The Impossibility of Truth and the Freedom Associated With This
The Impossibility of Truth and the Freedom Associated With This
To talk about the impossibility of an idea, we must first describe the idea. This sounds like an obvious and easy task but it is anything but straightforward. We treat the concept of Truth as such an intuitive idea that we seldom question its relevance as a category of demonstration of concept or as “proof,” within our language. We take truth to be self-evident and unquestionable. We “know” things and nobody can tell us otherwise. It is this certainty that makes it difficult to dissect the concept. Let us first look at the different facets of truth which have been described.
The most intuitive theory of truth is the theory of Correspondence, which states simply that facts or assertions must correspond to objects or events. It is the most obvious form of truth available to us. I can say: “you are currently reading words” and you can agree to the truth of such a statement. This is generally where we stop questioning and take the a fact as a ‘truth,’ but the statement is actually more complex than it appears. We can easily question its validity by asking about each particular point within the assumption: What is “currently”? What is “you”? Here we can rely on Heidegger’s description of Being [1]. If we take Being to be Heidegger’s Dasein [2] as a “Being concerned with the being of its Being”, then we know that this experience can only unfold through the passage of time. It seems like a self-evident truth. But what if we ask a question that goes one step further? What if the tools that Heidegger is using to construct his idea “...the Being of Dasein finds its meaning in temporality” [3] are limited? What if, due to his context, he is limited in the conception of the idea of Being? What if language is limiting the scope of our study? Western languages have a tendency to circularity when it comes to describing the concept of being. Being cannot be described without using itself as a starting point for the explanation: “I am...”. This, as Heidegger puts it, places “Being” as the ontological foundation for every other idea; he says “Being is not a genus. The “universality” of Being “surpasses” the universality of genus” [4]. Is our focus limited by our linguistic context? Is ‘being’ really a universal ontological foundation or is it only a contextual ontological foundation?
Heidegger elaborated these ideas further in “The Essence of Truth:
“A statement is true if what it means and says is in accordance with the matter about which the statement is made... The true, whether it be a matter or a proposition, is what accords...” [5]. This is clearly a proposition of correspondence as truth and thus limits our scope of the questioning of the existence of an ultimate truth. There can be no ultimate truth if looked for through correspondence because the scope of correspondence is too narrow and doesn’t allow for counterintuitive conceptions within science.
The second theory of truth that has been proposed is the Coherence theory of truth. Harold Henry Joachim posited that “...”conceivability means for us systematic coherence...”. [6] That is, a concept will be taken as ’truth’ as long as it is logically consistent within a specific framework of ideas. As long as (A) is true, we can attach a secondary proposition (B) to it, no matter how preposterous, and the whole statement will remain as true, eg: “My name is Erick, or I’m a monkey’s tail”. This is obviously a humorous way of expressing the idea but it drives the point home. My name is Erick, although I am not a monkey’s tail. It is an interesting approach to truth because it exposes the flaws in the idea of an ultimate truth. So, perhaps, the ultimate truth is the impossibility of truth itself. It shows an attempt at a cohesive presentation of truth as definite, and definable, as long as it remains logically functional within a set of parameters. In other words, as long as our scope is limited enough, we can attach some modicum of ‘truth’ to a statement made within a very specific set of controlled parameters.
We can see now that truth isn’t as obvious as it may sometimes seem. Although this theory is useful as an illustrative concept, Gettier showed how this model of truth can lead to faulty conclusions under specific circumstances. We can find faulty assumptions in all theories of truth, and doing so allows us to home in on a concept of “truth” by identifying what it is not and thus bringing us closer by degrees to a functional thesis about what truth means— or doesn’t mean.
A third theory is the Pragmatic theory: “The true”, to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as “the right” is only the expedient in the way of our behaving... The “absolutely” true, meaning what no farther experience will ever alter, is that ideal vanishing-point towards which we imagine that all our temporary truths will someday converge.” [7] William James used this beautiful idea to describe the elusive nature of truth. Here we are presented with a more relativistic approach to Truth. We can take the example of Einstein’s theory of relativity to illustrate this proposition: If we are traveling on a train at the speed of light and we, standing at the very rear of the train, look out the back window and turn on a flash light at the very moment that we rush past a bystander who is static, will the light from our flash light travel away from us at double the speed of light and at the speed of light for the static bystander? The answer is: the light will travel at the speed of light for everybody relative to their position. Meaning that, relative to us, the speed of the light coming out of the flashlight and the speed of the train would both be limited to the speed of light, from both motions combined, and the bystander would not notice any difference in the speed of the light leaving the flashlight because, relative to them, light would travel at its normal speed. This example demonstrates how what we used to take as self-evident is not so. Truth can vary greatly depending on the problem we are looking to study and will be anything but self-evident and obvious. Russel criticizes this theory because, according to him, you should be able to differentiate between falsehood and truth in any adequate theory of truth: “When we say that a belief is true the thought we wish to convey is not the same thought as when we say that the belief furthers our purposes; thus “true” does not mean “furthering our purposes” in the sense in which “pluie” means rain. Thus pragmatism does not answer the question: What is in our minds when we judge that a certain belief is true?” [8]. The way Russell presents relativism of Truth in this excerpt is more closely linked to a relativism within theory of mind, where a specific truth may not be consistent from one person to the other, therefore exposing the limitations of truth in the context of pragmatism because there is no real way to reach true consensus. A good question to illustrate this point would be: How can I know that what I perceive as magenta is the same magenta your sensory organs make your brain perceive?
Another interesting proposition about truth is the Deflationary theory which states that truth is redundant. If we say: “You are reading an essay”, it is the same as saying: “It is true that you are reading an essay”. This is used as ‘proof’ that the very concept of ‘truth’ is redundant where it is possible to assert it. In other words, if we can put into words anything stated simply enough to be called a truth, the need to call it true is eliminated. This is a more sophisticated version of the Correspondence theory of truth. It states ‘truth’ as self-evident and intuitive. Within the Deflationary theory of truth, Performative truth has also been proposed as a way of circumventing redundancy arguments. This theory states that: “Ascribing truth to a proposition is not really characterizing the proposition itself, nor is it saying something redundant. Rather, it is telling us something about the speaker’s intentions. The speaker— through his or her agreeing with it-... is licensing our adoption of (the belief in) the proposition... the idea is that saying of some proposition, P, that it is true is to say in a disguised fashion “I commend P to you”, or “I endorse P”. [9] This seems more of a linguistic circumventing of the issues within Deflationary theory than a solution to the limitations of the propositions of redundancy. It is another dead end in our search for an ultimate truth.
I would consider Mathematical truth and Moral truth as subsets of Coherence theory. They are both true within the given parameters of their own ontology. I would place Mathematical truth closer to an ultimate truth than Moral truth because of the precision mathematical “language” and its proven correspondence to reality, but it cannot be called an absolute truth because of its limitations; e.g., It cannot speak to us of emotions and thus functions chiefly within a subset of parameters in which we use mathematics as proof, such as within physics. I would not even take Moral truth seriously, because it generally comes from systems of social control such as institutionalized religion, so the parameters under which it can successfully operate are entirely dependent on the social and historical context of a given society; that is, the morals of the 21st century would get us killed in the 15th century, or the morals of the USA would get us imprisoned or killed in the UAE.
When speaking about truth, I like to use the metaphor of a flashlight as a representation of our mind and the flashlight beam as our ideas probing the surfaces of reality. Wherever we shine our light is the scope of what we’ll be studying. Our ultimate truth then will be whatever truth is gleaned from this limited set of parameters and it will remain true for us until we shine our flashlight elsewhere and discover other truths. The further away we move, the broader the beam’s coverage but the less detail we can see, until it is too far to illuminate anything specific. The closer we are to the surface, the more detail we will see but we will miss the broader truths. This feels like a functional analogy to how truth is limited to where our attention focuses and what our tools permit us to study, making it subjective. So where does this place ultimate truth and what implications does this have for our concept of Freedom?
Truth is not the ontological foundation we intuitively sense it to be. Rather, it is a conclusion of our testing of ideas and practices. There is no ultimate truth and our compulsive need to categorize our reality as true or untrue doesn’t change the fact that reality is. As individuals, we are left with the existential void that is the logical conclusion from this realization. As Westerners, our extraction of meaning from perception is tinted by the Abrahamic religions and the value systems they have weaved into the fabric of society for millennia. Does this limit our freedom or does it offer a new freedom that sidesteps value judgements established by systems of morality designed to control populations?
We can rely here on Jean-Paul Sartre’s ideas as a pivot into the concept of freedom for man emerging from the impossibility of absolute truth and the idea of absolutism in which God plays a fundamental role. Sartre’s proposition that “existence precedes essence; or... that subjectivity must be our point of departure” [10] echoes Heidegger’s Dasein and the a priori nature of the knowledge of what it means to Be. Reality is subjective and should therefore be studied contextually. “...there is no human nature since there is no God to conceive of it. Man is not only that which he conceives himself to be, but that which he wills himself to be, and since he conceives himself only after he exists, ... man is nothing other than what he makes of himself.” [11] Sartre offers us our first taste of real freedom, which is based on the foundation of a subjective reality, and turns away from the idea of an ultimate truth. This is echoed by Nietzsche when he writes: “God hath died: now do we desire— the Superman to live.“ [12] The “Superman” of which Nietzsche speaks is the same free man to which Sartre alludes: a man free of the moral constraints established by religion. It is through existentialist thought that a new class of freedom emerges. The freedom of the creative life as proposed by Nietzsche. We can find extreme examples of this freedom in the metaphors of certain writers from which one of the great examples is Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”:
“He had not a minute more to lose. He pulled the axe quite out, swung it with both arms, scarcely conscious of himself, and almost without effort, almost mechanically, brought the blunt side down on her head. He seemed not to use his own strength in this. But as soon as he had once brought the axe down, his strength returned... He was in full possession of his faculties, free from confusion or giddiness, but his hands were still trembling. He remembered afterwards that he had been particularly collected and careful, trying not to get smeared with blood...et al” [13]
Raskolnikov’s decision to kill the pawnbroker is his statement about his freedom. Dostoevsky takes this idea, presented by Nietzsche and Sartre, and poses an extreme scenario from which his character is unable to escape. It seems that Raskolnikov misunderstood the concept of the subjectivity of reality and believed that murder was acceptable because he was able to operate outside of the realm of the law. What Dostoevsky subtly introduced is the proposition that our ontological understanding of reality presents its own morality to us from which we cannot escape. He says “when God is dead, everything is permitted.”
Another great example of this existential void and the freedom to which it leads is summarized in Albert Camus’s introductory line to “The Myth of Sisyphus”: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” [14] In this opening line, Camus sets the stage for his idea about the absurdity of reality. He proposes that there are two options for life: suicide or learning to live with this absurdity and, therefore, achieving freedom from the woes of absurd existence. “The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.” [15] Camus writes that “if this myth is tragic, it is only because the hero is conscious”. We are all Sisyphus due to the departure from religious belief and absolute truth. We must face the dreadful prospect of being free without the paternalistic figure of God protecting us and face this reality with the knowledge that this freedom marks the beginning of a new era for humanity, an era free of determinism that is being driven by our technological revolution and the fluidity of information attached to it. As Sartre puts it:
“Man is nothing other than his own project. He exists only to the extent that he realizes himself, therefore he is nothing more than the sum of his actions... responsible for what he is... free... condemned to be free... committing himself to life”
It is with the existentialists that we can have come full circle to the idea of “an impossibility of truth”. Since it is evident that no truth can be wholly objective, we must accept the subjectivity of reality and attempt to come to terms with our being condemned to freedom. Ideally, our species will become one of existential angst and a renewed sense of responsibility stemming from the knowledge that our search for ultimate meaning is meaningless.
1 Heidegger, Martin, Introduction to Being and Time, in Basic Writings, Revised and Expanded Edition, Ten Key Essays, p. 42
2 Heidegger, Martin, Introduction to Being and Time, in Basic Writings, Revised and Expanded Edition, Ten Key Essays, p. 54
3 Heidegger, Martin, Introduction to Being and Time, in Basic Writings, Revised and Expanded Edition, Ten Key Essays, p. 63
4 Heidegger, Martin, Introduction to Being and Time, in Basic Writings, Revised and Expanded Edition, Ten Key Essays, p. 43
5 Heidegger, Martin, The Essence of Truth, in Basic Writings, Revised and Expanded Edition, Ten Key Essays, p. 117
6 Joachim, Harold H., Coherence Theory of Truth, in Reading for Philosophical Inquiry, p 334
7 James, William, Pragmatic Theory of Truth, in Reading for Philosophical Inquiry, p 354
8 Russell, Bertrand, Logical and Philosophical Papers, 1909-13, p. 144
9 Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://iep.utm.edu/truth/#SH7b, Performative Theory
10 Sartre, Jean-Paul, Existentialism Is a Humanism, p. 20
11 Sartre, Jean-Paul, Existentialism Is a Humanism, p. 22
12 Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Higher Man, Thus Spake Zarathustra, p. 320
13 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, Crime and Punishment, p. 71
14 Camus, Albert, The Myth of Sisyphus And Other Essays, no page numbers
15 Camus, Albert, The Myth of Sisyphus And Other Essays, no page numbers 16 Sartre, Jean-Paul, Existentialism is a Humanism, p. 10
References:
Archie, Lee; Archie, John G. Reading for Philosophical Inquiry:
A Brief Introduction to Philosophical Thinking ver. 0.21; Open
Source Reader (2004)Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. New
York: Random House (1955)Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. New York:
Modern Library (1950)Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings, Revised & Expanded
Edition, Ten Key Essays, Plus the Introduction to Being and Time. ed. David Farrell Krell, San Francisco: Harper Collins (1993)Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Thus Spake Zarathustra. New York: Modern Library (1917)
Russell, Bertrand. The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell: Logical and Philosophical Papers. London; Boston: George Allen & Unwin (1983)
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism Is a Humanism. New Haven & London: Yale University Press (2007)
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/truth/ #SH7b, Performative Theory