What is Truth?

What I Mean by Truth

According to the New Oxford American Dictionary, a useful sense-making invention which I like to conveniently access through Apple’s built-in Dictionary app for macOS—with nine windows permanently open on my desktop due to my comparative definition/etymology obsession—truth means “that which is true or in accordance with fact or reality.” While Pontius Pilate asked what it is to Jesus Christ in the New Testament (John 18:38) in a cynical, dismissive way—and understandably given the context of Jesus’s bold, radical, and audacious claims—I want to clarify what it is I’m seeking, especially given today’s postmodern world.

“All men by nature desire to know” is the famous opening line of Book 1 of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, although I’d qualify it by saying some want to know more than others, and I’m one of those desirous seekers in the framework of Truthism and using tools like the Golden Compass, i.e., logic, reason, and intellectual humility, to adopt the most rational worldview and require the least amount/leap of faith to believe.

I also like metaphors of truth as a Golden Fleece or Golden Snitch—except as an infinite goal—in this quest or hero’s journey/game of life.

Obstacles to Seeking It

Unfortunately, we’re evolutionarily optimized for philonikia, i.e., victory and survival over philosophia, i.e., wisdom and truth. In other words, lower rung thinking over higher rung thinking. Motivated reasoning is a major obstacle, and it’s closely related to the backfire effect, confirmation bias, and belief bias.

Do you follow the truth (evidence) wherever it leads, or wherever you want it to lead?

Apparently Nietzsche’s favorite NT character was Pontius Pilate because he represented skepticism, power, and a refusal to be drawn into what he saw as the irrational moral drama of Christianity, and while I appreciate a healthy dose of skepticism—including the popular aphorism “truth doesn’t mind being questioned,” often attributed to Nietzsche but without a verified source—and “will to power” in the self-overcoming sense, I’m not a fan of how it was misused in the reversion to the Power Games of the early 20th-century contrasted with the Liberal Games (or Enlightenment-based systems).

Learning Across Traditions

Speaking of intellectual movements as it relates to truth, the eclecticism of my work attempts to select the best doctrines from various schools of thought while avoiding the worst:

• The Ancient World/Antiquity emphasis on the classics/humanities while avoiding violence and dogma (e.g. the best of Greco-Roman culture and Christian tradition)
• The Medieval World/Middle Ages emphasis on the trivium and quadrivium, as well as trade and urban life while avoiding primitivism and superstition (e.g. the liberal arts and sciences)
• The Renaissance/Reformation emphasis on human potential, rediscovering antiquity, questioning authority, and spreading knowledge while avoiding casual dismissal of divine or supernatural matters (e.g. Christian Humanism)
• The Scientific Revolution/Enlightenment emphasis on reason, empiricism, and—shared with Romanticism—individualism while avoiding scientism, reductive materialism, and excessive subjectivism (e.g. Cambridge Platonism)
• The Industrial Revolution/Capitalism emphasis on innovation, trade, markets, and material progress while avoiding the environmental and spiritual costs of excessive materialism, consumerism, and profligacy (e.g. Classical Liberalism + Transcendentalism)
• The Existentialism emphasis on the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent while avoiding disparagement of scientific knowledge (e.g. Christian Existentialism)

As for postmodernism and deconstructionism these days, while there may be some fair skepticism of absolute religious dogmas, uncritical progress, or totalizing political ideologies, I’m skeptical of beliefs that are untethered to reality, immune to reason, and slide into extreme relativism.

Suffice it to say, there’s more ink to spill on the subject as my calling and telos, but hopefully that paints a clear picture of how I approach it.