Chapter 3

The starting-point

I am now going to assume that there are those who are not totally brainwashed by this mindlessness and are willing to look at things seriously, and don't want to hold views that are their own opposites. I think we arrived at this despair by trying to get at the truth and failing; I think I see how we arrived where we are, and I think I can see a way to get from here to the truth again. We can know what the facts really are; and quite a few of them, if we're careful.

And once this view of mine becomes widespread, the hope is that sanity will drive out the intellectual degeneracy of our present skeptical relativism.

But then where do we start? This is, of course, the perennial problem of a philosopher; and in a sense, no matter where you start, you should have started somewhere else. I think that in the present age, given what I've said, we have to start with knowledge, because even if knowledge is meaningless without its being knowledge of some reality (which I don't happen to think is always the case), still, because of the history of philosophy ever since Descartes, it is not enough to assert this; one must now make a case for it.

But of course, you can't start there, because before starting with knowledge, you have to have some method as to how to proceed; phenomenology of either Kant's or Hegel's or Husserl's variety seems to have been found wanting, however brilliant; because none, I think, can account for how we make such a clear distinction between our dream world (which we think isn't real) and our waking world (which we think is); logically, for them, both would have to be equivalent.

The fear is that if you start from knowledge, you're stuck there, and can never get outside your mind. But I think that this fear is groundless, because in point of fact, in our early childish lives we are starting from knowledge, and learn by the time we are five that esse is precisely not percipi, when Mother tells us that there really isn't a lion at the foot of the bed, ready to bite our feet off when we stretch them out.

So the "somewhere else" I think we have to start is to look seriously at the skepticism and relativism of our age; but not simply describe it, as I was doing, but see what we can do with it. Not critique it, exactly, but think it through.

Of course, we can deal rather easily with the silly version of this which actually thinks it knows that nobody can really know anything, or actually thinks it is objectively true that nothing is objectively true: where skepticism or relativism are held as positive positions. The refutation is simply the position itself, which is in the first case unknown if it is known, and in the second is untrue if it is true.

But this refutation is too simple; there are those who honestly don't know whether anything could ever be known for certain, but are willing to be shown. These are the minds that haven't yet been killed by the poison of the "wisdom" of the age. This book is an attempt to reach them.

It will be rough going, from beginning to end, make no mistake about it. But what will emerge from this investigation into what we can be certain of is a different way of looking at causality, which will allow us to get out of our minds without actually ever leaving them (which is what is behind our present quandary), and will provide us with a method that can give us some confidence that we are actually finding out what the facts are. Once we do this, we will be able, I think, to approach reality through knowledge; and many of the important discoveries of the earlier centuries will turn out to have been basically true.