More Unfashionable Observations: Is it True?

In this week’s installment of Analogismoi we discussed the postmodern, neomarxist concept of power as an overarching meta-narrative. Behind the question of whether or not power is the meta-narrative and the oppressor-oppressed dynamic is the ultimate arbiter of truth is the question of what we mean when we say truth.

 

The most difficult thing when reading the ancient texts, whether it is the Ionian Monists or the ancient Babylonians, is getting underneath the colloquially accepted notion of truth that is part and parcel of the enlightenment thinking.

There are things we assume that simply are not reflective of the way people thought thousands or even hundreds of years ago. I believe it is fair to say that the standard idea of what it means for something to be true is what philosophers call the Correspondence Theory of Truth. This is to say that truth is a statement or belief that corresponds with reality. If I say “I am wearing glasses” and the case is that I am, indeed, wearing glasses than my statement can be considered true.

This is a fine, even if unsophisticated, idea of what some truth is.

Immanuel Kant talks about how judgments can be a priori or a posteriori. Judgements which can be made before or only after sense experience respectively. We can think of it like this. If I tell someone that my car has mass it can be considered an a priori truth as, so long as the car exists, we can assume it has mass without interacting with the car with our senses. However, should I say that the car is blue it is an a posteriori claim of truth as proof would require sense data.

Other notions of truth include Coherence Theory which states that a statement is true if it logically fits within a consistent system. Also, Pragmatic Theory where the usefulness of a statement is taken into account and when a statement produces practical positive consequences it is seen as true. There is Deflationary Theory, Pluralist Theory, Constructivist Theory and Identity Theory.

Philosophers have been hacking away at the idea of truth for a very long time. For the postmodern thinkers truth is merely a reality constructed by the oppressors in order to maintain a status quo that suits their interests.

I do not want to turn this into a full scale analysis of truth. It is enough, for now, to say that getting to the bottom of what it means for something to be true is not as easy as it might seem. For this reason, the postmodernist is asking valuable questions — even if their answers are lazy and uninspired.

What I want to get at with these ancient stories being read by modern readers is that we need to understand how to  separate ourselves from our epistemological epoch to better understand what is going on.

It really is hard to imagine, let alone refocus your thoughts to better understand, a world where the concept of the scientific method was thousands of years away. We do not have the space in a single post to discuss all the ways in which you need to refocus your thought in order to better understand what is going on, we will do it in pieces over the course of the project. There is something I would like to begin with…..the opposite of fact is not fiction.

It is easy for us to think of fact and fiction as being antonyms, but it is not something that is valuable. Fiction, properly construed, is a distillation of archetypical patterns. So we may take a play like Hamlet. And you can ask, “Is Hamlet true?” The answer is, it depends on your definition of true.

Was there a historical figure Hamlet who was a prince of Denmark? Did the events which occurred in the play actually happen? The answer, if you are tied into a correspondence theory of truth, is no. There was no Hamlet. There was no murder. There was no war.

This, however, seems to lack any real sophistication. What Shakespeare does in Hamlet is the very ancient and very human act of distillation of abstract principles. While Hamlet is not true, is the idea of vengeance real? Is the tragedy of insanity real? Is mortality something we have to grapple with? Does the issue of action and inaction in the face of uncertainty impact people on a daily basis? Does political corruption effect people? Is there a stark contrast between appearances and reality where hidden truths and deception pervade every day interactions? Is loyalty to friends and family something which is often tested for a variety of reasons?

Shakespeare looked at people and he thought about what they were up to. He distilled, from any number of situations, themes which are important and ubiquitous and displayed them in the form of his play. In this sense, of course Hamlet is a true story. It is more than a true story. It is a kind of meta-true story or a hyper-true story. It isn’t true in the way that you can say George Washington was the first president of the United States is true but it is, in many ways, a far more profound truth to be found in good fiction and its distillations of humanity than in particular modern historical facts.

You may not see it at first. The idea that an abstraction explained in a fiction is more true than a true story is a tough one to grasp. In order to help, I will give you two examples.

Has anyone ever asked you how your day was? If so, when they did, what did you tell them? This is to ask, at which level of analysis did you explain your day to them? Did you tell them something interesting that happened? Did you tell them something annoying? Did you tell them a story about your day distilling it down to its meaningful moments? Or rather, did you say “at 6:39 am my eyes first opened and then I sat up, yawned, wiped my eyes, stood up, walked out my bedroom door, down the hall into the bathroom…..”? Or, going to another level of analysis did you explain each muscular twitch in the order they occurred for your eyes to open? It would be true after all.

No, of course you didn’t? Because people, when asking about your day, are asking about what in your day was meaningful or interestitng. They are asking you to tell them something more, something they don’t already know, something deeper than a list of facts about what you did. Does watching a 24 hour video of everything you did in a 24 hour period explain to a person how your day was? Of course not. You need a different level of analysis, an abstracted, distilled level of analysis and not mere facts in order to be meaningful.

Are facts true? Yes. But without context they are meaningless. What are we to do with meaningless facts? Are your experiences true? Phenomenologists argue that everything humans experience is real. Whether or not that is correct, you can say that what you experience is meaningful and when someone asks you about your day it is that meaning they are asking for, not how many times you blinked…even if the number you give is accurate.

Another example I want to give you is that of math. Are numbers real? Some people would argue that numbers are the most real thing that there is. Which is more real, the abstract concept of the number three or three pencils

sitting on a desk? If you can abstract a concept of number out of particular instances you can move the world with equations. None of them are real the way the three pencils are real. You can’t touch the abstract concept. At the very least you have to acknowledge that the abstract concept of the number three is a different true than three pencils are and for many people the abstracted numeric concept is actually more real. Abstracted mathematics and physics may not be something you can hold in your hand, but as the people of Hiroshima will attest to, the real life consequences of abstractions can be far deadlier than anything else you could imagine.

The reason it is important to remember these distinctions when reading the ancient texts is that if we go into the ancient texts with our modern mind they will not yield up their value to us. Even if we discard the pitfalls in any translation, much less translations from ancient and dead languages, we still have to contend with differing epistemological framework. We need to treat the epistemological first person view of the ancient authors as a separate language which needs to be learned. The danger in not doing so is not merely in our inability to understand this wealth of collected wisdom and knowledge, but that it tends towards discarding the foundational texts and ideas of our culture and society.

In his 1882 book Die fröhliche Wissenschaft Nietzsche proclaims the death of god. A lot of people read this as a triumphant proclamation. They are wrong. Far from the concept of revelry in the death of the tyrannical God and the superstitious mindset which stands in the way of progress that people like to pull from out of context Nietzsche quotes, what he says is actually far more devastating. Nietzsche says:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us?

This is much different than the idea of the triumph over God that the 19th century seemed to be so fond of. This is far from an ode to the industrial revolution and its Tower of Babel like hubris. With modern man’s inability to understand the ancient underpinnings of their world and its dismissal as mere superstition man has pulled the slats out from western civilization. The end result? We are living it. A world where absurdity and contradiction reign supreme and the most basic concepts are now being questioned in the most ridiculous ways. In short, the technological marvel meant to replace God has left us speaking different languages.

While the current project is aimed at bringing together several levels of analysis and different methods and disciplines in a way to better understand the ancient foundations of man, there is another hope. This is the hope that my readers will be able to better abstract themselves from their epistemological framework which is a product of their times and be better able to understand these important ancient texts and what they have to teach us.

I leave you with this, The Brothers Grimm stories — written in 1812 — are folk tales that can be shown to date back to very ancient oral traditions. Jack and the Beanstalk dates back some ten thousand years. One of the old stories that the Brothers Grimm published is Hansel and Gretel. You remember Hansel and Gretel. Two children who are walking through a forest when they happen upon a house made of gingerbread, are greeted with hospitality only to find out that their host is a witch and intends to do the worst to them.

I’m going to spoil it for you — there is no historical evidence of Hansel, Gretel, the Witch or the Gingerbread house.

So it’s not a true story right?

Well, let’s think about this.

Hansel and Gretel are left alone in the darkest part of the woods by their parents who have no food to feed them. That which represents the stability and safety of their world, their parents, have abandoned them. Hansel and Gretel, alone in the forest, are vulnerable. As they walk through the forest, vulnerable and afraid they see a house. This is a good thing! They need a house and there is a house that appears. Further, it’s not an ordinary house. It is a house made of candy.

What is inside houses made of candy? A witch who is planning to fatten you and devour you.

So is it true?

When you have been deprived of what you need, in this case parental love and protection, too good to be true solutions present themselves and when they do your joy in them blinds you to the catastrophic danger that lurks behind easy and sweet solutions to traumatic problems.

Does it really matter that there wasn’t a witch in a house made of gingerbread in the thickest part of a forest? Are we this simple minded that our response to a story which presents a universal pattern is to ask for a source?

I would argue that it’s true, you know it’s true, it is more true than, say, some fact construed in a modern historical framework.

It’s more than true. Because true in that sense is localized to a thing in a time and a place or event. This is universalized and it is true for everyone always. It is not mere truth.

For the ancients it is also more important because it serves as a universal truth. An eternal truth. A truth on which we reflect in our daily lives at a constant.

To bring it full circle to where we started, this is a truth that cannot be forced top down from an oppressor as an extension of power the way the ideological successors to Marx want you to believe. This is a truth that comes from paying careful and mindful attention to the way people are and abstracting out of multiple particulars a pattern which is common universally and then telling a story with archetypical characters testing the limits of those patterns such that they can be understood as human universals.

Now that is true.