Truth as correspondence suffices (indeed, we could go our whole lives without needing anything else), but is there a more profound way to look at this, one of the deepest of all ideas?
Four conceptions of the truth, ascending (in my opinion) from the most insipid to the most profound. I don’t present them as ideas that should suffice to explain the truth alone, but as ideas which can be appended to the basic idea of truth as correspondence without thereby inducing a contradiction.
- Whatever works (the pragmatist view).
This view is so vulgar and American… applying common sense to it: It’s not necessarily the case that “If it works, it’s true!”
What I mean to say is, “If it works, it’s true!” is not itself a practical method we can use to find out whether something is true or not:
For a counter-example (one will suffice): imagine a primitive ritual whereby, every night, the sages in a certain tribe had to pray ardently for the sun to rise the next morning. Morning comes and—how miraculous!—the sun rises, the world is suffused with light, the sages look at each other with wondrous faces… another successful ritual. It worked, but it wasn’t true.
This view (like so many other American crimes against reason) reverses the chain of cause and effect; whether or not things work relies on the truth, not the other way around—truthfulness does not rely on whether or not things work!
- Truth is aletheia (unveiling/unconcealment/disclosure)
This, like the rest of Heidegger’s ideas, is a poetic way to describe the thing in question. But poets, due to the distinct goals they have in mind (arousing sentiment, expressing beauty), are allowed certain liberties with the truth—philosophers don’t enjoy the same privileges. It is (deeply) true that, in certain magical moments, we feel we see things as they really are—we feel that a veil has been lifted. But this beautiful idea does not itself encompass all that we should mean by “truth.” Our world is not only made up of wonderful truths, but of quite banal ones as well. Plenty of things exist without us so much as thinking about them, let alone seeing them for what they really are…
- That which resists (reality)
This is the psychoanalytic idea of the truth; i.e. Freud’s “reality principle,” or the Lacanian “Real.” The former is a hypothesized psychological process, and the latter is a “register of being,” but both of them come from the same idea of the truth.
In this view, the truth is that which resists our desires. In the general psychoanalytic framework, people begin with unbounded desires which are only really ever held in check by reality itself.
There is something deeply pacifying about these ideas, and I feel that there is a deep wisdom in them, as well. I think that many of people who are much more experienced are “post-oedipal” in the sense that they are less given to illusions.
People who haven’t really suffered, on the other hand, I think are subject to far more psycho-sexual complexes. I think these ideas serve as a knife that cuts through so many entanglements of our shared psychological existence. Why is mental illness rising? I think the answer is that, in a post-scarcity economy, we are less subject to the reality principle… the mind, wishing to expand forever, invariably goes too far. When it finally does meet with reality (as everybody must, eventually), it comes as such a shock that… bad things ensue.
This idea explains so much, and it can be added to correspondence without creating a contradiction—but at the same time, I feel like it does not fulfill our souls.
Is that all reality is? Something which, in its essential nature, only says “no,” again and again, to whatever we ask of it? Surely we can do better than that!
That which is faithful.
The ancient Hebrew word for truth is derived from a root word which means “support” or “believe.” The word itself can be used in many contexts, but these are not primarily centered around correspondence, but faithfulness, trustworthiness, and reliability.
In my view, the best way of thinking of the truth is not to see it as that which works, nor that which is unveiled to us, nor that which resists, but as that which we can depend on.
The piety of the ancient Israelites is revealed to us here. In this view, the truth is that which we can rely on, that which we can build on, that which we can use to strengthen us. Beyond correspondence, it is not merely there—it is something that, when we are true to it, will be “true” to us!
Which, by the way, leads me to mention that this usage of truth can be found in English, as well… when speaking of people, we use the terms “faithful” and “true” almost interchangeably.
This view goes beyond sterile correspondence without betraying it, without falling into poetic fantasies or wallowing in maudlin cynicism.