It was then that I turned to deeper philosophy for answers to these questions. In the beginning I started like Spinoza, whom I quoted at the start. The world in itself seemed to offer only conflicting notions of truth and meaning, and so like the ancient Greeks of old, I wondered if perhaps the mind could be trained to look beyond what the senses could not and thus find that one eternal, immovable principle. For a while I dabbled with this idea, enthralled by the notion of fulfillment through pure reflection, and I turned to the rationalists for guidance. Ah yes, the rationalists…they were those enlightened philosophers who joyously declared ‘Reason is King!’, and in the process constructed entire systems of thought that seemed to forget that man has both a heart and a mind, and that you can’t satisfy just one at the expense of the other. As Dostoevsky’s Underground Man said it best: “Reason is an excellent thing, but reason only satisfies the rational side of man…” I didn’t need to look much further than Descartes, whose lucid reason stumbled in its ambitious goal once it got past the famous “I think therefore I am”. Furthermore, the more I tried, the more I realized that even the most well crafted system must necessarily rest on basic premises and assumptions. If these were brought into question (after all, “Everything must be doubted” as Descartes had already said), then the whole thing would topple like a tower made of playing cards. What then? When do you draw the line in terms of what you doubt and what you question? If it was true that reason could find that one immovable principle at the bottom of all reality, then no one had even come close to scraping off the top-most layers, simply because reason had never been able to procure an unassailable fundamental principle.
A part of me cheered therefore when I found the works of Soren Kierkegaard and his seminal declaration “Reason is dead“. There was a rebellious streak in me that felt delight in reading this, a defiance of all those systems of thought in which only the pale dim glow of cold reason prevailed. In a way, I drew a subconscious parallel between this situation and the fact that I had reluctantly embarked on an engineering career. Thus I enjoyed this ideological rejection of everything ‘mechanical’ and ‘systematic’. Yes, reason as the sole guiding light was dead, its banner – so enthusiastically raised by the rationalists – had finally been trampled down when it was found that it couldn’t stand to the ultimate test: that of providing genuine fulfillment to a human life. Let’s think about it for a moment and reflect on three aspects that are important to the human condition and experience: beauty, morality, and purpose. Is it at all possible to reduce these three things to their equivalent ‘reason’ principles, purely objective and completely devoid of the subjective human-individual element?
I found that such a degree of detachment from one’s own nature was impossible; it didn’t make sense therefore to claim that reason was boundless in its power and possibilities. At best, I learned from Kierkegaard, that reason could only compare between alternative courses of action, but that was as far as it went. It was up to us to ultimately make the choices based on our own freedom and volition. I finally felt that I had at least achieved an important milestone in my search, and slowly but surely began to pick apart what remained of my world-view and perspective in order to accommodate these ideas. It was as if I had regained the breathing space I badly needed…truth was something to be found not in systems but inside of our own selves, and so I came up with my own way of relating to what I defined as my personal truth. Reason kept its prescribed boundaries, and beside it I reared a space for everything that was transcendental and meaningful to the heart. It was within this realm that I defined my personal conception of God, something which was to be put to the test quite soon enough.
An alternate title for one of Friedrich Nietzsche’s books is ‘How to philosophize with a Hammer’…and man, he wasn’t kidding. Though the core of what he was trying to convey is all about the definitive affirmation of human life, his method was to violently smash the stained glass windows through which the light of all beliefs and morality shone, and with a very heavy iron mallet. The point of the metaphor is not that he sought to smash the light itself, but rather the way we perceived its kaleidoscope of colours reflected upon the floor. Everything that had been valued, every belief that had been espoused, it was all up for grabs. The rationalists had sought that single unifying principle by placing a little too much faith in their reasoning. Nietzsche didn’t bother to do that, in fact his approach was far simpler: there are no truths other than those man invents for himself. In his thought, the very idea of a transcendent reality beyond what can be perceived simply attests to the fact that human beings are in their deepest nature afraid of facing up to the facts. All of this was conveyed with such a forcefulness of style, laden with outlandish fables and fire-brand aphorisms, that reading him left me reeling. It wasn’t that any of his arguments were waterproof (because again, there is no such thing), but they did shine a light on those until then overlooked recesses of the human psyche, and foreshadowed something of the Night that was to come. His works ushered in and influenced the western intellectual environment of the 20th century, and they introduced me to the possibility of an image vaguely mirrored in the restless waters of western thought, that of an Earth “unchained from its sun“, the appalling anxiety of finding oneself lost and without a reference, confronted only by “the cold breath of empty space“.
