metonymy4u

Do you believe in cause and effect? Then you must believe in God, which is the cause of everything. Do you believe we can know anything? Then you must believe in the soul, which can only know what it already knows. To pass from ignorance to knowledge is as incomprehensible as the notion of something from nothing.

Of course we philosophers understand the intellectual dishonesty which just occurred. We understand the physicist studying her meters and gauges is studying nothing more than that. We understand that the search for knowledge never ends up where it’s going; that the search is all and the destination nothing. We understand that the everything that God is the cause of does not in fact exist, because to exist is to be capable of being doubted and one cannot doubt the existence of everything. But we accept the fictions that are necessary to save us from utter nihilism.

Or do we? Can we not also see those fictions themselves as stages on life’s way? Contingent amusements that can stand to be stripped away, just as the child strips away their own playthings, lovingly setting them aside in boxes, kept perhaps for a time in the attic, but then given away when the house is sold, or left behind for someone else’s joyful discovery.