My daughter sent a comic to me. It's from the existential comic site. It shows three ancient philosophers competing in the philosophy event at the Greek Olympics. There's Thales, who declares everything as water.
Zeno, who declares motion as impossible, and Socrates, who declares they're full of bullshit. The crowd goes wild, Socrates won. But of course, he didn't really win. He refuted nothing.
His reputation was even worse than Samuel Johnson's stone-kicking refutation, and quote-unquote refutation, unquote, of George Barkley. It's a well-worn antidote. Samuel Johnson and his companion, the biographer Janis Boswell, stood outside church in 1763. Talking about George Berkley's or Barkley's, startling philosophical conclusion that matter doesn't exist.
Okay, here's how the argument works. We only perceive matters, characteristics. That green thing that has four legs, a flat surface, and a horizontal surface? Our mind then combines those things to declare, quote-chair, unquote.
But we don't perceive chair. We only perceive the things that comprise the chair, and, therefore, the chair itself doesn't really exist. Since all things are mere combinations of other things that we perceive in the relation to other things, nothing really exists. Everything is just our ideas, all is mine.
There is no matter. Boswell said, though it can't be true, it's impossible to refute Johnson. Boswell wrote in his philosophy, quote-answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a huge stone. I refute it thus, unquote.
That's how Johnson refuted Barkley. He checked the stone, saying, ah, you know, there's matter. That end of the discussion, but Boswell concluded the story by noting that he would have loved to have seen a genius like Johnson contend with Berkeley. Since Berkeley's ideas could not be, quote, answered by pure reasoning, unquote, David Hume, which is somewhat conclusion by Barkley's ideas.
He said, quote, they admit of no answer and produced no conviction. Zeno, there is no motion. Barkley, there is no matter. We could add a few other philosophers in this ad tradition.
He had a permit, he said, there is no change. Jacques Derrida said there is no reality. None of them could be refuted, but none of them commence anyone with a shred of ingenuousness or common sense. They probably didn't even believe their own conclusions, and I can guarantee freaking to you that they didn't live by their own conclusions.
But they couldn't be refuted. Why? Why is this? I think that lecture and tosspot, Boswell, I mean, he loved women, he loved drinking.
I think he hit on the answer. These philosophers could not, quote, be answered by pure reasoning, unquote. There is something about reality that transcends reason, something not subject to reason, something that can't be defined, something that defies captured by words. See, this piece is a follow-up of sorts.
Last week's post, the one that was, uh, are you engaging the active existence than you're a man of the Dow? This is a follow-up of sorts. The active existence, I pointed out last week, is prior to all else. The active existence is prior to essence and attributes, which themselves are prior to existence itself.
Because the active existence is prior to all else, it informs all else. Importantly, all else doesn't inform it. The part doesn't capture the whole. The son doesn't define the father.
So the world of essence and existence isn't going to define the act of existence. Words and reason are the tools of the world of essence. Essence is prior to existence, so essence is tools paint existence as well. But the exact of existence is prior to it all.
That's how Berkeley and Zeno and Dareda can be 100% logical and 100% wrong at the same time. Yeah, it's a paradox. Get used to it. Everything informed by reality, a thing I call the reality spectrum.
Everything informed by the reality spectrum is a paradox. I remember listening to an interview last year with Ian McGillcrest, the guy who wrote that masterpiece, um, the brain in his emissary or the master in his emissary. He's on a podcast last year and he was describing it around table discussion with other heavyweight intellectuals that hit upon two contradictory statements that were both true at the same time. One of the participants lit up and said, ah, a paradox.
Now we're getting someplace. Exactly. The reality spectrum is someplace. It's everyplace.
If you deny it, you'll never get anyplace. Your reach conclusions, but nothing will be concluded. You'll be right, but you'll be wrong. If you deny the reality spectrum, you're playing poker without the face cards.
You might draw a straight flush, six to ten and reach the pot. Then the other guy will lay down four kings. You'll see that you lost, but you won't understand why. The full deck of the reality spectrum transcends your partial deck of essence slash existence only.
The partial deck can win hands, like Berkeley did, but in the long run, the full deck will win. In chapter two of his classic book Orthodoxy, G.K. Trustin describes the maniac. Maniacs, trustin observed, quote, are commonly great reasoners, unquote, but there's still maniacs because they reason within a very closed circle.
The maniac's explanation of a thing is always complete and often in a purely rational sense, satisfactory. If the maniac says six guys have a conspiracy against them, then you tell him, hey, I spoke to each one of them. They sure mean they don't. The maniac responds.
That's what the conspirators would say. And he'd be right. The argument itself can't be broken. In order to get anywhere to maniac, you have to break open his little world.
Now, for the maniac who relies solely on the reason, you have to break open his reality of essence and existence only. You have to get him to see the act of existence, the Tao. You need to get him on the reality spectrum. But you can't use reason to do it.
Something else is needed. It's sometimes humor. When you juxtapose something next to the maniac's tilted reality that he didn't expect, he might laugh and inadvertently let in more reality. But sometimes something harsher is needed, a jolt of sorts, and maybe in your death experience, maybe the birth of a child.
Or maybe someone wise just telling him he's full of bullshit and kicking a rock at him.