Westerners in Wonderland and the Death of Reality
“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?” said Lewis Carroll in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass (Alice). A world of one’s own — such a thing can sound very appealing. No more dealing with uncomfortable or inconvenient truths, such as that love and money aren’t always returned, hatred and heartache often are, and busting budgets really does lead to bankruptcy.
And there are creatures who do have a world of their own, at least in a metaphorical sense — they’re called infants. Most developmental psychologists agree that babies are solipsistic, which, psychologist Dr. John R. Morss tells us (quoting famed child psychologist Jean Piaget), refers to “a state in which the subject treats the world as an extension of itself. For Piaget, ‘the baby experiences the universe as himself.’ … Thinking in the infant ‘resembles sort of a perpetual waking dream.’” Young children have other reality-perception deficiencies, too, such as the inability to grasp that volume doesn’t change just because shape does (as when water is poured from a short, wide glass into a tall, thin one). But as the child develops cognitively and gains experience with the world, he learns more about reality — he gets in closer touch with it. This includes the realization that there is much beyond the self and the rejection of solipsism.
But cognitive development is no guarantee that people will accept all that cognition can apprehend. After all, the concept of solipsism itself wasn’t developed by a child psychologist to explain children, but by Greek pre-Socratic sophist Gorgias (c. 483-375 B.C.) to perhaps confuse adults. Serving in that capacity, it has a lot of help from fellow “isms,” such as nihilism, nominalism, idealism, existentialism — and especially today’s popular delusion, relativism. And all these half-baked infantile philosophies have one thing in common: a denial of some aspect of reality. This fatal flaw running through all modern philosophy is why G.K. Chesterton wrote in his 1933 book St. Thomas Aquinas:
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