I suppose that I like others have been under the false impression that Bishop George Berkeley, English philosopher, thought that all was thought, that perception made reality. I suppose, also, that I like others have a problem understanding what today’s physicist might mean by wave and particle duality, that light, for example, or an electron, appears as a particle when we test for particularity and as wave when we test for wave, both photon and electron appearing to be what we want them to be. But Berkeley did say, “The horse is in the stable,” and physicists do say that photon and electron simply have a particle-wave duality. Both horse and subatomic entities are real and independent of the human mind. Life and the world around us do exist outside our perceptions. The real world is, in fact, real and not a figment.
But I like others wonder whether or not we aren’t at times characters in pure fictions. I wonder whether or not we don’t live allegorical lives like some Swiftian or Dantean character suffused in a pool of irony, our world either a world of Gulliver, where things like little relatively imperfect Lilliputians only appear to be perfect and big relatively perfect Brobdingnagians only appear to be imperfect, or a world like the Hell or Purgatory through which Virgil leads us, where the evil, sinful, and the indifferent make up the populations we encounter.
Fiction, specifically as allegory and irony, is what I perceive to be our circumstance in the world of politics and media through which some “Virgil” guides us. I know this is round-about for your mind at this point, but let me add some context that should bring your thoughts together. In Dark Conceit: the Making of Allegory, Edwin Honig writes that in reading works like those of Swift, Dante, and others who write allegories, ironies, and satires, “We suspend belief in witnessing another world bound by its own necessities, and layered with the purpose, irony, paradox, wisdom, justice, and truth which the fictions realized” (171). *
Now for some necessary definitions as Honig explains: “An allegory starts from the writer’s need to create a specific world of fictional reality…he ordains the reality by designating it according to its function…Each allegory starts with a tabula rasa assumption, as though the world in its view were being made for the first time” (113). Honig says that this allegorical world differs from “the world as-is,” that reality that most of us, including the Reverend Bishop Berkeley, know exists outside our minds, the world in which a real horse is in a real stable.
And irony? Honig says, “Irony is felt immediately through the rapid conversions and the startling juxtapositions of dissimilars…It first proposes a basic congruence between two things which have a patent incongruence underlying them. Then it presents for consideration certain instances of this incongruence…In effect, then, the absurd possibility of similarity, or even of equivalent and interchangeable identities, is momentarily taken as a serious fact. Irony pretends in this way to confirm a union of opposites…irony is the …mode of the satirist hunting down the disparities which are understood to exist between man’s moral and physical natures, between all sanguine expressions of hope in social ideals and in the benevolent intentions and the unregenerate condition of human actuality” (130).
Are you seeing the relevance to your world in this summer of 2021? There is, regardless of what politicians and utopian idealists tell us, a real horse in a stable. It does not exist because we say it exists. There is a reality outside perception, and in Afghanistan in August, 2021, that reality plays out in the desperation of a people fearing for their freedom and safety. It’s as though the politicians are writing the incongruence and acting it out, the incongruence lying between the fictional world they proclaim and the real world “as is.”
When the leader of the free world proclaims in an interview and in press conferences that the chaos in Afghanistan was inevitable, he speaks a perception of his own making. He sees no alternatives beyond his own allegorical and ironic composition, and even if he sees alternatives, he determines they are equivalent. Could a different story have been written? Is the obvious not obvious, and is it not that which is evident to many the reason for the irony played out on the world stage in August, 2021? Is it not obvious that those who faced the dangers of August could have been evacuated before the withdrawal of soldiers? Is it not obvious that the military did not have to abandon an impenetrable military air base called Bagram (and its weapons) so that evacuees might have an alternative point of departure?
We live in a world of allegory and irony, apparently, a world of perceptions in which the “ideal world” is conjoined to the “real world” in the minds of academicians and politicians more concerned about writing their legacies in fictions of their own making than in assessing realities. And as they write, real people suffer, very “real” people, the horses that really exist in the stable. The same can be said for those who seek to make the free world a socialist world, aiming to do so either in their ignorance of the 162 million people murdered in democides by socialist governments in the twentieth century or in spite of those murders.
Ironic, isn’t it? Those who proclaim a championship for women’s rights have acted to enslave women under a repressive Taliban regime. This who proclaim freedom have acted to censor speech. Those who proclaim help for the poor have acted to impoverish many by closing businesses.
Is this a Dantean world of allegory and irony? Are we all following Virgil as he leads us on a tour of a Hell in which perception has become reality?
*Honig, Edwin. 1966. New York. Oxford University Press. Copyright by Honig in 1959.
But I like others wonder whether or not we aren’t at times characters in pure fictions. I wonder whether or not we don’t live allegorical lives like some Swiftian or Dantean character suffused in a pool of irony, our world either a world of Gulliver, where things like little relatively imperfect Lilliputians only appear to be perfect and big relatively perfect Brobdingnagians only appear to be imperfect, or a world like the Hell or Purgatory through which Virgil leads us, where the evil, sinful, and the indifferent make up the populations we encounter.
Fiction, specifically as allegory and irony, is what I perceive to be our circumstance in the world of politics and media through which some “Virgil” guides us. I know this is round-about for your mind at this point, but let me add some context that should bring your thoughts together. In Dark Conceit: the Making of Allegory, Edwin Honig writes that in reading works like those of Swift, Dante, and others who write allegories, ironies, and satires, “We suspend belief in witnessing another world bound by its own necessities, and layered with the purpose, irony, paradox, wisdom, justice, and truth which the fictions realized” (171). *
Now for some necessary definitions as Honig explains: “An allegory starts from the writer’s need to create a specific world of fictional reality…he ordains the reality by designating it according to its function…Each allegory starts with a tabula rasa assumption, as though the world in its view were being made for the first time” (113). Honig says that this allegorical world differs from “the world as-is,” that reality that most of us, including the Reverend Bishop Berkeley, know exists outside our minds, the world in which a real horse is in a real stable.
And irony? Honig says, “Irony is felt immediately through the rapid conversions and the startling juxtapositions of dissimilars…It first proposes a basic congruence between two things which have a patent incongruence underlying them. Then it presents for consideration certain instances of this incongruence…In effect, then, the absurd possibility of similarity, or even of equivalent and interchangeable identities, is momentarily taken as a serious fact. Irony pretends in this way to confirm a union of opposites…irony is the …mode of the satirist hunting down the disparities which are understood to exist between man’s moral and physical natures, between all sanguine expressions of hope in social ideals and in the benevolent intentions and the unregenerate condition of human actuality” (130).
Are you seeing the relevance to your world in this summer of 2021? There is, regardless of what politicians and utopian idealists tell us, a real horse in a stable. It does not exist because we say it exists. There is a reality outside perception, and in Afghanistan in August, 2021, that reality plays out in the desperation of a people fearing for their freedom and safety. It’s as though the politicians are writing the incongruence and acting it out, the incongruence lying between the fictional world they proclaim and the real world “as is.”
When the leader of the free world proclaims in an interview and in press conferences that the chaos in Afghanistan was inevitable, he speaks a perception of his own making. He sees no alternatives beyond his own allegorical and ironic composition, and even if he sees alternatives, he determines they are equivalent. Could a different story have been written? Is the obvious not obvious, and is it not that which is evident to many the reason for the irony played out on the world stage in August, 2021? Is it not obvious that those who faced the dangers of August could have been evacuated before the withdrawal of soldiers? Is it not obvious that the military did not have to abandon an impenetrable military air base called Bagram (and its weapons) so that evacuees might have an alternative point of departure?
We live in a world of allegory and irony, apparently, a world of perceptions in which the “ideal world” is conjoined to the “real world” in the minds of academicians and politicians more concerned about writing their legacies in fictions of their own making than in assessing realities. And as they write, real people suffer, very “real” people, the horses that really exist in the stable. The same can be said for those who seek to make the free world a socialist world, aiming to do so either in their ignorance of the 162 million people murdered in democides by socialist governments in the twentieth century or in spite of those murders.
Ironic, isn’t it? Those who proclaim a championship for women’s rights have acted to enslave women under a repressive Taliban regime. This who proclaim freedom have acted to censor speech. Those who proclaim help for the poor have acted to impoverish many by closing businesses.
Is this a Dantean world of allegory and irony? Are we all following Virgil as he leads us on a tour of a Hell in which perception has become reality?
*Honig, Edwin. 1966. New York. Oxford University Press. Copyright by Honig in 1959.
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