On truth…
Delineate truth versus belief…moral truth versus objective truth.
“There are no facts, only interpretations.”
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
“I must find a truth that is true for me.”
~ Soren Kierkegaard
‘The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.’
~ Winston Churchill
Is the above fact or interpretation?
Is there any absolute objective truth?
Is the statement that ‘there are no absolute truths’…. an absolute truth?
How do you make sense of a world where the truth is always shifting and where so much remains unknown?
Learn to hold everything loosely, to remain ever humble about what you do know and ever optimistic about what you will learn.
“There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival “knowing”; and the more affects we allow to speak about a matter, the more eyes, different eyes, we know how to bring to bear on one and the same matter, that much more complete will our “concept” of this matter, our “objectivity”, be. “
~ Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality III, 12
“The difficulty is to teach the multitude that something can be both true and untrue at the same time.”
~Arthur Schopenhauer, ‘The Christian System', Religion: A Dialogue and Other Essays (1851)
“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
"The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth."
~ Niels Bohr
"Philosophy and religion are just like psychology in that you never can state a definite principle: it is quite impossible, for a thing which is true for one stage of development is quite untrue for another. So it is always a question of development, of time; the best truth for a certain stage is perhaps poison for another. In such matters nature shows that it is thoroughly aristocratic and esoteric. It is nothing that our liberal minds would hope or wish it to be: that one thing is true and the same everywhere, and such nonsense. There is an extreme uncertainty about truth; we are confronted with the utter impossibility of creating anything which is generally true."
~ Carl Jung
“We cannot disregard the fact that natural science was formed by men. Natural science does not simply describe and explain nature … it describes nature as exposed to our method of questioning … This is true even of the simplest and most general concepts like space and time. Therefore it will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth.”
~ Heisenberg
Is the truth the thing in itself or our perception of that thing?
It seems that we can never know absolute truth, only informed perspectives based on the comprehensible information we have access to.
If the thing in itself can’t be directly detected does it even exist? While we can't exclude that things in themselves exist in some way, they remain, by definition, completely inapprehensible by us, and thus are, for us, no different than nothing (no-thing). That doesn't mean that we can't conceptualize nothing as a something, but it remains that we can know nothing of it, in itself.
It may be best to come to think of the world not as filled with sharply defined truths but as a place of myriad possibilities.
“If you wish to strive for peace of soul and happiness, then believe; if you wish to be a disciple of truth, then inquire.”
~ Nietzsche, 19 yrs old
He proposed that the truth is a claim made by an individual from a context in life. Hence, Nietzsche does not deny truth or reality, but provides an interpretation that redefines them. The sole opportunity for truth and the only experience of reality are from an individual's perspective within life.
Truths are useful fictions that allow us to engage in meaningful discourse and solve problems.
“The falseness of a judgment is for us not necessarily an objection to a judgment; in this respect our new language may sound strangest. The question is to what extent it is life-promoting, life serving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating. And we are fundamentally inclined to claim that the falsest judgments (which include the synthetic judgments a priori) are the most indispensable for us; that without accepting the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a constant falsification of the world by means of numbers, man could not live - that renouncing false judgments would mean renouncing life and a denial of life. To recognize "untruth" as a condition of life - that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous, way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself Beyond Good and Evil.”
~ Nietzsche (BGE, On the Prejudices of Philosophers, pg. 201)
Karl Popper argued that scientific theories can never be proven to be true but can instead only ever be tentatively and hypothetically accepted as an approximation of the truth.
Popper's philosophy of science is based on the idea that all knowledge is provisional, scientific knowledge can never be proven definitively true, but it can be falsified or disproven through empirical testing.
Popper rejected the notion of verificationism, which asserts that scientific theories can be confirmed or verified through empirical evidence. Instead, he advocated for falsificationism, which holds that scientific theories should be formulated in a way that makes them open to potential falsification. In other words, scientific knowledge should always be subject to critical examination and should be willing to change or be discarded in the face of new evidence.
While Popper acknowledged the fallibility of scientific knowledge and advocated for a critical approach to knowledge, he did not outright deny the possibility of absolute truth.
“Truth is no harlot who throws her arms round the neck of him who does not desire her; on the contrary, she is so coy a beauty that even the man who sacrifices everything to her can still not be certain of her favors.”
~ Schopenhauer
If there is no absolute truth, what about math, or a triangle…are there more than one kind of truth?
Fact has an epistemological component (a claim about what I can know) and a metaphysical component (claim about what actually exists). Sometimes fact is used to refer to actual existence -- the fact that the moon circles the earth (metaphysical claim), and sometimes it is used to refer to publicly verifiable, shared experience (epistemological claim). According to the first way of using the term fact, IF it is true that God exists, then the existence of God is a fact, whether or not we can actually know that God exists. According to the second way of using the term fact, If all publicly available data points in the wrong direction of a theory (say, that the earth is flat), then facts change when new types of previously unavailable evidence comes about.
"Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.”
~ Voltaire
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are so full of certainty, while the wise are so full of doubt."
~ Bertrand Russell
Since absolute truth does not exist, finding a universal answer to the meaning of life is an impossibility. Searching for something that cannot be found may itself be life’s purpose?
A universal truth may not exist but an individual one may.
In the absence of any falsifiable objective reality, it may be best to conceive of a subjective "life affirming" worldview that benefits your life?
“Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.”
~ Nietzsche
“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”
~ Charles Bukowski
The very real issue is delving into the relativity bucket (like post modernism trends) where at some point, complete open-mindedness opens the doors to utter and pernicious nonsense not to mention the conflicts between those who vehemently believe different truths and will fight (sometimes to the death) with those who disagree.