What of other lies - lies which did not necessarily make us act to our disadvantage, nor took anything from us, but which just misled us? Why should we be hurt by them?
It is all because of trust, she decided. We trusted others to tell us the truth and were let down by their failure to do so. We were hoodwinked, shown to be credulous, which is all about loss of face. And then she decided that it was nothing to do with trust, or pride. It was something to do with the moral value of things as they really were. Truth was built into the world; it informed the laws of physics; truth was the world. And if we lied about something, we disrupted, destabilized that essential truth; a lie was wrong simply because it was that which was not. A lie was contra naturam. Truth was beauty, beauty truth. But was Keats right about that? If truth and beauty were one and the same thing, then why have two differnet terms to describe it? Ideas expressed in poetry could be beguiling, but philosophically misleading, even vacuous, like the rhetoric of politicans who uttered the most beautiful-sounding platitudes about scraps of dreams, scraps of ideas.
Alexander McCall Smith in full philosophical flight - while wearing Isabel Dalhousie's contact lenses - in chapter 11 of The Comfort of Saturdays.
Showing posts with label dalhousie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dalhousie. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Alexander McCall Smith I
What if we really did kill God, what then? Would we all be rationally committed to the greater good, or would savagery be the norm? To kill God: the idea was absurd. If God existed, then he should be above being killed, by definition. But if he was just something in which we believed, or hoped, perhaps, killing him may be an act of cruelty that would rebound upon us; like telling small children that fairies were impossible, that Jack never had a beanstalk; or telling a teenager love was an illusion, a chemical response to a chemical situation. There were things, she thought, which were probably true, but which we simply should not always acknowledge as true: novels, for example - always false, elaborately constructed deceptions, but we believed them to be true while we were reading them; we had to, as otherwise there was no point. One would read, and all the time as one read, one would say, mentally, He didn't really.
Isabel Dalhousie muses, in her charming philosophical way, in Alexander McCall Smith's latest book in the Dalhousie series: The Comfort of Saturdays.
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