The version of reality a man adopts will depend largely on his values. - R. W. K. Paterson

There are two kinds of danger awaiting the individual who stakes his life on the conviction that the symbols of romance and grandeur which summon him express ultimate realities wherein he can truly find himself. It may be that our dreams are no more than the pathetic illusions of creatures who are driven by various biological, psychological, and social causes to deceive themselves about their actual status in the scheme of things, and therefore that the patrician’s commitments to ideals of glory and majesty are no better than empty posturings. He may be relinquishing this world’s goals for pathways which lead nowhere. Yet even if this were so, he could still give the reply made by Pascal in recommending his Wager: ‘if you lose, you lose nothing’; for the patrician has already judged that worldly pleasure and profit, if devoid of all higher significance, are not worth having.

On the one hand, the existentialist seeks to remain true to his original vision of the meaninglessness and futility of everything, since this fundamental cosmic honesty must be the basis of any attempt to live authentically; on the other hand, his stark personal reality is that he finds himself unable to appropriate the truth of nihilism existentially, unable to affirm it as his personal truth, the truth within which he will henceforth live: and it is at this point that he clutches at the artifice of commitment, hoping to save himself from nihilistic despair by a desperate leap towards a faith that will restore purpose and meaning to his shattered world.

When those around us perceive the world as if it were a narrow and humdrum shopping precinct, in which the best life possible consists in avoiding all risk and striking bargain after bargain in order to multiply and spin out a succession of manageable pleasures, all else being folly, we can easily come to doubt any version of reality in which there is space for grandeur.