Quid est veritas?
What is Truth?
Pontius Pilate spoke these words to Jesus (John 18:38) after Jesus declared that he came as a witness to “truth” and before Pilate declared to the crowd that he could find him guilty of no crime. According to John, the people would demand his execution anyway, and Pilate would send him to the cross while washing his hands of any responsibility.
Pilate spoke in jest, as if truth were meaningless. Unfortunately, many of us today are more Pilate than Jesus. We doubt there is any truth in this world.
Like Pilate we are foreigners here, ruling over a foreign land that we do not understand. Born with the faculty of reason, we inhabit an irrational world. Born with love of good, evil meets us at every turn.
Better then, to conclude that there is no truth, no good, no evil, no reason, only random events in an uncaring universe.
We waffle and joke about truth like Pilate, unwilling to commit ourselves to any position that might seem dogmatic.
That includes what is real, meaning, even right and wrong.
The Pilates of the world see truth disintegrate again and again, taking away any meaning they create.
They see the universe as a jumble of particles, fields, and mysterious matter and energy. And whatever we cling to disappears.
At the lowest, they conclude we are a self-aware slime, clinging to the outer crust of a rock, that invents reasons why it is special.
If so, we the authors of what temporary truth there is. We are dealers in an opiate for our existential suffering.
Others are more sure that there is ultimate truth. They attend churches, temples, mosques, protests, political rallies, and symposia convinced that reality has intrinsic, God-given meaning. They believe that we were put here with a purpose and have no need to make it up for ourselves.
The Pilates say we are deluding ourselves with fantasies of a truth beyond ourselves.
Neither side is correct.
Truth cannot be pinned down. Reality cannot be said to be “out there”, a Platonic ideal, nor “in here” as postmodernists would have it. It is neither pure thought nor is it solely external and objective. Rather it is the child of a marriage between thought and reality.
Philosophers who continue to debate the question are ill. They are asking questions no different than asking what is outside the universe or what happened before the beginning of time or how many angels can dance on a head of a pin.
Senseless.
Thoughts are bound up with reality and cannot exist apart from it. Nor can reality, paradoxically, exist without thought because reality is brought into being through consciousness. A universe with no one to live in it may as well be no universe at all. We cannot talk about it.
Thoughts become words, but words have no intrinsic meaning. A dictionary definition is a kind of sleight of hand, substituting some words for others.
Pointing at objects and pronouncing their names, as children learn, meanwhile, doesn’t count as defining words at all. Like any tool, people learn how to use words this way.
Words are given meaning based on how they are used. Those uses arise from functions in the human mind, perception, and physical actions in the world. Thus, the word “chair” has no meaning except insofar as one uses it to think about and act on places to sit down. It need not refer to any specific type of object or have any definition.
Likewise, words like “man”, “woman”, “male”, and “female” that generate so much controversy today have no intrinsic meaning outside of how they are used. Different and, apparently contradictory, terms can be applied biologically and socially without any fear that “truth” will be denied.
Words are a contract between us and our thoughts, other people, and reality. We cannot redefine reality by changing how words are used, as a linguistic anti-realist (which is what some postmodernists are) would say. As a hammer is needed to pound in a nail and a screwdriver will not do, so the right word is needed for the right job. The “job” of the word defines its purpose, not society, not the individual.
From this perch, denying both objective and subjective, real and anti-real, we can ask again: What is truth?
Truth can best be understood by understanding its opposite: falsehood.
A falsehood is when words are applied so that they fail to do their job. They don’t “mesh” well with reality or with others because they create in human beings thoughts, perceptions, and actions that are incongruent with one another and expectations. They create a lack or deprivation rather than abundance and flourishing. They do a bad job.
For example, if you take a road sign pointing the direction to a city and flip it so it points in the wrong direction, rather than people reaching the city they wanted to reach, they will end up somewhere else. The outcome defines the original sign as falsehood.
This binds falsehood up with good and evil by necessity.
The devil is called the father of lies for a reason.
What if, however, someone tells a lie to save someone’s life? For example, the people who, like some of my relatives, concealed Jews and others from the gestapo? In that case, it is a deprivation for one who is doing evil.
That is called “justice”.
When a lie is to spare someone’s feelings, however, it is called “mercy”.
Not all true and false statements have moral connotations. Mathematics is a language and so mathematical statements are as bound to how they are used as natural languages. We have a system of numbers that is at once a construct of thought and word as it is a reflection of reality.
For example, if I say the square root of two can be expressed as the ratio of two integers, that statement is false because it leads to absurdity within the rules of mathematical usage that people understand.
Thus, we come to a deeper understanding of falsehood. It is not only related to evil but also to absurdity.
Nonsense.
The devil is the father of nonsense too.
Still, the devil must be particular to human beings because true and false cannot exist without a particular language that gives true and false values to statements in the same way that right and wrong cannot exist without human beings to be blessed or to be wronged. These are bound up in human nature and language. An alien species could have very different ways of using words and mathematical notation that would be completely incomprehensible to us.
Nevertheless, human beings aren’t free to turn the devil into God, so to speak, and try to change true into false or good into evil any more than we can make the square root of two a rational number. We can only change such statements by rejecting the rules they are based on entirely. This can have strange consequences.
You can imagine a species like the cow that didn’t mind being eaten in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams, where the ordinary rules of ethics might not apply.
That suggests a disturbing slippery slope however in that one could theoretically alter a human being to “not mind” being tortured to death. Victims of human sacrifice, for example, would submit themselves willingly to a brutal death in some cultures, often under the influence of drugs. We cannot contemplate such an act without thinking it is wrong. This is because even though the sufferer doesn’t mind, we do! In fact a person need not be aware they are being done an evil for it to be evil.
If however we contemplate a world where no one minds this torture to death, then we are asking one of those diseased and senseless questions. We might as well be contemplating whether a tree that falls in a forest makes a sound in a universe where no people can hear.
Truth and falsehood, therefore, must include us, you and me and the human society we live in. It cannot be held in a vacuum or placed into a hypothetical universe where it loses all sense. Also the words by which truth is expressed cannot be separated from their common usages. They cannot be defined nor redefined ad hoc to make truth mean anything you like. Each word must do its job properly or it has no meaning at all.
What that means in the end is that truth is defined by the outcome it has. Do the words that express it do the jobs they are supposed to do? Do they lead to sense, justice, mercy, and human flourishing by the rules that we share to understand them?
It also means that there is no such thing as “your” truth because a private truth has no sense at all. Likewise, truth cannot be divorced from human action or placed in hypothetical universes so that it loses meaning. Therefore, truth is “our” truth, “here” truth, and “now” truth.
With that in mind, who is more right? Pilate or Jesus?
Jesus said he came as a witness to truth. He did not come like Plato and speak of celestial forms and distant abstractions. His truth was communicated to others by actions as much as words. It was not a truth divorced from human usage or activity but one deeply bound up with it. Hence he understood better than any philosopher, perhaps, that truth is not simply given but enacted.
To be a witness to truth, then does not mean to be a witness to one’s personal reflection on life nor does it mean to declare truths apart from human minds. It means to be a witness to a truth that, in the context of a language and a people (Israel in the case of Jesus), has no room for error. Those who hear it, understand it, and act upon it within that context will not go astray from what the witness intends.
From this perspective, the Pilates of the world, foreigners to the context, are left out in the cold not because there is no truth but because they cannot understand it within the context of their own worldview. They have to be reborn into a new way of thinking to understand it.
And this is the takeaway. We feel an emptiness and regret at the unfeeling cosmos and the pointlessness of existence in part because we have allowed our culture to change us to the point where that feels like the only “correct” thing to believe. Some of us resist the culture but only find ourselves going down irrational rabbit holes, developing counterculture that is no less empty.
The culture is the problem. We may not be able to imagine thinking any differently, but we can. We may not be able to imagine a new kind of truth, but we can.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical investigations. John Wiley & Sons, 2010.