Truth is a White Lie

@Reconstructo,

Reconstructo;111316 wrote:

I don't suffer for the truth, I am the Truth. Life is the truth.

If this is true, then am I also the truth? Or is it just my life that is the truth?
Are the two separable? I think this could be painful.

If you are the truth, and I am the truth, what is the point of division?

@TickTockMan,

TickTockMan;111351 wrote:

If this is true, then am I also the truth? Or is it just my life that is the truth?
Are the two separable? I think this could be painful.

If you are the truth, and I am the truth, what is the point of division?

Well, it's a playful quote of Jesus Christ. Yes, you too can be the truth. Faith will make you whole. :sarcastic:

When I say that "life is the truth," this is a compact metaphor for the subordination of life to reason. The fault of most epistemology is its naked disregard for motive. What is this supposed will to truth? Truth is a tool in the hands of Life. Of course Truth can function as a religious concept, as indeed it does in the New Test. Jesus says he is the truth. Nietzche interpreted Plato as doing the same thing.

The truth becomes more and more dissociated from the noble man. It becomes a God or a universal reason that a person can participate in more distantly. The only epistemology that can survive the questions of the skeptic is pragmatism, as the only things we know with any certainty are our desires.

I suggest a reading of my meta-ethical investigation thread. Also, you should understand my comment to Ken in relation to a long long argument between us about the correspondence theory of truth. I was getting bored of the carefully reasoned replies. I decided to indulge myself. Logic-chopping is often so pointless, so insincere. Folks don't live like that.

@Reconstructo,

yeah but some people use philosophy is used to defend their sense of conventional normality, others to question it. A lot of academic philosophers are like that (by no means all.) But the attitudes are worlds apart.

@jeeprs,

jeeprs;111379 wrote:

yeah but some people use philosophy is used to defend their sense of conventional normality, others to question it. A lot of academic philosophers are like that (by no means all.) But the attitudes are worlds apart.

I take this as saying that philosophy is a tool in the hands of Value. And value for me is equivalent to Life. I suppose I'm flying a vitalist pragmatist flag. A spiritualized pragmatism would grant truth to that which gives us sublime feelings, a sense of power. A consistent pragmatist could probably agree with Christ saying "I am the truth" as long as Christ said it with a gleaming and invincible smile.

For me, pragmatism is what most humans use in relation to objective reality. They pose as being more puritan, but I'm not convinced. I say look at a man's values if you want to see the ground of his rhetoric. And rhetoric is to be praised just as having two hands is to be praised.

Plato can spit on the sophists and so can I. But the sophist is superior to those who worship epistemology rather than Sophia, for the sophist is more honest about the game, wiser.

To make an idol of the game is for me an inferior sort of religion. Better to use sophistry against the petty-god dialectic.

@TickTockMan,

TickTockMan;111351 wrote:

If this is true, then am I also the truth? Or is it just my life that is the truth?
Are the two separable? I think this could be painful.

If you are the truth, and I am the truth, what is the point of division?

Part of the problem with social change is that minds must be changed, and everyone already has the sense that they are true to the truth... Their behavior is in accord to what they understand the truth to be... To show them they are wrong is not a reasonable process but one attended by pain and danger...It is an emotional process because people have an emotional connection to the truth which they consider as themselves... No matter how wrong a person is, they feel they represent the truth...It is no small problem, even if the solution seems simple: People must be made to feel differently in order for them to think differently...

@Fido,

Fido;111391 wrote:

Part of the problem with social change is that minds must be changed, and everyone already has the sense that they are true to the truth... Their behavior is in accord to what they understand the truth to be... To show them they are wrong is not a reasonable process but one attended by pain and danger...It is an emotional process because people have an emotional connection to the truth which they consider as themselves... No matter how wrong a person is, they feel they represent the truth...It is no small problem, even if the solution seems simple: People must be made to feel differently in order for them to think differently...

This is good. It is feeling that changes what a person takes for truth. It's pain or pleasure that founds "logic" which pretends (in some mouths) to transcend such contingencies (Daddy wipe off the mud!). But if a person is not suffering, they don't have much need for change. They are happy enough with food sex and entertainment. They no longer want to breed or fight. They leave that to the working class, including policemen and soldiers. The no longer identify with their social group. They are atomized cynical-practical pleasure seekers. And yet emperors have been stoics and Christians. Kojeve presents both of these as creations of the slave, to comfort him in his slavery. Mastery demands a willingness to risk given-being in the name of prestige. Now I don't know what to make of Kojeve/Hegel in this regard. The slave drives history, and philosophy is the creation of the slave. Christianity/democracy is supposedly a transcendence of this dialectic, but only if afterlife is abandoned. The Terror of the French Revolution was the ideological slave facing death, drinking the blood that makes him a master. But this is more myth than history. It's no dogma for me, this Kojeve/Hegel, but it seems to apply to our conversation.

@Reconstructo,

Slavery was common where philosophy was born... I see the reason for this as simple...Slaves represented alienable wealth, and such wealth divided communities from each other, and citizens from each other... Their societies were commonwealths, and often democratic, at least at the start, but unequal wealth destroyed the equality upon which democracy depends... So people, left with the shells of their societies, their common grounds, and common faith -searched for a rational for ethical behavior which was once motivated by a common bond of affection based upon a shared nationality...Why should people not profit on the misery of their countrymen, and why should the poor accept their misery and not seize the wealth of the rich???

Laws are little support when morality has been strangled by commerce and economy...The epitomy of a slave society is Sparta, and they lived only to terrorize and exploit their Helots... They had ten slaves for every man, woman and child Spartan; and compared to others their Golden age was an age of lead...Their strength was in part maintained by control of wealth, that it was made liquid in the most il-liquid form of pickled iron bars; and yet they were all open to bribes of Gold or Silver...They were not innovative or inventive...They lasted as long as they did because they tended to enforce an equality of sorts...Excess wealth has always been the apple of discord... Without equality, wealth buys division, and division invites revolution or invasion....

@Fido,

Fido;111391 wrote:

Part of the problem with social change is that minds must be changed, and everyone already has the sense that they are true to the truth... Their behavior is in accord to what they understand the truth to be... To show them they are wrong is not a reasonable process but one attended by pain and danger...It is an emotional process because people have an emotional connection to the truth which they consider as themselves... No matter how wrong a person is, they feel they represent the truth...It is no small problem, even if the solution seems simple: People must be made to feel differently in order for them to think differently...

It seems a problem of Gordian Hydras. Impossible to untangle but by a forceful cut.
But once cut, a new knot appears.

One mind has the truth, but only its own. Does each mind know the truth?

Can relativism be avoided when one mind shows another the error of its truth?

If we were to agree that truth is in the mind of the beholder, would that mere
admission change the truth we consider to be ourselves?

Forgive me if I'm stomping over ground that has been trod
countless times before. I'm not as well read as some.

TTM

@Reconstructo,

The difficulty of changing forms for the good is not the same as changing forms for the bad... Good is sapped by the sort of organization often required to advance a view of truth...People advancing a personal, anti social, or evil cause have an advantage in organization... The Nazi's collected and bred a sort of person who could surrender self to the party, for a cause they could sacrifice self for... When people do good it is for self first, and then for a greater good...But good needs no organization, and fails because organization takes energy, and distracts from purpose...For people who do not seek good, or good as it never is, as an abstraction, nothing serves them better than to have all their individual purposes organized... What the mass of people seem to desire is a truth so simple it can be expressed in few words, and demogoges simplify... The reason people seek, for good, rejects all simple explanations for complex situations... For those reasons: that they cannot organize, and cannot simplify the good find change an impossible goal...

@Fido,

Fido;111554 wrote:

What the mass of people seem to desire is a truth so simple it can be expressed in few words,

Then why is Theism predominant?

I would think that Atheism would be about as simple as it gets . . .

@TickTockMan,

TickTockMan;111589 wrote:

Then why is Theism predominant?

I would think that Atheism would be about as simple as it gets . . .

The denial of an accepted truth will never be accepted as truth without a fight... Consider that magic, spiritualism, and religion are not just a part of the childhood of the individual, but are part of the childhood of mankind... For those who crave certainty no science is as effective as religion... Science always reaches a point where it admits it does not know beyond, and religion never ever reaches that point...

@Fido,

Fido;111595 wrote:

The denial of an accepted truth will never be accepted as truth without a fight... Consider that magic, spiritualism, and religion are not just a part of the childhood of the individual, but are part of the childhood of mankind... For those who crave certainty no science is as effective as religion... Science always reaches a point where it admits it does not know beyond, and religion never ever reaches that point...

So perhaps I am wrong then.

Religion simplifies and reduces the need to think, where science rattles the brain. Theism is easy because it provides the comfort of an episode of "Father Knows Best" played on a grand scale, where Atheism (or at least Scientism) is like a scavenger hunt with an often illegible list of items to try to find.

@Reconstructo,

But seriously, and aside from the Dawkinsian presumptions about the idiocy of religion, atheism, as a philosophy, really can only produce nihilism and a completely fragmentary view of the nature of realilty, can't it? I mean, aside from the fact that we can all be justifiably proud of the you-beaut inventions and technology we all have, the universe currently makes no sense whatever in a large-scale sense, from the viewpoint of scientific philosophy.

It is one thing to 'believe religion' in a child-like and simplistic way, and another to 'seek the ground of reality' through religious enquiry.

@jeeprs,

jeeprs;111605 wrote:

the universe currently makes no sense whatever in a large-scale sense, from the viewpoint of scientific philosophy.

People often speak of the universe "making no sense" or being "meaningless" when viewed through the lens of certain philosophies. I wonder, sometimes, why we must insist that the universe have meaning at all. Must it make sense to gratify some human need? Meaning is a label that we as humans sew on to the fabric of reality, isn't it? Cannot some measure of liberation be found in the embrace of meaninglessness?

jeeprs;111605 wrote:

It is one thing to 'believe religion' in a child-like and simplistic way, and another to 'seek the ground of reality' through religious enquiry.

But if our religion is false (and surely some religions must be false) how can we trust the stability of the ground of reality we find?

@Reconstructo,

religion is different for every person. Generally speaking the major source of falsehoods regarding religious matters comes in the form of statements beginning with the words 'religion is....' followed by an opinion.

My inherited religion was anglican christianity. I left it. I was never confirmed, I don't believe in it, and I don't worship in a Christian church.

Nevertheless I believe it contains a great deal of truth. I am just not religious in the way that they understand.

@TickTockMan,

TickTockMan;111538 wrote:

One mind has the truth, but only its own. Does each mind know the truth?

Can relativism be avoided when one mind shows another the error of its truth?

If we were to agree that truth is in the mind of the beholder, would that mere
admission change the truth we consider to be ourselves?

TTM

Good points. I don't think relativism can be avoided except subjectively by dogmatism. And I would say that we cannot help but view our own truths differently if we admit the subjectivity of truth. How can one not become an ironist? Keats wrote about this quality in Shakespeare, that presenter of so many very different characters. He was all of them and none of them. For me this ties into the Christ myth, the man in whom totality dwells. What if we make it our goal to see into all human lives from the inside? I doubt the ideal can be perfectly realized, but isn't that what "nothing human is alien to me" implies? To know one's self completely might be to know everyone. James Joyce cast as the lead in Finnegans Wake a character known as HCE, which means among many other things "Here Comes Everybody."

@Reconstructo,

Reconstructo;111360 wrote:

I was getting bored of the carefully reasoned replies. .

I can understand that. People often tire of carefully reasoned replies when they are constantly refuted by them. As John Locke said, theologians were enthusiastic about reason until it stopped serving them. Then, they became suddenly people of faith.

@TickTockMan,

TickTockMan;111608 wrote:

People often speak of the universe "making no sense" or being "meaningless" when viewed through the lens of certain philosophies. I wonder, sometimes, why we must insist that the universe have meaning at all. Must it make sense to gratify some human need? Meaning is a label that we as humans sew on to the fabric of reality, isn't it? Cannot some measure of liberation be found in the embrace of meaninglessness?

I've often presented existentialism as a heroic sort of religion. To embrace meaningless is macho, I think. One can look down on the weaklings who need the crutch of illusion.

But meaninglessness itself, inasmuch as it provides this macho heroic pleasure, is also to be doubted. For meaninglessness also offers the comfort of certainty (one is done with the search for meaning, having abandoned it as futile). This also gives man a chance to play the Byronic hero. He is free in the void, to drink screw and joke his meaningless life away. Kundera calls this the unbearable lightness of being.

---------- Post added 12-15-2009 at 08:39 PM ----------

kennethamy;111627 wrote:

I can understand that. People often tire of carefully reasoned replies when they are constantly refuted by them. As John Locke said, theologians were enthusiastic about reason until it stopped serving them. Then, they became suddenly people of faith.

Your "refutations" bore me. The role of Mr. Logical is so unheroic. The leaders of the world and their techno-wizards have no need of the type. It's one more religion for chatterers. The world is dominated by realpolitik and applied technology. It simply doesn't appeal to me to lick the boots of the status quo. I feel that your conception of language is errant and limited. Formal logic is a laughable oversimplification of living human language. I would think that a reader of Wittgenstein would be aware of this. In my view, your concept of reason is theological. This craving for an objective standard to kneel before embarrasses me. So much of philosophy is the chatter of altar boys who are utterly terrified of that Lovely Lady Life, who some have also named Truth. The love of Sophia transcends the role of hall monitor. Philosophy as lingual referee is a spiritually bankrupt notion, founded upon an absurdity, that language can draw a final picture of its own workings. I find genuine theology more respectable than pseudo-theology. If we are going to worship anything outside of ourselves, it should at least be grand and not a pile of deductions.

@Reconstructo,

Reconstructo;111631 wrote:

---------- Post added 12-15-2009 at 08:39 PM ----------

Your "refutations" bore me. The role of Mr. Logical is so unheroic. ourselves, it should at least be grand and not a pile of deductions.

What has boredom and heroism to do with it? Children typically reject what bores them, and children find action heroes entrancing. What has that to do with the life of the mind? Better for you to turn to Harry Potter novels if you want to be entertained. Or, better still, the movies. They are not quite as taxing. In the meantime, your disparagement of reason is like the fox and those sour grapes he could not reach, and then consoled himself by the belief that they were sour in any case. And, why do you place the term, refutations, between quote marks? If that is suppose to indicate that they are not really refutations, hadn't you better show that is true, say, by argument?

@kennethamy,

kennethamy;111636 wrote:

What has boredom and heroism to do with it? Children typically reject what bores them, and children find action heroes entrancing. What has that to do with the life of the mind. Better for you to turn to Harry Potter novels if you want to be entertained.

How priest-like indeed. I feel like I'm on the Starship Enterprise, and Data has asked me why humans laugh, or why they risk their lives when it does not appear logical to do so.

Such questions is regard to "Truth is a White Lie" appear naive in the extreme. For predatory apes like ourselves, who are clearly status-seekers, heroism and boredom are important indeed. And this is why I mock any so-called critical thinking that refuses to address motive.

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