The One and the Many: On Truth [I]

Our time breeds two kinds of orphan. There are those who seek to transpose, in as hypostatic a form as possible, systems said to disclose some ‘essence’ of reality; then there are those who take the flux des différences as rebutting or, at the very least, complicating such a pursuit.

Much of the ongoing conflict across fields either belongs to this general opposition or must at least reckon with it as a background problem. In philosophy, it shows as the clash between systematic construction and pragmatic or deliberately nihilistic criticism; in politics, between a minimal recognition of the human and an increasingly diffuse compartmentalisation of identity; in aesthetics, between ‘beauty’ as inherited from its classical roots and the postmodern refusal to distinguish the object of art by any necessary property.

But the opposition may be ill-formed. Essentialism still possesses a certain adequacy when situated against a background of relativity, provided that a system’s ‘essence’ is understood, ironically and perhaps suicidally, as performing a function in the actualisation of perception. It need not describe reality independently of every possible office in order to disclose a reality which, without it, could not have appeared in just that way.

A system organises perception by fixing distinctions under which something can be. Its essentialism lies in this very act of fixation; its relativity, in the fact that any distinctions presume the system which employs them.

If every possible distinction remained equally salient, no determinate object could stand out. To see something is to let something else recede. A system which left nothing in the background would have no foreground; its completeness would be indistinguishable from absence. Every system, therefore, draws an object from the undifferentiated and binds it to rules through which it may be used.

The same object may belong to more than one system because more than one thing may be done with it. But the systems are not consequently interchangeable. Their reality lies first in the worlds they actualise within perception.

Certain observations survive even when the systems through which they were first made differ so radically from ours that the object then observed may reasonably be said to constitute a different entity. Take, for instance, the role of alchemy in the history of ideas. Medicine, chemistry, physics and philosophy – and, through philosophy, psychology – owe much of their development to what is now commonly regarded as the childish enterprise of seeking the petra philosophica.

One could say: ‘The alchemist found the right things for the wrong reasons.’ But the reasons were part of the practice by which the things appeared. A discovery does not occur between a naked mind and a naked object. The object must first appear as the kind of thing about which a question can be asked. Later, another system reengages it. What the alchemist treated as a body governed by sympathies becomes, under the chemist, defined by composition and reaction.

Either those systems share a continuous object despite apprehending it via different means, or they concern objects that are strictly distinct, yet whose constituent relations still sufficiently cohere to be traced within a single development. On either account, a system founded upon premises that appear irrational to the modern sceptic nevertheless disclosed objects which later systems inherited.

Every system exists in combination with others within the general matrix of ideas. It is therefore at once limited and necessary, obsolete and present. Once established, a system approaches and intersects with other systems wherever common parts permit translation between them; it repudiates others wherever their incompatible parts resist. Its elements propagate through later systems in a manner which may, with due caution, be compared to the propagation of genes under natural selection.

A system also enables counter-systems which could not have been conceived without something determinate to oppose.

When Russell came upon the paradox that struck at Frege’s logical project, he could formulate the contradiction only in the language which Frege himself had pioneered, namely, the conjunction of mathematics and logic. The same system which failed as a totality thereby survived as the condition of its own correction.

In the most favourable case, a system finds a place among many others and survives its counter-systems indefinitely. In the least favourable case, it is declared obsolete after confrontation. In either case, it remains a necessary moment in the actualisation of perception. It belongs among the conditions from which a later system could emerge, whether the later system acknowledges and defends its predecessors or remains ignorant of their influence and even of their existence.

The difficulty begins when we ask which systems are true.

Before answering, we must ask: what work is the word ‘true’ doing here?

In one practice, ‘true’ may mean empirically confirmed. In another, it may mean sincerely felt. To demand a decision between them before specifying the practice is to ask for the winner of a game whose rules have not been stated. Within a practice, the distinction between getting something right and getting it wrong may be exact. But exactness within a practice does not by itself establish that the practice supplies the sole meaning of truth.

Many systems do not, in any case, live principally by that distinction.

Myth's office orders suffering, death, war, kinship and obligation; it gives recurrent human experiences a form to inhabit. Its effects may be found in courage, consolation, architecture, music and ritual. To ask which version of myth is scientifically true is to misunderstand the practice. A myth ceases to function when made answerable to criteria foreign to it.

The Gospels differ in retelling the life of Christ. Harihara is worshipped as Śiva and Viṣṇu in one body, while the two gods are worshipped separately elsewhere. Daoists treat every division as partial without thereby failing at the task for which their language is used.

Music likewise has no rationale apart from what rhythm, timbre and melody do within perception; its forms need not submit to a common standard outside their use. Visual art remains recognisable as art despite the collapse of every proposed necessary criterion of beauty. Warfare concerns the destruction of resistance or the imposition of one will upon another; the moral superiority of that will is neither required nor demonstrated by military success.

These systems may contain propositions, but the truth of propositions is not the principle from which their operations derive.

What, then, of science?

Science requires disciplined distinctions between what is and is not. Its methods specify what counts as one or the other and thus guide the search. But from this it does not follow that science has discovered truth as an object or that every intelligible question must be translated into scientific language.

Science determines propositions within its domain. However, the proposition that its domain is the only valuable one is itself non-scientific. Medicine’s ends include the maintenance and the prolongation of life. Yet these ends can be pursued whether or not the physician believes that life is inherently good. A nihilist may set a bone correctly. The metaphysics of the physician neither aids nor prevents the healing.

Systems can be compared only once the relevant function is stated. Scientific medicine is superior to wishful thinking as a means of restoring bodily health. But if one says that medicine is morally superior because life must be preserved, one has added an ethical premise. The premise may be sound. But it comes from outside medicine.

When we say that medicine is more effective than wishful thinking at treating disease, we do so because the effects can be compared, and the methods of scientific medicine succeed more reliably across cases. Yet this establishes truth with respect to a specified end. It does not show that medicine answers every question raised by illness. A ritual may console without curing. To call it medicine because it consoles confuses its function; to say that consolation is worthless because it does not cure confuses ours.

Relativism becomes careless when it infers that, because every judgement occurs within a system, no system can fail. Essentialism becomes careless when it infers that, because a system succeeds, its terms must describe reality independently of every possible system.

This applies also to the present account. It cannot survey every other system from a place outside perception. Its equanimity is itself a manner of seeing. It makes relations visible which a more sectarian view may conceal; yet it also weakens intensities which only commitment can disclose.

The partisan and the non-partisan, rather than simply possessing unequal quantities of the same knowledge, are instead looking at different things.

Ultimately, every system reveals by omitting.