Tom Stoppard: A Life

by Hermione Lee

This is the dilemma. If all statements are either interim judgements, or tautologies, or intuitive assertions, or propositions awaiting their contradiction, then the man who waits to act from certainty will never act at all. Yet he does act, we all act, we have to act…We have to act on intuitive assumptions, an instinctive sense that one course of action is better than another, that one value judgement is nearer the truth than its opposite. The quest for certainty has to stop. And what is left when we try to justify our choices is an appeal to a set of standards which can never be authenticated by an appeal to logic—or the wisdom of sages. Just getting through one day from breakfast to dinner, we’re all the time making value judgements which can only appeal to a sanction which we might call metaphysical, or spiritual, or mystical, or religious. Maybe [they’re] all the same thing. That’s the one thing I’m prepared to say that I know.