Delusion and Truth
Still from Unmadham “The test of sanity is not the normality of the method but the reasonableness of the discovery,” Bernard Shaw wrote in his Preface to his play Saint Joan . “If Newton’s imagination had been of the same vividly dramatic kind (as Joan’s) he might have seen the ghost of Pythagoras walk into the orchard and explain why the apples were falling.” I was reminded of Shaw and his Joan while I was watching a Malayalam movie, Unmadham [Delusion] yesterday. The movie isn’t particularly impressive because the plot is quite amateurish. But the question it raises: whether a person’s delusions can have any epistemic value is of immense importance to me. Can a delusion lead one towards a truth others fail to perceive? The movie says yes. Shaw would instantly agree; his Joan is an example. Philosopher-psychologist William James would doubly agree. He argued in his classical work, The Varieties of Religious Experience , that the value of a religious experience should be ju...
