Truth is not merely multifaceted - it is also multi-layered. Wherever you cut into the truth and however deeply you penetrate into it, you find a different stratum of interpretation. Typically, we consider the image of penetrating deeply into the truth to be a matter of digging deeply enough. We assume that there is a privileged deepest layer - that if one is seeking the truth, it is located at this deepest stratum.
In imagining the truth in this manner, we forget that the truth is a totality, and therefore indivisible. Like a machine, you can take it apart to see how it functions, but try as you might, it is impossible to identify a single part as the agent responsible for the functioning of the whole, for every piece in some way contributes to that functionality. The truth is like that: unified, it speaks for itself; divided, it is unintelligible.
Interpretation is the dismantling of the machine that is the truth. Interpretation is only necessary where understanding is absent. It is for this reason that interpretation dismantles the truth - so that it can create a reliable blueprint that may be used to reassemble the truth in all its functionality. To interpret the truth well is a difficult task - more difficult even than knowing the truth for itself. Many expert mechanics lack the skill to create a blueprint for building the machines they know so well. To interpret the truth well, one must have a thorough acquaintanceship with the unlimited human capacity for misunderstanding.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
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if truth is a machine [veritas ex machina], then the whole truly is greater than the sum of its parts. but, how is this machine constructed? of what does it consist? in reading between the lines, i see a chimerical entity that embraces centuries of metaphysics. i begin by dissecting your Truth - ironically - searching for a clear interpretation out of habit. is it aristotelian in nature? can i glimpse that specter of homoiosis - a likening between things and the soul's experience of them? i summon aquinas with that ancient spell - adequatio intellectus et rei - the correspondence of the intellect and the thing. i invoke kant and his agreement of knowledge with its object. i inch closer with heideggerian truth: Unverborgenheit - disclosedness. unconcealment. these all seem too transparent, too flat.
my final resting place is kantian in nature. yet, your thought goes beyond his. you have understood the limits of human knowledge without accepting them. sapere aude.
but this, however, is just my interpretation.
Of all theories of truth, I would have to say, not unironically, that none of them are adequate to the truth itself. For it is truth itself that theorizes and that gives itself over to be understood by the theory. For me, truth is absolute and ultimate. As philosophers, it is the aim toward which we strive, the sun which illuminates our path toward itself. The truth is the truth of the light of reason, stripped of its ideology and its ambition to control.
There are many problems with the existing theories of truth, but as it should be clear, these cannot be solved by more theorizing, but only by returning to the thing itself and keeping it always in sight. In understanding truth as homoiosis, as adequatio, as correspondence or agreement, there are many confusions of truth at play - confusions of the truth with itself. Such theories say too much while saying too little. At least Heidegger is clear in his ambiguity regarding aletheia and the unconcealment of Being. Couching his meaning in inspired prose, he preserves the revealing beauty of truth, where the others reduce it to an emptily formal relation.
If I must come to a rest, I would do so in Heidegger. But I am not content even with this possibility, for he preserves the beauty of truth while losing sight of its plainness. Truth must be seduced; she must dictate the terms of her own opening, for otherwise she will be perverted into an uncanny duplicate of herself.
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