Pretty Purposes, Reasonable Rhetoric

As a philosopher, I am deeply moved by the diversity of methods that human beings have devised in order to survive on the face of the Earth. From faith all the way to reason, mankind has proved to himself again and again that, despite the rough terrain of reality, he is capable of leveling it - if only for a moment - in order to pass on to the next leg of the journey. We see the Middle Ages, wrought with pestilence and famine, and shiver to think that men and women had to live through them; but a glance at their Earth-centered cosmology, their comfort in faith and their sublime superstitions reveals not only an awesome ability to deal with a bad situation, but also the process by which they dealt with it: falsification. 

 

Our species has passed through a number of trials and tribulations, and at each step of the way has devised their own particular myth that helps them cope with (and often enough arrive at) the Truth. In fact, when one considers the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment, the birth pangs of Romanticism and the death throes of Modernism - when one considers these different paradigms in relation to the more general Truth that they all but obscured, it is evident that each favored its own limited method for arriving at Truth, and this to the exclusion of all others. What this amounts to, for a moralist, is that every generation of epistemology has falsified and obscured almost all of reality in order to clarify a specific particle thereof - in short, that human progress is built upon a history of lies. 

 

It is indeed strange for our modern minds to try and comprehend, for instance, a Cubist representation of reality as a chaotic flux, when we know that this particular aesthetic form grew up under the most systematic, highly-organized despot-machines hitherto known to mankind. But when we put ourselves in the place of these artists, and try to comprehend the fact that the atrocities committed during the first few decades of the last century were indeed committed by vast, human organizations - well-ordered human social machines, if you will - why, it's quite easy to see why the artists and intellectuals of the time preferred chaos! "Human beings," they must have thought, "especially organized bodies thereof, cannot be capable of such monstrosities - it's nothing more than fate! accident! forces beyond our control!" This particular little lie - most likely propagated without any consciousness of its falsity - provided those poor men and women with the will to live through a horror movie. 

 

If we move our historical perspective a bit further out, and consider a much larger portion of mankind's progress, it's obvious that two dynamically opposed fictions have pervaded Western epistemology since the ancient Greeks: namely, faith and reason. They have acquired different names throughout the years - "art/science," "irrationality/rationality," and "subject/object," just to name a few - but the basic concepts have remained the same. The two most prevalent (and, naturally, antagonistic) modes of thought today still consider reality as one of two things, neither of which it actually is: either completely unknowable, chaotic and master-of-man; or entirely knowable, lawful and subject to man's intellect. 

 

It is these two antagonizing elements in the western world that are responsible for almost all of the technological, scientific, political and humanitarian progress that our society has made in the past two thousand years; and it is these elements that, after a long and arduous battle, are yearning to be reconciled. This is evident enough from the most cutting-edge in both the sciences and the arts: I refer you to the irrational beauty of method by which the "truth" of string theory is usually asserted, or the rigorous industrial rationale that produces our popular music. The aesthetic appeal of science, not to mention the faith placed in reason by our leading scientific minds, shows us quite clearly that these lies, these "coping mechanisms" we call faith and reason, are no longer working on their own and respective of each other - for our sake, they must join forces, in order to keep mankind sane and on the road to tomorrow. Our will to live - assuming it is still intact - would not settle for anything less.