Truth

When Felipe Fernandez-Armesto wrote his book Truth, he added a comment at the bottom of the book cover: “A History and a Guide for the Perplexed”.  It’s a brief book, and yet I go back to it because it tries to address the most important issue I see us as facing today:  what is ‘truth’?   On that same book cover, we read “We need to know how we have got to where we are in the history of truth – how our society has come to lose faith in the reality of it, and lose interest in the search for it.  We need a history of truth to illuminate the unique predicament of our times …  [which]  can still help us survive contemporary uncertainty and rebuild life after doubt.”

Felipe Fernández-Armesto is a British history professor, his father a Spanish journalist and his mother a British-born journalist.   He had spent most of his career teaching at the University of Oxford, has lectured at universities all over the world, and  been the recipient of numerous awards.  He has written many books, for which Truth is probably not the most well-known.  However, Truth is a helpful commentary on an issue that is often on my mind.  In conducting discussion groups on issues ranging from economic determinism through to the limits of individual responsibility, one underlying and nagging concern is how to determine what is ‘really the case’.

Indeed, in our increasingly confusing and confused world where postmodernism confronts scientific determinism, and empirical studies confront philosophical explorations, there is no clear way of knowing what is ‘true’.  It is popular today to suggest that it is who we are and what we have experienced determines what we think, and that truth is a matter of personal preference.   This view  suits the diverse nature of current society.  But it’s a perspective that doesn’t really help us, as we confront a situation when everyone feels free to define truth as that which he or she prefers, and we end up with intellectual and moral confrontations, often becoming shouting matches in which the people with the loudest voices are most likely to be heard.

In Truth Felipe Fernández-Armesto asserts that to an unprecedented and dangerous degree, our society has abandoned the pursuit of truth, “a long-standing, widely shared project of mankind.” His book was an attempt to explore this modern predicament and suggest that the quest for truth is not dead, despite the conflict between religious fundamentalists who claim to know all truth and secular nihilists who think it can never be known. He suggests that we can find the answer in human history. His interesting and challenging book takes us on a whirlwind guided tour of human thought, telling us just as much about the various sights as we need to know for his purposes, entertaining us with amusing vignettes of biography, explaining difficult concepts with well-chosen metaphors.

When seen in this perspective, present-day confusion seems almost normal. Humankind has always been asking the same questions, and struggling to find answers in much the same old ways. People in primitive societies are just as capable of reasoning as people in advanced societies, and sophisticated people are often prepared to trust in irrational approaches. According to Fernández-Armesto, people throughout history have sought to get at the truth in one or more of four basic ways. The author illuminates this theme by sketching the development of four basic epistemological categories: (1) the “truth you feel,” characteristic of primitive society, in which emotions and non-sensory or nonrational kinds of perception convey truth; (2) the “truth you are told,” important in archaic society, in which truth flows from oracular, divinatory, or scriptural sources of authority; (3) the “truth you think for yourself,— or deductive or rationalist methods of pursuing truth, which evolved from ancient origins to reach an apex of prestige in the 17th and 18th centuries; and (4) the “truth you perceive through your senses,” or that derived from direct perceptual experience, which is dominant today. All four, Fernandez-Armesto argues, have always been around, though the ascendancy of the fourth is a relatively recent phenomenon.

What do these four categories mean in practice?  The first he addresses is truth through feeling. Truth is a tangible entity, something you know, even something residing in your soul.  The third-century B.C. Chinese sage Chuang Tzu stated, ”The universe is one.” Others described the universe as a unity of opposites. To the fifth-century B.C. Greek philosopher Heraclitus, the cosmos is a tension like that of the bow or the lyre. The notion of chaos comes along only later, together with uncomfortable concepts like infinity.

Then there is authoritarianism, the second variety of truth,  ”the truth you are told.” Divinities can tell us what is wanted, if only we can discover how to hear them. The ancient Greeks believed that Apollo would speak through the mouth of an old peasant woman in a room filled with the smoke of bay leaves; traditionalist Azande in the Nilotic Sudan depend on the response of poisoned chickens. People consult sacred books, or watch for apparitions. Others look inside themselves, for truths that were imprinted in their minds before they were born or buried in their subconscious minds.

Reasoning is the third way Fernández-Armesto cites, and this takes us much closer to the modern world.  He argues that since knowledge attained by divination or introspection is subject to misinterpretation, eventually people return to the use of reason, which helped thinkers like Chuang Tzu and Heraclitus describe the universe. Logical analysis was used in China and Egypt long before it was discovered in Greece and in India. If the Greeks are mistakenly credited with the invention of rational thinking, it is because of the effective ways they wrote about it. Plato illustrated his dialogues with memorable myths and brilliant metaphors. Truth, as he saw it, could be discovered only by abstract reasoning, without reliance on sense perception or observation of outside phenomena. Rather, he sought to excavate it from the recesses of the mind. The word for truth in Greek, aletheia, means ”what is not forgotten.”

Plato’s pupil Aristotle developed the techniques of logical analysis that still enable us to get at the knowledge hidden within us. He examined propositions by stating possible contradictions and developed the syllogism, a method of proof based on stated premises. His methods of reasoning have influenced independent thinkers ever since. Logicians developed a system of notation, free from the associations of language, that comes close to being a kind of mathematics. The uses of pure reason have had a particular appeal to lovers of force, and have flourished in times of absolutism like the 17th and 18th centuries.

Finally, there is his fourth category, truth through sense perception.  Unlike his teacher, Plato, and many of Plato’s followers, Aristotle realized that pure logic had its limits. He began with study of the natural world and used evidence gained from experience or experimentation to support his arguments. Ever since, as Fernández-Armesto puts it, science and sense have kept time together, like voices in a duet that sing different tunes. The combination of theoretical and practical gave Western thinkers an edge over purer reasoning schemes in India and China.

The scientific revolution began when European thinkers broke free from religious authoritarianism and stopped regarding this earth as the centre of the universe. They used mathematics along with experimentation and reasoning and developed mechanical tools like the telescope. Fernández-Armesto’s favourite example of their empirical spirit is the gruelling Arctic expedition in 1736 in which the French scientist Pierre Moreau de Maupertuis determined (rightly) that the earth was not round like a ball but rather an oblate spheroid.

Scientific progress inevitably led to questions about previously established certainties about God and the purpose of human existence. Did one exist simply because one thought, as Descartes famously suggested? Was Kant right in supposing intuition to be more important? Is art ”truer” than science, realism and even meaning, all of which it now apparently disdains? Does God exist because many people believe in him, as William James proposed? If so, is truth basically opinion, as the modern American pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty seems to suggest?

Such scepticism appears to be reinforced by recent discoveries in science. Einstein’s theory of relativity implies that time and space as we understand them, the very elements in which we live, cannot definitively be measured. The work of the physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg shows that experiments cannot be perfectly objective; ”laws” of nature can be overturned by random events; beyond infinity lies infinity. History, as the British philosopher and historian R. G. Collingwood suggested, can be regarded as literature, but language itself deceives, as Wittgenstein demonstrated. No wonder the French philosopher Michel Foucault supposed that truth was defined by whoever was in power, and many of his followers have concluded that there are many coexisting truths, from which (in effect) we must pick and choose.

What happens when some of these truths conflict with one another? Fernández-Armesto advises against searching for the answer in religious fundamentalism or escaping into a fantastic artificial world of what is often called ”Oriental thought.” He explains why certain new philosophical terms are deceptive. ”Intersubjective agreement” and ”community reasoning” merely reiterate James’s notion of truth by consensus. Instead he advises us to return to the four methods that have served mankind so well in the past: the truth you feel, the tradition of the past, reason and sense perception. No one approach alone can guarantee that we can discover the truth, but each method can help to correct the mistakes of the others.

Fernandez-Armesto’s profound analysis of a crisis that pervades both the academy and the larger world points a way beyond the timid equivocations of our time. Examining the modern abandonment of truth in the humanities and the growth of relativism in our culture, which he views as ominous developments, he urges a return to traditional approaches to truth and advocates “hounding subjectivism and relativism until truth is run to earth.”

The first important step is to take notice of what other people are saying. Here language plays an essential role, because arguing about meaning (as Plato saw) helps us to understand how we know what we know. Whenever we get an intimation of the truth, we should try to express it for others. Searching for truth (however imperfect the process) is fundamental to education. Fernández-Armesto recommends reasoned arguments, supported by evidence, instead of the shouting down and dismissiveness that have regrettably been characteristic of much recent academic discourse. One place to begin to look for the truth is in between the extremes of authoritarianism and scepticism, the middle ground that Aristotelian logic is reluctant to explore: something is not entirely false just because it cannot be shown to be entirely true, or entirely true because it cannot be shown to be entirely false.

Perhaps another source, much used in present times, is to find out more about the author.  In an interview with Felipe Fernández-Armesto, (The Crop, 28 March 2004) Neil Scott asked “You were, possibly, the first academic I had met who was openly religious. Do you think this has influenced your work?”  He replied “I suspect not. I always assume that other people think that my Catholicism affects my view of the past. I always mention if I feel that it might excite people’s anti-Catholic sentiment, in case it makes them hate me: I wouldn’t want to deprive them of that pleasure. Sometimes it backfires. I was once giving a lecture in New Zealand: The subject was ‘Truth in the Works of Frank Sargeson,” a novelist. I did mention that I was Catholic and some drunken man in the audience made an opprobrious remark about the Pope, after which another person took offence and then a third person got annoyed and it broke out in fisticuffs. And it was a great occasion in New Zealand. I felt a bit like a saint as these penitents came up to shake my hand saying ‘We’re not really like that in New Zealand.’ It was very gratifying. For the first time, I felt I had stimulated a reaction in a lecture.”

Scott observed that Fernández-Armesto didn’t seem to place the same importance on religion as some others do.  He asked another question: “Do you believe in the idea of a universal human nature?”  He replied, “There are two answers to your question: the first is yes, the second no. There is no point in talking about human kind unless you think there is something that they have in common. On the other hand, I don’t think there is any thing that is exclusively human, because we are products of evolution. We know that there have been other species – Neanderthals, homo habilis, homo erectus – there are lots of species that are not homo sapiens that have had the same nature, the same abilities and that have done everything that we consider peculiarly human. The more we think about other primates the more we see that we’ve got in common with them.”

In relation to the suggestion he seems to be attempting to capture this elusive universal human nature in his work, he replied: “I’m not interested in human nature for its own sake. I’m interested in constructing the narrative, constructing the story of human divergence and reconvergence. If you think of the history of homo sapiens from 150,000 which goes back to a common ancestor. How do you characterise what has happened? We have got different from each other. It is such a short time. And yet we’ve developed all these different kinds of cultures: it is amazing if you compare it with any other kind of social animal. You know, ants don’t have that kind of diversity in a single species. Even chimpanzees which are the animals most like us – do have some cultural divergences – but they’re tiny compared with the vast differences in human history. The big story is how it happened and the big question is why it happened and the current phase of the story seems to be a kind of reconvergence in which in the last few hundred years we have been exchanging culture. That is what I am really interested in. The universal is a by-line in the way I have been thinking over the last few years.”

He adds:  “For me, history is about what it meant to live in the past. It doesn’t mean experiencing it directly. One of the things about being a historian is that you do live vicariously, learning about things not by the senses but vicariously. I relish that. History is sources, I am much more interested in them than in what actually happened, if you could ever know them.”

He’s a compelling writer, and in this brief book introduces so much to consider.  I wish I could write as engagingly as he does.  Please read Truth.  It’s well worth the time!