OK, trusting that this little treatise will pass muster, and sorry for length, but I was inspired this morning. Happy to defend my points but this is written (as almost ALL my stuff is) to provoke thought in new, creative directions. Let the red pen go and go with it mateys! You can always find your way back... ;-) ============== What is truth? We have a hard time with truth these days. I think its because we lost some of the parts, so that whats left over doesnt make much sense anymore. Weve done a similarly poor job of keeping knowledge intact. One huge BLOOPER: we lost BOTH the subject and the object of BOTH truth and knowledge. Theres no more an object without a subject than there is an up without a down or an in without an out. Yet weve come to pretend as if there were. What is the OBJECT of truth or knowledge? It can be anything, but it MUST be SOMETHING. Truth and knowledge are about some thing, even if it is nothing. Lose track of what they refer to, and they cease referring to anything. What is the SUBJECT when it comes to truth AND knowledge? The holder of truth and knowledge. The apprehender. The believer. The knower. We play an integral, unavoidable role, and our involvement leaves deep marks on truth and knowledge -- ALL truth and knowledge. As hard as weve tried, we failed to eliminate ourselves from the proposition. Im deeply interested in why we ever wanted to. What is the OBJECTIVE of truth and knowledge? Ill leave you to ponder that for a moment, because I suspect it will frustrate you, and I want you to feel it. Weve ignored this part of truth and knowledge so terribly that the ignorance -- and the habit of ignoring -- have become culturally embedded, societally normalized, even institutionalized DENIAL. Truth and knowledge ALWAYS have purpose, an end game, an agenda, even if were unaware what it is. What is the SUBJECTIVE of truth and knowledge? Hmm… Thats interesting. Weve so badly lost track of the counterpart to objective that the sentence sounds like bad English, even as ungrammatical. What in fact IS the counterpart to objective? Motivation. Intention. Inspiration. Origination. Desire. This ought to clue us in. Weve so lost our selves in questions of truth and knowledge that we not only dont know where we stand, we barely grasp the concept of standing SOMEWHERE. Truth and knowledge are always EMBODIED. The move to disembody them is sleight of mind, a dissociation of collective cognition in social experience, similar to the mechanism that trauma victims use for self-preservation. That begs the question: what trauma? In a nutshell: socially sanctioned dehumanizing exploitation. Another huge BLOOPER: we depersonalized truth and knowledge. We call this objectivity. It has long been and still is considered a virtue. I consider it an intellectual sin, a disingenuous denial of the MOST important aspect of either truth or knowledge. We claim truth and develop knowledge about things that MATTER TO US, things that what we CARE about. And then we do a flip, stand on our heads facing backwards, and maintain that we care about those things because they are true and certain and factual and obvious. Therefore, we insist, they matter -- period. Thats not a valid observation or an accurate perception; its a sneaky mental trick. Except for those in Christian-influenced cultures, the vast majority of humankind have for the vast majority of their experience and history understood that truth is a matter of BEING TRUE to SOMETHING OR SOMEONE, and that knowledge is a matter of EXPERIENTIAL INTERACTION. Weve become so self-disconnected and theoretical that we hardly know what to DO anymore. In older times, to know involved intimacy. Knowing a woman regularly resulted in children, unless you happened to be another woman. Knowing a subject meant that you participated in it. Karen Armstrong explains this wonderfully in her book The Case for God. Truth is a relationship. Knowledge is an experience. What we Christianity-recovering Westerners call truth and knowledge are ARTIFACTS. In Judeo-Christian terms, they are current-day objects of idolatry, a worship of the gift in denial of ourselves the givers, a prostration to the work of our own hands as if it were fashioned by the hand of God. Just a couple of simple linguistic adjustments can help start reorienting our thinking and our experience of truth and knowledge in more honest, healthy directions. Think true to rather than true of or true about. Think knowledge of or knowledge in or knowledge with rather than knowledge about. And what about the mysterious objective of truth or knowledge? What is it? Our frustration with that question stems from a mistake. We think that someone else, something else, somewhere else, even if that be the Great Dude In the Sky, determined the answer for us. What ever makes us think that its an answer to be accepted from without rather than created from within? Who ever declared that someone else should in our stead define things so fundamental for us? Why do we so easily allow the usurpation and imposition? Who ever showed that truth and knowledge are not simply what we want them to be? I think that those questions merit long, deep, incisive examination. Because, after all the philosophical gyrations have spun out and wound down, and after all the polemical dust has settled, at the end of the day, truth and knowledge are exactly what they were going into the fray: whatever we want.
Posted on: Fri, 24 Jan 2014 23:26:20 +0000
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