ESSAY
LIFE IS ILLUSION AND DREAM
Right: George
Berkeley.
Berkeley doubted even of the material world.
To him, everything was but an illusion.
Georges Berkeley in the eighteenth century, doubted even of the
material world. To him the physical world – mountains, houses,
people – didn’t exist. They were illusions, ideas. To Berkeley,
only ideas existed.
This is an
extreme conception, rather marginal, which contradicts much
evidence; it is a conception that has aroused repulsive and
vigorous reactions.
Samuel Johnson, a famous writer and
contemporary of Berkeley, reacted to the other thesis saying:
«I can easily refute him!» And he kicked a stone, which made him
limp.
Incomparably more
consensual is the idea that we are predisposed to live in
illusion, in fantasy, in dream. That is a way of escaping from
the hostile reality, from life’s cruelty, from the threat of
death, from the uninteresting.
Full lucidity is
intermittent, we only get it from time to time. Our knowledge,
and its truth, is very limited. This is an ancient idea. Four
hundred years before Christ,
Demosthenes considered that
«nothing is easier than auto-illusion: all man wishes to be true
all in which he believes».
But there are
other opinions still more radical: «Men have always fought
reality with all their strength », said Jean Servier. And Edgar
Morin, in the same line: «The illusion crosses all history, all
the societies, all the individuals, and all the spirits, as soon
as they get out of a disillusion, are ready to fall into another
one.»
In short: to
these authors, man lives in a world of myths, of fantasies, far
way from reality. This is a way of getting existential comfort,
and is a biased form of giving meaning to man’s lives.
On the same line,
Sigmund Freud
said we should thank the illusions. And accept them
without complaining. If eventually they collide with reality and
break into pieces, they are, after all, a way of giving meaning
to life.
Anyway, even
accepting the relevance of illusion and dream in our lives, it’s
still true that conscience has a place in our existence. Our
thoughts about the illusion and the dreams in which we live, are
a proof of that «wavering small flame», that Edgar Morin speaks
of.
When the Bible,
in the
Ecclesiastes, asserts over and over that «all is vanity
and striving after wind», behind that allusion to a certain type
of illusion – the existential illusion, connected to the many of
our daily wills which are condemned to end up in smoke – is the
fact that we are conscious of this: the conscience of illusion
and, so, the denial of that same illusion.
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See also:
Life is dream quotes
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