Believe It Or Not

No, this is not a discussion on the work of Robert Ripley, but rather an examination of a philosophical  phrase that startled me, as did the identity of the author. Now where philosophy is concerned, I tend to the classics, drawing on such works as Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, Plato's Republic, or even The Biblical Ten Commandments, which all by themselves outline an ethical path. (the rest is commentary).

The phrase in question? "Seeing is believing puts the horse before the cart."* The author? Stephen King, of all people, he who writes all that hairy stuff about worlds that lie just beyond our present veil of existence. Great for escapism, and therefore I was surprised to be confronted with a truth that has nothing to do with fantasy but everything to do with day-to-day reality.

Certainly King would not leap to the mind as a deep-thinking philosopher, or at least not to my mind. Yet his horse-cart analogy bears some looking into.

The argument here is the proposition that what we see is determined by what we believe. In classical times, belief held that the world was flat, and  maps from that era indicate this, along with fuzzy edges that are highlighted by the phrase "Here Be Dragons." Yes, Thales of Miletus sometime around 620 BCE predicted an eclipse, but then, there have always been outliers, who had a different belief than the belief currently in vogue. Think Galileo. Think Copernicus. Think Einstein. Think Heisenberg. Or Rachel Carson and her Silent Spring. (I was determined to get a woman 'outlier' in there somewhere). All these departed from the prevailing belief and hence put forward another way to view the world and, indeed, the cosmos.

Thus it does no harm, before putting forward a point of view, to seek out the underlying belief that structures that point of view. Much of organized religion falls under such a rubric, and a great deal of nationalism, the twin causes of reprehensible actions that are all too evident in today's world. The belief that a certain way of viewing the world is the ONLY way to view the world is horribly counter-productive, particularly when that belief is juiced up to allow for killing anyone that does not succumb to that belief. All of which would indicate that the belief in question deserves a close, very close, examination, and if the belief is found wanting, alter it to one that allows for progression rather than stasis. So William Blake: "The cut worm forgives the plow."

Ample food for thought here.

* Stephen King, Duma Key, 'How to Draw a Picture' (VII)