Mundus est fabula

The world is a fable

‘Mundus est fabula’, we read on a book held by Descartes in a painting by J.B. Weenix. Mundus est fabula, “the world is a fable”. 

Indeed, who could doubt that the world is a fable? Who could doubt that the reality you inhabit is the product of the stories you tell yourself, and the stories that you have been told.  What is real is what is given, what is created is fiction. The world is not given, it is created. The world is a fable.

What is real is what is indubitable, and what is fiction is what is not real. It is possible to doubt the world. The world is a fable. 

The space within which worlds are created, this too is a fable.

Take away everything of which you are uncertain, and what remains is no world. 

‘Mundus est fabula’

Fabula’, a story, a fable, rooted in a more ancient word that means ‘to speak’. What is spoken of is the world, and all speech is a story. To speak is to perpetuate the fable. To speak, is to play your part in the deception. 

Descartes, the first modern philosopher who put the world between brackets. Who doubted everything. And what remained was I. 

Having traversed it, Descartes was able to see through the fable, to see through the illusion. He devoted himself to ‘reading the great book of nature’, and he realised it was only a book, written by I. 

All that is fake, is created by something real. All tales, are told by real people. All plays, are played by real people. 

This makes Descartes the first phenomenologist, the first to doubt the tale of the world, and the first to find the certainty of life. 

Yet in seeing the world as a fable, Descartes played his part in creating the fable we live today. The matrix we live now, where irreplicable scientific studies, models, maps, or fables as Descartes would call them, determine the real lives of real living beings. 

No story can be told twice, without becoming something else entirely.

Where bureaucracy, the ‘illusion of the state’, stifles the life out of communities. The illusion meant to safeguard the living from illusion. Except it doesn’t work that way. 

Stories have no reality, and precisely this gives them their value for reality. As maps, fables, to guide ourselves through existence with certainty and confidence. 

Armed with fictions, we can face reality with more certainty. 

Yet Descartes was not the first to see. The idea that the world is a fable or an illusion is as old as thought itself. Did Heraclitus or Parmenides think anything else? Yet we do not hold Heraclitus or Parmenides accountable for creating the fable we live today. We do point to Descartes. 

All is a fable, so why not create a better one. So Descartes thought. All is a story, so why not live my own story. All is a fable, so why participate in the play written by someone else? 

We are unconscious of the fact that we are being played, deceived into playing a game which we did not choose. And once having realized it is a game, nothing rests but creating a play for ourselves. This was Descartes’ achievement, the philosopher of the will to power. 

The world is a play. The only question is whose play. 

And now, we are playing Descartes’ play. A story in which humans act as robots, in which the fable of the world is held together only by the repeated act of playing it. A continuous creation, which would shatter the moment the power goes out. 

A world dominated by models, yet knowing little reality. A world of little certainty, yet infinite possibility. In Descartes’ world I was certain. In ours, the ‘I’ too has become a fable.

The father of modernity held with him the keys to break through it. He opened the door to the creation of our matrix,  and as such, he holds the keys to close it. 

“A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard.”

(Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) 

This is all it takes. A single surge of electricity, this is all it takes to disturb the simulation. 

Meditate on what it means to be a thinking thing, and you will realize what God is. Meditate on what it means to think, and you will see what it means to be God. So says Descartes. 

Meditate on what thought is, and you will realize that it is creation. The only true creation, perhaps. 

“‘Everything is true,' he said. 'Everything anybody has ever thought.’”

(Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)