (it’s absolutely true that the dog-truth does not hold in any general sense). Move on to the next level and cordon off also this as relative?

Well, keep peeling the onion all the way down to the meta-claim that there’s no absolute truth. You can unfortunately only state this as an absolute truth-claim.

So what about global skepticism? What if everything is just illusory, even our thoughts and sensory experiences? And what if there’s ABSOLUTELY NOTHING behind this illusion?

Right. So this obviously also amounts to a complex truth-claim. Assume it’s really the case that my thoughts, intentions and sensory experiences are illusory. First of all, we then need to affirm these phenomena as illusory, i.e. as some sort of thing that actually exists in the specific way that illusions exist. So we’ve only really managed to put these “illusions” in a special metaphysical category. You’ve just added a label.

Moreover, this sort of statement will also have to affirm as real the metaphysical transformation (X = Y) that all these phenomena really only are something else, be that null and void or any other positive existent. You need to add the positive fact of an equality relation over and above the supposedly illusory experience, because the illusion is metaphysically speaking taken to be something other than itself - even if that’s just nothingness.

So to deny the simple truth of basic experience, you’d have to erect two other entirely different truth-claims, wildly incoherent at that, and with the entire structure of basic logic nested beneath them.

Yeah. You’re already in truth. Let your heart vibrate to that iron string. You don’t need to stand on the shoulders of any giants. You don’t need any arbitrary authority.

So get out there and do your own research.

The great march of mental destruction will go on.

Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them.

It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake.

Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four.

Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer.

We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face.

We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage.

We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed.