Doubt

Doubt

A very brief essay on choice

I find that when I begin to read, my extremities tremble with a desire to write.

But when I begin to write, there grows in my mind an insatiable thirst for reading.

The effect is that I have written nothing and am illiterate.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet is not upset to discover himself on the brink off being and non-being. He is upset at the choice, and longs not to choose. After all what sadist would imbue mankind with choice yet deprive him of the freedom to not? So complains the atheist. Yet existence is a given, and we must choose. There remains then a single question: is existence real? Is to ‘be’ to actually ‘exist’ (to ‘be’ in the world)? Does thought necessitate a reality? So begins the doubter. When I say ‘I do not believe in God’ I am saying, by a trick of language, that I do not believe in the act of being itself. That is, I believe in an infinity of effects with no cause.

By a longer road I may initially suggest no unified cause, merely a pantheon of accidentally related self-existent causes. The universe is a rainbow of effects, each preceding from a unique and ultimately anti-simple cause. I am an effect of say, the cause that acts when the earth’s moon is in waxing crescent. But then, the orbit of planets is an antecedent cause to the cause that effected me. This cartoonishly foolish example serves well to illustrate the folly of such a system. The very fact that anti-simple causes are distinct pre-supposes cognizable distinction. ‘All is random.’ But whence the observation of randomness? What comparison may be made to identify what is ‘all’ from what is ‘else’? All such lines of argument, from a belief in fragmentary reality to a belief in disorder as supreme essence, these mask a formidable contention, one which exponents of such theories would do well to wield, as it stands on its own merits, needing no prefatory ‘system.’

That contention is doubt. The choice not to accept, to not be persuaded. One begins with the assertion that all that is must be provable by reason, and nothing taken on ‘faith’. It is not necessary that the doubter can himself prove all that is, rather that ‘someone’ could. When no-one can, the doubt precedes apace to it’s next victim, reason itself. Who granted reason after all? Why not grant fantasy and intuition, the flashing up of images from the void? Certainly their appearance is more suggestive of a super-nature than reason, that cold, dead thing. If we grant existence, we needn’t be on good terms with it, why not be enemies?

Alliance with fantasy over and against reality is the (ironically ‘logical’) step from a simple doubt of reason. The doubter is not taking issue with the one and one making two, he denies the existence of ‘one.’ Identity is thus challenged. If by a movement of will desire suggests bovinity over divinity as the end of mankind, what restraining authority need be granted to ‘reality’? It would be unserious to suggest that reality is mere convention, the collective thought of a billion thinkers, each ‘existing’ thereby in the same hallucination. What need has such a nihilist of ‘seriousness.’ Why not posit the law of absurdity, and act the cow?

The reader would be forgiven for believing their beloved author to be the thatcher of a straw-man, to easily beat about the ears his opponent, and light it aflame to thunderous applause. Of such I am guilty, but the straw man would simply laugh. He desires to be a man of straw, and ridicules me for expecting mereological congruity between himself and his fellow man. Rather a straw crow, cawing in scorn at the mass of bovine humanity, aimlessly bellowing after food and ‘meaning’.

There emerge then from the ears of doubt, new lifeforms, escaping from the recesses of the brain out into the open air. The battle of the ‘Absolute’ and the ‘Absurd.’ Kierkegaard scurries from one ear, to meet on the scalp of our doubting man his enemy Hegel, who has proudly ascended the heights of humanity, and taken up residence at it’s pinnacle. There are two resolutions to the joke of bovine man, either that man is more fully man when cattle, or that in the progress of time the cattle will find themselves growing skinny, walking on their hind legs, going naked, seeking shelter and clothing, and at last engaging in the activity of ‘reason.’ This is to say, the doubtful crow is suggesting by dint of cawing that it would be better for man to be man than a cow. Doubt at last is merely faith in choice, though arrived at through the back door of superstition, intuition, and flights of fancy.

Cogito ergo homo sum