"What is truth?""The truth is out there," is the hope of the X-File's FBI agents. Perpetually foiled, they nevertheless strive to uncover the relationship between the government and extraterrestrial life. Various layers of secret society turn every new piece of evidence into merely greater enigma. In this way the story progresses continually leaving both the agents and their TV audience unsatisfied, wondering whether the show's mantra is merely a false hope.
- pontius pilate
In our most gripping life pursuits, we are driven by the idea that "the truth is out there." However, our answers lead to more questions, and we have to wonder if the forces of concealment will forever hold our prize from our grasp. After prolonged searching and frustration, a dark doubt may begin to creep: Can we reach the truth at all?
Into this doubt comes Michael Oakeshott's meditation on the nature of truth. First, he says, we have to stop thinking of truth as something that is "out there," not something we don't already have knowledge of. For if the truth is something we have no clue about currently, we will never be able to reach the truth. For we wouldn't know what would count as the truth.
Oakeshott would make this analogy, I believe. Saying "the truth is out there" without knowing what would satisfy our search is like saying the following: I want to get to a place, but I don't know what it would be like or when I would find it.
Even if we accept this answer, it seems to miss the point: the FBI agents really don't know the truth they seek. And in general we feel the strain of not having the truths we want. Our disappointment is that we don't feel satisfied in our particular pursuit. It does not matter that we know some truths, we want to know a particular truth.
To this, Oakeshott would rephrase things into something even more shocking, but after consideration, what can only be the case: yes, the FBI agents don't know the particular truth they seek, yet they do know what would count as an answer. They know that an answer must accord with the knowledge they already have. Thus they already know something of the truth, and it isn't entirely "out there" at all. This means that all the truths we could possibly know, we already know a little about them.
After we digest this shock, we should come to realize that Oakeshott is using the word "truth" in a funny way. For him, truth isn't a "thing" at all. It's something that comes in degrees. We know more or less of it. It's a feeling about how the facts fit. It's satisfaction.
About "what is out there" the FBI agents know some truth, but they don't know complete truth. But we can turn the problem around. The evidence the FBI agents do have, that is, the concrete alien DNA samples, the creepy sound recordings, and the eye-witness accounts; all these! they only know partially. They certainly have the information, but they don't know what it means. In other words, they don't know the truth even about their evidence!
It is very important to let this sink in. We can apply this thinking to everything we know. We have information which we think are facts, but until we solve every question, we don't know the full meaning of these facts. In all actuality, what we think is important, might, when a new piece of knowledge comes to us, seem unimportant after all. And what is unimportant, might take on a whole new significance.
But in all this we might become dismayed. For this makes our whole reality topsy-turvy. Now it seems, we can't count on anything to stay still for us to surely reach the truth. Should we just give up on it all?
Not at all. Again as Oakeshott says, We do have knowledge of truth. Even though it is in degrees, we still have it. Though new information modifies what we know, the new information never implies that we should reject all of what we knew before. The only thing these realizations should spur us on to is humility. Since nothing is fixed for us, the only thing for us to do is follow what the experience says we should conclude. We are responsible for no more.
"There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced my monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment. Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless."
- T.S. Eliot
in East Coker
"I write to you, not because you do not know the truth, but because you know it, and because no lie is of the truth." - 1 John
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