The Suicide of Thought

G.K. Chesterton

From: Orthodoxy

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Editor’s note: Chesterton’s insights are as applicable and instructive today as they were a century ago. In this excerpt from Orthodoxy, he masterfully shows that the shift from a Christian worldview to a relativistic, postmodern worldview (“A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed”) leads ultimately to the denial that anything is really knowable and, further, that life has any real purpose. This is why he can make the profound and arresting claim that “There is a thought that stops thought (and) that is the only thought that ought to be stopped.” Today, as then, if this relativistic dogma that truth is unknowable is not “stopped,” we are left with alienation from God and a meaningless existence.

[W]hat we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition.  Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed.  Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert—himself.  The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt—the Divine Reason.  Huxley preached a humility content to learn from Nature.  But the new sceptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn.  Thus we should be wrong if we had said hastily that there is no humility typical of our time.

The truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic.  The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on.  For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.

At any street corner we may meet a man who utters the frantic and blasphemous statement that he may be wrong.  Every day one comes across somebody who says that of course his view may not be the right one.  Of course his view must be the right one, or it is not his view.  We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.

We are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own.  Scoffers of old time were too proud to be convinced; but these are too humble to be convinced. The meek do inherit the earth; but the modern sceptics are too meek even to claim their inheritance…

[The] peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought.

It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith.  It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.  If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, "Why should ANYTHING go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?" The young sceptic says, "I have a right to think for myself." But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, "I have no right to think for myself.  I have no right to think at all."

There is a thought that stops thought.  That is the only thought that ought to be stopped…

To sum up our contention so far, we may say that the most characteristic current philosophies have not only a touch of mania, but a touch of suicidal mania…What we are looking at is not the boyhood of free thought; it is the old age and ultimate dissolution of free thought.  It is vain for bishops and pious bigwigs to discuss what dreadful things will happen if wild scepticism runs its course.  It has run its course. It is vain for eloquent atheists to talk of the great truths that will be revealed if once we see free thought begin.  We have seen it end.  It has no more questions to ask; it has questioned itself.

You cannot call up any wilder vision than a city in which men ask themselves if they have any selves.  You cannot fancy a more sceptical world than that in which men doubt if there is a world.

…Free thought has exhausted its own freedom. It is weary of its own success.  If any eager freethinker now hails philosophic freedom as the dawn, he is only like the man in Mark Twain who came out wrapped in blankets to see the sun rise and was just in time to see it set. 

Taken from Orthodoxy, chapter 3 by G.K. Chesterton (1908). Rights: public domain.