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Truth as Numen

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What is truth? And why should we want it?

As far as I can tell, we want the truth for two different reasons.

1. Truth is power. It helps us manipulate nature and organize our social lives. It gives us food, shelter, organization, technological progress.

2. Truth is beautiful/sacred/numinous. We want the truth even when it hurts. We want the truth even if it is useless. This kind of truth is its own reward.

These two motives are not exclusive. I just think they should be differentiated.

First, I think that concepts often function as numens, especially for philosophers.

I think that Truth functions as a numen or as an object of desire beyond its practical application. Unless Truth functions as a numen, pragmatism is truth.

I've got nothing against pragmatism. Pragmatism is arguably the numen in its more obscure form. A methodless method, systematically anti-systematic, an anti-Truth.
Numen - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pragmatism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sophia (wisdom) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jungian archetypes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Symbol - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

@Reconstructo,

Reconstructo;132720 wrote:

What is truth? And why should we want it?

As far as I can tell, we want the truth for two different reasons.

1. Truth is power. It helps us manipulate nature and organize our social lives. It gives us food, shelter, organization, technological progress.

2. Truth is beautiful/sacred/numinous. We want the truth even when it hurts. We want the truth even if it is useless. This kind of truth is its own reward.

These two motives are not exclusive. I just think they should be differentiated.

I think that Truth functions as a numen or as an object of desire beyond its practical application. Unless Truth functions as a numen, pragmatism is truth.

I've got nothing against pragmatism. Pragmatism is arguable the numen in its more obscure form. A methodless method, systematically anti-systematic, an anti-Truth.

?

- you get blind from mastrubation
- you can form ice from water at living room temperature
- santa claus excist
- god excist
- we are the only planet with intelligent life in the entire universe
- your TV speaks to you
- does politicians lie?
- does politicians tell the truth?
- can you have a triangle with 3 right angles?
- what is the best color red or black?
- what is best Ferrai or Labrogini?
- what is best red wine or oysters?

@Reconstructo,

Truth-as-numen.

The consciously irreligious will not like this idea because they don't want to see the Truth as something that functions religiously for them.

The consciously religious might not like the apparent reduction of religion to an instinct, no matter how spiritual.

I feel like this idea is both persuasive and one that puts me in no-man's land.

@Reconstructo,

Truth is an aesthetic. Truth is Pride. Truth is Confidence. We hate thinking that our ideological bases may not be "real". We want them to be better than those of other people. If we operate on "true" principles then we can feel justified.

@GoshisDead,

GoshisDead;132950 wrote:

Truth is an aesthetic. Truth is Pride. Truth is Confidence. We hate thinking that our ideological bases may not be "real". We want them to be better than those of other people. If we operate on "true" principles then we can feel justified.

Yes, thank you. This is why motive is such an important part of epistemology. This is why Hegel made Desire the driving force of History. The Desire for Recognition.
If Truth wasn't a numen, then pragmatism would seem like the "honest" way to go. It seems to me that truth is either valuable in itself (as numen) or merely as a tool for survival and pleasure. Pragmatism is the right epistemology for survival and pleasure (an opinion). Who cares about correspondence of concept to being if all that is required is adjustment to environment, natural and social?

@GoshisDead,

GoshisDead;132950 wrote:

Truth is an aesthetic. Truth is Pride. Truth is Confidence. We hate thinking that our ideological bases may not be "real". We want them to be better than those of other people. If we operate on "true" principles then we can feel justified.

Truth is the naive's carrot, truth is the demagogues whip, truths is but the lubrication of politicians ..truth is sometimes apparent, sometimes it's hidden.

Truth is sometimes disregarded because the lies are shinier ..more attempting ..more attractive.

Propaganda killed the truths ..if we are overwhelmed by truths ..we sometimes choke and refude it.

TELL ME THE TRUTH ..yes hon your ass look too big! ..AARRRRR!! ..huh?

@HexHammer,

HexHammer;132960 wrote:

Truth is the naive's carrot, truth is the demagogues whip, truths is but the lubrication of politicians ..truth is sometimes apparent, sometimes it's hidden.

Is this then the Truth? The Truth about "truth"?

@Reconstructo,

Reconstructo;132720 wrote:

What is truth? And why should we want it?

Don't the answers to your questions lie in the fact that you are asking them? When you ask a question, would you not prefer a true answer to a false one? Then ask yourself what you are asking for, and why you are asking for it. When you have an answer, let us know! If truth doesn't matter, then the answers to your questions are: truth is a cabbage, and you want to make sauerkraut with it (but a turnip might do instead).

@Twirlip,

Twirlip;132963 wrote:

Don't the answers to your questions lie in the fact that you are asking them? When you ask a question, would you not prefer a true answer to a false one? Then ask yourself what you are asking for, and why you are asking for it. When you have an answer, let us know! If truth doesn't matter, then the answers to your questions are: truth is a cabbage, and you want to make sauerkraut with it.

Yes, I agree. Those questions you quoted are actually rhetorical questions. At the moment I do think that Truth is a numen. To want the truth for it's own sake, is to have a religious regard for the truth. The Truth for philosophers is an "ethical self concept." A philosopher "incarnates" Reason rather than the "Holy Ghost". A philosopher exists as an integrated system of concepts that wants to reveal/mirror "being"/"reality." That's my theory at the moment. (Carl Jung pointed me toward the numen via his "archetypes," which are essentially "spiritual" instincts. Jung might use the word "symbol" (the known representing the unknown) in a case like this, but I thought it better to drag out a lesser known word, and build on that.)

@Reconstructo,

I agree that there is something religious about it. I'm being reluctantly being dragged backwards, kicking and screaming, through a prickly hedge, protesting all the way, in the direction of some sort of religious belief. My own belief in truth (and lies, of which I've experienced a-plenty), goodness (and evilness), and beauty (and horror), and all that crap, makes me sort of religious, in spite of myself. Damn it.

@Twirlip,

Twirl:
If you don't want to call it religious call it the human tendency to affirm their identity through justifying their ideology.

@Twirlip,

Twirlip;132969 wrote:

I agree that there is something religious about it. I'm being reluctantly being dragged backwards, kicking and screaming, through a prickly hedge, protesting all the way, in the direction of some sort of religious belief. My own belief in truth (and lies, of which I've experienced a-plenty), goodness (and evilness), and beauty (and horror), and all that crap, makes me sort of religious, in spite of myself. Damn it.

I sympathize. I went through a hard-core atheist phase. In a way, I still am a hard-core atheist. But I would not deny that this is a sort of faith. At the moment, I see man as God, but then another term is required for the ground of being, or the source-of-it-all, including man. So that's God squared. But then Kant persuades me that we can't think above the limits of this human brain and Jung suggests (to me) that religious emotion is itself evolved. At the same time it seems possible that evolution was driven partially by an as-yet-undiscovered force.....I suppose my religion is Truth/Self-Realization/Blah-Blah.

Thanks for joining the discussion.

---------- Post added 02-26-2010 at 05:16 PM ----------

GoshisDead;132973 wrote:

Twirl:
If you don't want to call it religious call it the human tendency to affirm their identity through justifying their ideology.

Hey Gosh, what do you make of the notion of religious "instinct" or archetypes, numens? Do you think it's a good explanatory concept?

@GoshisDead,

GoshisDead;132973 wrote:

Twirl:
If you don't want to call it religious call it the human tendency to affirm their identity through justifying their ideology.

But when I talk about becoming religious, that's not what I mean. I may be absurd, but I'm not absurd in that particular way. It would be more like: I'm in search of an ideology with which to justify (with 20/20 hindsight) my affirmation of my identity. Theology as rational self-belief, rather than an irrational self-belief rationalised by means of an extant theology (however rational that theology might be in itself).

You may be right, in that it is best to reserve the word 'religion' for a kind of ideology which seeks to justify itself (and if 'religion' is not the word for that, then we still need some word for it, perhaps just the word 'ideology' itself), but then the need is not to have some other word or phrase for 'religion', but rather to have some word or phrase other than 'religious' for what it is that I am (so reluctantly) becoming.

Perhaps that obliges me to say what it is that I think I am becoming! But perhaps there is no need, because that kind of thing might be what this whole thread is already about. (Reconstructo: is it?)

(Not sure how clear I'm being here ... I know what I'm trying to say, but I haven't had a lot of practice in saying such things clearly.)

@Twirlip,

Twirl: I was just being flippant

@Twirlip,

Twirlip;133000 wrote:

Perhaps that obliges me to say what it is that I think I am becoming! But perhaps there is no need, because that kind of thing might be what this whole thread is already about. (Reconstructo: is it?)

I think it may be. Let me rephrase. A numen is just a numinous object, some object that inspires the feeling of the sacred/divine/etc. The term has apparently been applied to ideas before, but that's not its most common use. It's my current opinion that verbal/conceptual types have verbal/conceptual numens. This numen is essentially their abstract ideal self.

For some, the Truth is Marx. For others it's Pragmatism. For others it's Sophia. For others its Skepticism. Throughout the course of my life, anyway, I have continued to edit my numen/self-ideal. If the numen is transcendental, that means it's always-already-there, which would mean that a man has always some ideal (a synonym of numen).

It seems to me that education/development is the sophistication of the numen. Sophistication = wising up: up toward Sophia(Truth-Wisdom as numen). Hegel saw the progress of philosophy as the concept becoming conscious of itself as concept. But desire also played a major role in his system. It seems to me that the transcendental numen (adapted from Jung) fits nicely onto the Hegelian idea of the Concept's(Science's) self-penetration. (The real is revealed by discourse dialectically. What fuels this dialectic? It's Beatrice that had Dante climbing the spirals of Hell and Purgatory...)

@Reconstructo,

Did anyone mention Kant yet? Isn't it significant that Kant relegated the Noumenon to the unknowable? And Kant's use of the term is a formative moment in the modern paradigm is it not? This paradigm resulted in the bracketing phenomenological approach on the one side and linguistic analysis on the other. Wikipedia entry on the "numen" doesn't mention Kant but surely noumenon and numen are related, are they not?

@Deckard,

Deckard;133040 wrote:

Did anyone mention Kant yet? Isn't it significant that Kant relegated the Noumenon to the unknowable? And Kant's use of the term is a formative moment in the modern paradigm is it not? This paradigm resulted in the bracketing phenomenological approach on the one side and linguistic analysis on the other. Wikipedia entry on the "numen" doesn't mention Kant but surely noumenon and numen are related, are they not?

I don't think he directly relates them, but they do seem related. You might say that Kant invented noumena in pursuit of a numen. Kant seems to me like a great leap in man's self-consciousness. //How does noumena link to negative theology?//

I think you're right about that formative moment. Science was implicitly addressing a pseudo-noumenon. Numbers are transcendental, I now think. To describe reality in terms of numbers is to describe it transcendentally. Number is perfect abstraction. It seems that Kant sniffed out the implicit, and made it explicit. He did so in the pursuit of Truth? And self-realization/recognition?

For Hegel, self-consciousness is explicitly the goal, and history both martial and intellectual is driven by Desire. The word "project" is used by Kojeve where I use numen. I feel that numen emphasizes the sacred/erotic nature of this desire for (self-)recognition/wisdom/truth. For me it's Kant + Hegel + Jung....

At the moment, Kant seems very important to me linguistically/numerically.

@Reconstructo,

Reconstructo;133047 wrote:

I don't think he directly relates them, but they do seem related. You might say that Kant invented noumena in pursuit of a numen. Kant seems to me like a great leap in man's self-consciousness. //How does noumena link to negative theology?//

Not the "pursuit" of (knowledge of) the nomena but rather the denial of it as your allusion to negative theology suggests. Of course negative theology preceded Kant by some time. Is the pursuit of the nomena the forging of a golden calf? I prefer a preliminary iconoclastic bracketing to guard against such heresy.

@Deckard,

Deckard;133073 wrote:

Not the "pursuit" of (knowledge of) the nomena but rather the denial of it as your allusion to negative theology suggests. Of course negative theology preceded Kant by some time. Is the pursuit of the nomena the forging of a golden calf? I prefer a preliminary iconoclastic bracketing to guard against such heresy.

It's possible you misunderstood me. I think Kant created the noumena in pursuit of the numen. What I mean is that the unknowable was created as a means to know, because for Kant the numen (erotic/sacred goal) was Truth.
It's strange that numen and noumena are so related phonetically, but their meaning, as I understand them, is significantly different..except that the self-consciousness of the transcendental (a leap toward the ankles of Sophia) demanded a noumena to ground it as objective. Noumena as askesis? In an epistemology sense, I think so.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by the last line, but I have a vague idea. For me, the use of a neutral word like numen is an attempt at bracketing. For me the numen isn't transcendent but only transcendental. The numen is the object of desire for our "religious instinct" or what Jung would call the Self-archetype. Spiritual eros must have an object, and perhaps it must be conceptual? Even if embodied? But anything that is a thing is a concept (though not only a concept), so I think yes. The numen is a concept. But sometimes it's a concept attached to a spatial reality and sometimes it's just pure concept.

@Reconstructo,

Reconstructo;133084 wrote:

It's possible you misunderstood me. I think Kant created the noumena in pursuit of the numen. What I mean is that the unknowable was created as a means to know, because for Kant the numen (erotic/sacred goal) was Truth.
It's strange that numen and noumena are so related phonetically, but their meaning, as I understand them, is significantly different..except that the self-consciousness of the transcendental (a leap toward the ankles of Sophia) demanded a noumena to ground it as objective. Noumena as askesis? In an epistemology sense, I think so.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by the last line, but I have a vague idea. For me, the use of a neutral word like numen is an attempt at bracketing. For me the numen isn't transcendent but only transcendental. The numen is the object of desire for our "religious instinct" or what Jung would call the Self-archetype. Spiritual eros must have an object, and perhaps it must be conceptual? Even if embodied? But anything that is a thing is a concept (though not only a concept), so I think yes. The numen is a concept. But sometimes it's a concept attached to a spatial reality and sometimes it's just pure concept.

The etymologies must be related. Both seem to refer to the head. Numinous traces to Greek nuere="to nod" while noumena traces to Greek nous="thought". (I think Aristotle was an outlier among the Greeks in his belief that the brain only cooled the blood for the thinking heart - Plato put thinking in the brain, thymos in the heart).

Kant was not only responding to Hume and the empiricists but also to Descartes and the rationalists. Kant's Noumena/Phenomena could be read as Cartesian dualism seen through the empiricist lens. I want to say Rationalism + Empiricism = Transcendental Idealism but of course its not that simple. (still Kant must have known Bacon's metaphor involving ants, spiders and bees.) I think it qualifies as a qualified synthesis. For Kant, Descartes' independent mental substance becomes an active player in conditioning the experience that is produced by Descrates' material substance. The tendency is to assume that Kant's noumena has more in common with Descartes' material substance. However, what would Berkeley have said if he had read Kant? For a post-Kantian Berkley noumena could very well be synonymous with numena.

Can you say a little more about the distinction between transcendental and transcendent?

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