Our relationship to the truth becomes perverse whenever we think we possess it. I have written before that we only truly know what we truly love, and the quality of our knowing and loving is a function of the qualities of the soul who knows and loves. To be concerned about whether something is true or false is only significant when it comes to matters of fact, but while the realm of facts is important, it is at the same time a very limited part of what's important in our experience. Our subjective, qualitative experiences and judgments are ultimately what really matter. And we never have certainty about them.
We don't say that a poem is true or false, but that it is good or bad. And good and bad are not absolutes but relative terms. No poem is absolutely good or absolutely bad, but the excellence of a poem is judged by an innate disposition in the human soul that knows what is good and what is not. But that innate capacity for recognizing the good can only be awakened by exposure to it; it's a capacity that has to be awakened. And a healthy culture is one which creates the conditions in which more people wake up to what is good than stay asleep to it.
Healthy acculturation or education is not simply about conditioning children to be well behaved, but to come alive. And I think it's possible to evaluate the health of a culture according to what proportion of its members who are not just nice and well behaved, but enlivened by their exposure to what is deeply and truly good. When I look at my students I see nice, bright kids for the most part, but I also see kids who have been failed by their culture.
Few of them are awake because they live in a world designed to keep them asleep. Most are stuck sleepwalking in what Kierkegaard called the "aesthetic" in the Stages on Life's Way. The consumer culture and economy could not exist if it were not for the inertia that keeps us asleep in the aesthetic. Its thriving depends on the narcosis it promotes.
And so it follows that one's capacity for goodness, either to do it or to recognize it, is a function of the degree to which one has been awakened by it. To take an example from the world of literature, one can enjoy, even prefer, entertainments like the novels of Michael Crichton and Danielle Steele to those of Dostoyevski, but there is no question that the former are inferior in quality. Dostoyevki is simply more awake, and reading him awakens in us capacities that had lain dormant before the encounter.
And so a consensus develops among those who are themselves more or less awake about what is mediocre and what is great, what is worth reading and
re-reading, and what isn’t worth even the briefest browsing. The pairs
“important and unimportant”, “deep and superficial”, “morally serious
or unserious”, are more appropriate qualifiers in matters of the
deepest importance to us than “true and false”. There is no certainty about these matters; there is only wisdom or the lack of it.
True and false are judgments we make that have usefulness only in the horizontal world of fact, and to live only in a world of facts is to remain asleep. We are alive to the degree that we are awake in the vertical world of quality, and our desire for higher quality is rooted in our longing to awaken to what is truly good. And the more awake we get, the more intense the longing, and the more intense the longing, the more frustrated we become. And too often that frustration causes one to possess what he cannot, and that's when all the trouble begins. We either settle for possessing what is not really worth much–scientific fact. Or we pretend that we own a truth that we don't–fundamentalism. Or we decide that the whole business is impossible–skepticism.
Because we cannot possess something we long for doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. The more we grasp at it, the more it eludes us. True goodness is rather shy and will only show itself to those who want gently to enter into a relationship with it. It is something that reveals itself as a subject, not an object. It is something ultimately known only intersubjectively. It can only be loved, and as anything or anyone who is truly worthy of our love is shrouded in mystery that eludes our grasp, so is anything worth knowing. And we kill what we long to know when the compulsion to possess or control it enters into our relationship with it. It's the story of the goose that lays the golden eggs told over and over. In the end, we possess the carcass of a dead bird, but no longer the mystery of its gifts.
The choice between a rationalist skepticism and a fideist fundamentalism or dogmatism is a false choice. Although the most important things cannot be known with certainty does not mean that we cannot know them. But fundamentalism and dogmatism are not a form of knowing or really even of true believing. Certainty is way over-rated, but skepticism isn’t the only alternative to it. Theology and Philosophy serve us best if we think about them as a kind of poetry. There is something objective there; there is something profound–an experience–to which the text points, and the most important experiences are the most profoundly subjective. And the text is never a proof, but a testament, an attempt to bear witness to some encounter that the writer only partially understands, and which his writing is an attempt to interpret. And that interpretation is what we the reader in turn attempt to interpret.
Am I saying that truth is merely subjective, that it's what we each decide it be? No, truth–the kind that matters, is neither objective nor subjective–it is intersubjective. It reveals itself in relationship, and relationships develop over time. As we have relationships with persons, we also have relationships with texts. We've all had the experience of getting to know somebody over time. We've all had the experience of reading something at one point in our life and understanding the text one way, and then reading it at another point in our life and "getting it" in a way we didn't the first time. We've all had the experience of thinking we understand someone that we've known for a long time and then to be surprised by something he or she says or does.
As great poets reveal what is deep and true as expressions of their intuitions and their skill in using language to give some utterance to their moments of insight, so does any philosophy or theology that is worth reading. And I would also argue the same is true for the sacred scriptures of any tradition. These texts are important not for what they are in themselves, but in what they point to. And their importance can be judged by their relative success in awakening its reader to dormant depths that lie within him.
The text itself is but the product of a feeble attempt by a writer to articulate a pre-rational insight to which he has awakened to and which he seeks to share as best he’s able with others. But as no one thinks of a poem or even the body of a poet’s work as some kind of possessable truth, so neither should we take the work of any philosophy or sacred text. We need to approach them as lovers–shyly, gently, always with reverence. Let them reveal their secrets to you gradually.
(In an earlier version of this post I had several paragraphs about "Nietzsche and the culture-wide Dark Night of the Senses." It made this essay too long, and I'll develop it another time. )
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