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 judged not only by its origin but also by its fruits. A lot of saints and mystics experienced delusions frequently. They were probably seen by their contemporaries as lunatics or eccentrics though history made them great because their delusions brought more compassion, courage, or integrity to the world – what James called “fruits.”

The protagonist of Unmadham is a person who has the courage to tell the court that he got the evidence for the crime from the ghost (spirit) of the murdered victim. No court will accept such evidence. On the contrary, the protagonist loses his job as police constable and is ordered to be sent for mental checkup.

But his visions and the revelations given by the ghost turn out to be true.

The movie didn’t make much at the box office. I don’t think that’s because of the limitations of the plot alone. People’s unawareness of cognitive psychology may be a bigger reason. The sarcastic remarks I heard in the washroom of the multiplex after the movie was over convinced me of that. That’s why I decided to write this post.

Religion, faith, delusions of mystics and saints, and such things have been haunting my mind in the last year because I retired from teaching and had plenty of time to think about anything, and religion took priority because of what’s happening in my country these days. That’s how I came to write the book, The Simplest Guide to Religion. [I have now embarked upon a more ambitious project on ‘why people believe at all.’]

Religion has a different way of understanding reality. It is another way of perception. And a very valid one too. That’s what Shaw’s Joan and James’s saints all teach us. Even Unmadham, which has nothing to do with religion, teaches a similar lesson: that a delusion can be an unconventional mode of perception and can lead to the discovery of truth.

Delusions can be heuristics, to use a favourite word of one of my philosopher-friends. They can help us reorganise perception, prompting us to ask questions or notice connections that eventually lead us to truths we would otherwise have missed.