Consistency and Thought

A friend of mine whom I hold to be rather wise recently posted this on facebook: "it may be much easier and just as fulfilling to live without being necessarily intellectually consistent."

One cannot help but see her point. There afterall does not seem to be any correlation between intellectual consistency and fulfillment or happiness in life. However, I think at the heart of the matter lies the question of whether consistency of thought and coherence in life are important or even possible. I cannot claim any expertise in this area, but I do have some thoughts.

Is it possible to be perfectly intellectually consistent? I highly doubt it. When determining the consistency of certain propositions we employ logic and reason, and they are rather reliable tools. Yet Chesterton was right I think when he said: "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." When we take a step back, we should ask ourselves why reasoning should be accurate? Why should employing good logic yield better results than bad logic? Or why should reality be consistent?

After all as Chesterton pointed out, reason has its limits. Using reasoning, we are only able to determine whether certain bodies of knowledge are logically consistent. Yet ultimately one must make the extrapolation between something being consistent and something being TRUTH. If consistency has no bearing on truth and reality then perhaps consistency might not be neccessary, or might not even exist at all. If one cannot make the link between consistency and truth then how can one be perfectly consistent? Afterall if truth is not consistent then one could almost say that consistency is inconsistent with reality?

I do not pretend to have an answer to this. Yet I do not believe it is possible to live with complete inconsistency. When we exert something like "Nothing is consistent with reality", we must ask ourselves if the statement we made is actually consistent with reality or not. If it is not, then somethings have to be consistent with reality. If it is consistent with reality , then well it becomes self contradictory and invalid. Thus even though the existence of consistency in reality cannot be proven, it does seem to be undeniable as well.

I do not think it is neccessary or even possible to be absolutely intellectually consistent or to even perfectly understand what that means. However, I think every time we assert some view or thought we implicitly acknowledge that some form of consistency must exist. It might not be possible to answer this completely but I think we do live out some form of that answer everyday whether we like it or not. Perhaps thats enough.

In the end no matter how we reason about all this there are certain things we must just accept by faith as absolute truths. Wthout these we lose any right to assert our views at all.

"If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see." - C. S. Lewis in Abolition of Man