Page 34 - GALIET THE HEROIC SPECTACLE OF MORALS: Hume IV

Galiet & Galiet
Ì Doubt.
Did civilization distort and fragment being’s mirror to the point of extinction, while in this Daedelian labyrinth of ours, that there is no longer a golden chord, no Ariadne, no waxed wings, no airplane that can rescue us? No Platonic sphere or Dantesque mirror or saintly notion of love? Was it necessary to stab metaphysics to death? What if we are really dwelling in Plato’s cavern so swamped with images that we cannot see the light? Was he right? This is the crucial question. On it depends my life, your life. O Hamlet! Don’t our lives go beyond to be or not to be, to die or to sleep?
O Life! O Life! What are thou but a dream!112
“For in that sleep of death, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, what dreams may come must make us pause!113
Dreams, they say? Of beauty? Of another reality?
Isn’t this what Plato, forever, contemplates and so dearly and logically defends?
Perhaps we are too over-schooled in the art of doubt.
Doubt! O Doubt! To not want to err, but to err! O how not to err!
What do you think? If we cannot trust Plato, shall we then trust Pascal’s wager?
Ah! The Existence of God, yes, that is the most important philosophical dilemma. But who does the dishes as Parra said?
What is it? This life of ours? Is it utility, approbation? Or Sisyphus? Or God? Is man the measure of all things, Protagoras? Is he?
I think he is.
But my intuition says no. Man cannot everything!
Where did your sudden ‘no’ impulse come from? From God? Telepathy? Practical wisdom? Fear?
112 De la Barca, Calderon. La Vida es un Sueño. Mexico: Editorial Porrúa, S.A., 1990.
113 Hamlet’s famous soliloquoy. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
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