"The Truth? You can't handle the Truth"
- Deep Throat
Truth is, it is impossible to even discuss truth without falling down the philosophical equivalent of a K-hole, ending up staring at the back of your own head saying "Well it depends what you mean by mean." There are reasons why there are campuses and colleges full of awkward white men of a certain age (sorry to stereotype analytical philosophy like that, but if there's one thing I've learned it's that a prescient generalisation has more 'truth' to it than an ethnicity graph) arguing each other into a hole in the ground over language and meaning while the world goes on around them barely even noticing their absence. It's because the question "Is there such a thing as Truth, and can we understand it?" is at once a meaningless intellectual curio, and one of the foundational questions of all human experience.
All of the things we say, do and think are done 'as if there was' such a thing as truth, and as if we could know things. Yet any examination of the idea of what is true, what is false and how we tell one from the other soon throws up so many problems that we are forced to admit truth is only provisional. There are the usual tired examples of Newtonian physics being undermined by relativity, in turn undermined by quantum mechanics etc, etc.
I absorbed all of this more or less in my stride, all this conceptual stuff about absolute knowledge being impossible. Emerging from the reassuringly simple period of Atheist Materialism into the swamp of Postmodernism is Appallingly Expressed But It Has a Point was hardly a philosophical Road to Damascus. As soon as you look at the predicates of the scientific method it is apparent that all sincere science operates from a position of "We cannot know for sure, but it looks like..." Sure, researchers in the trenches are forced to use the shorthand of "we have proved that" because well, otherwise they too would end up staring at the hair-netted backs of their own heads. Again, in order to proceed with life, work or thought it seems we have to pretend or imagine that truth and knowledge are possible, all the while aware that they are fundamentally not.
No, what really got me was when this idea began to be applied to our inner lives, and to human relations. The human mind, spirit, brain (take your pick... or admit that they are all words for one entity we do not have true knowledge of) is where we do our knowing, our understanding and our self-deception. Where can the question of Truth be more pressing, applicable and urgent than to our minds and their relations with other minds. We've all been on acid and faced that breath-defying realisation that we can never know what another person is thinking, what it is like to be them, or rather what it is like for them to be them. and that we are embodied and embedded in our own selves for all of our time on earth. Some of us have even done it without the acid. But this realisation has something important in it. Not only can we never truly know another's thoughts, or being, but we cannot know our own. The unconscious is another of those invisible, undeniable concepts, like gravity (or relativity) that changed our view of everything. The idea that somewhere in my head there are other parts of me that I can't see, influencing me with a power of its own, like some kind of dark matter, puts the final conceptual nail in the philosophical coffin of Truth.
If you cannot even be aware of the totality of yourself, how can you even begin to probe and question the world without, or your lover, as they lie away from you in the dark, their own head full of such half-thoughts, dark matters and questioning as your own. When you ask someone what they feel, or why, they cannot tell you. They may not even be able to tell themselves. For they too have invisible elephants in the room of their soul, thought-skeletons in the closets of their frontal lobes, Reds under the conceptual bed. Even if they know what they feel, to be able to articulate why, or even know it, will be beyond the power of their tongue to tell, or your ear to receive. We are separate worlds, and the satellite beams of language rarely hit home, and when they do they cannot be decoded. We get by on a nod and a wink.
"Know Yourself" said the Delphic Oracle, and then sat back and chuckled as Humanity set about this most impossible, most Sisyphean of tasks. God gave Adam Eve as a help meet, and on the next day God Rested, arms behind his head, and waited for the fireworks. We cannot know ourselves, and we cannot speak the Truth to each other. Well, no. This is not true. We live in the fog of unknowing, beset on all sides by strange shapes, stalked by our own shadows, divided each from each by dark seas.
But we can help each other. We can speak the Truth as best we know it, accept that certainty is impossible, but learn to live with mutability. Indeed, if there is one thing that the debate on Truth should not be used to legitimate, it is Lies. Truth may not exist, but Falsehood most certainly does.
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