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On truth
Posted by diogenes on 2025-September-16 18:30:58, TuesdayIn reply to Re: Sorry posted by Pharmakon on 2025-September-14 06:41:13, Sunday
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Very quick reply, and sorry about the delay. Nietzsche... well, what can one say? Nietzsche is endlessly fascinating, but his anticipation of postmodern idioms is not something that I regard as his most commendable moment. “Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions”. Of course, the very notion of “illusion” presupposes a reality with which the illusion is contrasted. And Nietzsche certainly believed, at least in his later work, that he had found the key to much of reality. I am quite sure he believed that the world was “will to power” and that there is an “eternal recurrence”, etc. He certainly did not think these were further “illusions”, on a level with the Christian illusions he attacked. Russell – I think in the passage you quote he is talking about belief rather than truth; he is arguing against dogmatism in areas where dogmatic belief is particularly unwarranted. I have read a vast amount of Russell, and I can assure you that he had nothing but contempt for the notion that there is no truth but only “truths”. I refer you to his essay on “The Ancestry of Fascism”, which can be read online here: https://www.spokesmanbooks.com/Spokesman/PDF/140Russell.pdf Given the current rise of fascism, what he writes is particularly relevant. I shall just quote the following: As we know, the theory of relativity has come to be thought bad [in Germany in the 30s] because it was invented by a Jew. The Inquisition rejected Galileo's doctrine because it considered it untrue; but Hitler accepts or rejects doctrines on political grounds, without bringing in the notion of truth or falsehood. Poor William James, who invented this point of view, would be horrified at the use which is made of it; but when once the conception of objective truth is abandoned, it is clear that the question ‘what shall I believe?’ is one to be settled, as I wrote in 1907, by ‘the appeal to force and the arbitrament of the big battalions,’ not by the methods of either theology or science. ...Turning to the issue you raise of rival theoretical frameworks for research, we do indeed refer to the Whig interpretation of history, or to the Marxist interpretation of history. I would say that these intellectual frameworks can themselves be judged in terms of how much truth they contain. The Whig interpretation of history was implicitly criticised in Hume's History of England, where Hume showed that the idea that the English Constitution had always been at heart a pattern of liberty, which had been gradually confirmed over successive generations in struggles against monarchs like Charles I, was a nonsense. For this reason Hume was traduced by Liberals for a hundred years, until scholarly history caught up with him. Marxist historiography has more to recommend it, but I do not wish to judge the relative merits of historiographies here. My point is simply that historiographies themselves can be subject to critical assessment in terms of their overall success in representing truth. One can certainly find truth in conflicting accounts – in conflicting historiographies or religions or philosophies – but only, so I would contend, because the reality they seek to describe is itself complex; so that one theory might be true concerning one aspect of the complex truth, and another true about another aspect of the complex truth; and this is a perfectly respectable position. But it is not possible for two conflicting theories to both be true about the very point where they come into conflict. For example, either when I die I shall be reincarnated in another life form (as Hinduism and Buddhism maintain), or (having lived a life of saintly self-denial) I will find myself in Heaven (as Christianity asserts), or neither. But I can't both be reincarnated as a stick insect and go to Heaven at the same time. To take another example, LaudateAgno made the assertion en passant in an earlier post that Hinduism was at its core monotheistic. Is this true? I think it is largely false as a description of the actual religious beliefs which characterise the hundreds of millions of Hindus in India. I am quite sure that at the popular level most Hindus think of Lord Shiva and the Great Mother as distinct divine beings. In the Puranas there are certainly a multitude of gods, and a certain friendly rivalry between some of the major ones as to which is the absolutely supreme god – a rivalry which is never quite resolved in the Puranas themselves. On the other hand, it is not exactly wholly false to say that Hinduism is monotheistic. On the more philosophical level, such as Vedanta, it has often been maintained that Reality is One, and that there is a single divine principle. And there are numerous sects which teach that the god they worship is so far above the others as to constitute the only really suitable object of worship. The truth, in other words, is complex, and because it is complex an assertion may be partly true and partly untrue. But in such circumstances, I would hold, it is always possible to substitute a more complex statement which is wholly true. The role of metaphor is a difficult one. I wouldn't want to deny that much of our language is metaphorical and that a metaphor can have a degree of truth without being wholly or literally true. I would hold that, even in these circumstances, it is always possible to state the matter with complete clarity, without metaphor, in a manner that has a definite truth value; but to justify this would take me some time. “Should I once more attempt again to engage with Derrida? I suspect your advice would be that this would be a waste of time and effort.” I wouldn't necessarily say that, because, as I said before, one of my closest academic friends in a past life was a Derridean scholar who certainly was not the kind of person to fall for any kind of charlatanry. In the end, it is simply a matter of personal judgement whether one thinks a given writer is worth reading or not. There are certainly some writers, though, who are not worth reading, and a deliberately obfuscating language is very often a good indicator of this.  |
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