Some ideas I find myself reconsidering regularly, from oldest to newest:
- A fragment from one of Rilke’s letters, on the need for a lover to love the distance between himself and the beloved
- Zeno’s paradoxes
- C. S. Lewis’s “Meditation in a Toolshed”
- Dostoevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor”
With the first three, reconsideration usually means renewed hostility – I come back at the ideas with new attacks.
Today, however, I returned to the Rilke passage and found myself affirming it slightly more than I have been able to recently, though with a style of reservation that only seems diplomatic: the statement is true relatively, but in a way where it must seem absolutely true until it runs its full course and finds its own limits. It is a truth that can be transcended to greater truth, but which must be passed through in order that the greater truth can be known at all.
*
I’ve been deeply disturbed to discover that Martin Buber somehow has become more foundational to my thought than Nietzsche. Yet, I love Nietzsche more. And I have to remember that reading Nietzsche I came to Buber’s beliefs on my own – Buber said the beliefs and gave me companionship where I’d arrived. Nietzsche advocated apartness. Buber advocated togetherness, but from the ground Nietzsche led us to in our apartness. Nietzsche taught yin heaven. He gave his reader a starry midnight sky, but a sky set in a finite duration: an open darkness into which the new sun could rise and close the infinity with bright, human blue. Buber is the still-knowing day, and I share that day. The day will end, but at this moment night is only a memory and a certainty of the future.
*
Increasingly, I refute things like this: “This is true, but not true enough.”
Increasingly, I suspect all truths will someday come to be seen as not true enough.
If this is true, what is the sense of refuting what we already know to be refutable? When do we stop?
(Doesn’t skepticism have an unexamined and absurd faith in one particular vision of truth? Is skepticism skeptical enough about skepticism?)
At some point does it make sense to stop courageously at the surface? When do we stop asking and start affirming? And when we affirm, in what role are we affirming? Who are we as affirmers if we affirm what we could just as easily break?
What’s “Truth” then if it somehow remains what it is regardless of how minuscule a presence it has in a statement?
And why does “Optimism” need to be optimistic about “Optimism” if it’s so much better than skepticism?
Is it better to be ignorant and happy? or wise but troubled?
1) I’ll say something reckless: Truth is the ideal that permits authentic conversation to happen between people of goodwill.
2) I hope you don’t think I’m setting up optimism as the alternative to skepticism!
3) Better? We have to do what we have to do. If you are happy, you’ll be content with your ignorance. If you are troubled and you are a certain kind of soul, you’ll be forced to deeper wisdom.
So Truth is a Contract.
It is a necessary condition, but it is not a contract. The goodwill of the truthful is more closely related to a contract. Truth is more a shared faith that makes the goodwill/contract meaningful.
It is true, that a meaningful contract must be initiated through goodwill, however the sharing of faith in such a contract does not increase the amount of truth, it increases the value , the “Quality” and while great Quality approaches perfection it approaches “Truth” to be sure, but that doesn’t mean that it IS “Truth” itself, its only because Perfection and Truth are aspects of perfect consciousness, that is God, as God = perfect Truth {in perfect consciousness}.
If I move toward the Sun, and light glints off my body it doesn’t mean I have become more “Sun” it means that because Light is a characteristic of the sun, and because I draw near the sun, I draw near the light.
But language does not commonly make this distinction with respect to Perfection and Truth regarding Consciousness .
I think Truth is not what you are looking for here.
could I be wrong?
Truth for man, only comes in one flavor .
(Unlike the iMac)
That flavor is “Shortcoming”, which tastes like “Humility” to some and like “A life free from regret”. This is why the Truth is so often salted and served with agenda.
People will swallow it with a spoonful of agenda
(or something else generally a LOT of whatever else)
even though it still tastes terrible because the agenda helps soften the flavors of conviction, and humanity.
but the worst part is that it doesn’t have to taste that bad, because here is an amazing dish! This one gets better the more you eat it without trying to season it.
It actually seasons itself, because the dish is you, or me or that guy over there, and with Time and honesty everyone likes the way they taste a little more.
EDIT:
the line in the previous sentence was supposed to read:
“That flavor is “Shortcoming”, which tastes like “Humility” to some and like “A life free from regret”
*FOR OTHERS*.
I’m going to make some distinctions:
1) Truthfulness is faithfulness to the contract: to represent fully and undistortedly one’s own reality, in all its dimensions;
2) Lowercase-t truth is the faithful representation of one’s truth, including the gaps and unclarity, and one’s own response to success and failure in representing the full reality;
3) Uppercase-T Truth is the transcendent point that truthfulness and truth approach together (possibly asymptotically, futilely). Truth feeds into truthfulness and produces a new truth, recursively. The new truth which again feeds into truthfulness, etc. (again, perhaps eternally without ever experiencing the satisfaction of reaching its terminus.)
Why undergo this cycle? And what is the ultimate point of approach? This is the faith that grounds the contract: the irrational belief in the existence and value of truth, which is beyond the current scope of one’s truth and truthfulness.
The authenticity I mentioned earlier as a quality of conversation is the willingness to faithfully represent the entirety of one’s reality and just as much the willingness to go where the truth takes us, which is — I cannot emphasize this enough — always toward anxiety, into perplexity, through perplexity and out into the new conception of truth. Most people choose to abort their quest the minute anxiety sets in. Most of us regard pregnancy as a disease, a threat to our vanity, the promise of enormous pain, of unwelcome primordiality — and all of this is true in a sense, but not true enough.
Any person who considers anxiety or pain to refute an idea is not a philosopher.
Anyone who wants comfort but is unwilling to confront dread is not spiritual.
Truth does not exist for the sake of peace. Peace is only a stage in truth’s cycle. Truth also carries a sword–but even those war-mongers who love metal swords and the gratification of vengeance and institutionalized murder hate the kind of sword truth carries. This suits everyone just fine. There’s no more satisfying object of irritable hatred than that which inflicts anxiety. So the war-mongers do the peace-worshippers’ dirty work for them, leaving the peace-worshippers to stand by, perhaps wringing their well-washed, bloodless hands.
The one thing war-mongers and peace-worshippers agree on is the annihilation of painful, disruptive, transcendent truth.