Readings

by Rick Dietrich

And Pontius Pilate Said . . .

What is truth? This is an interesting and important question, if for no other reason than that human beings have, we discover at a very early age, widely different ideas about what is true. And their different ideas cause no end of argument. Indeed, they may cause endless argument. To take a current example, Darwinians and proponents of intelligent design will never come to terms, because they have completely different ideas about what constitutes what is, or can be, true.

I come to this conclusion, at a relatively later age, especially after having spent some time lately reading about truth and truth-telling. I began with Simon Blackburn’s wonderful little book, Truth. It just jumped off the shelf of one my local bookstores, off the shelf and into my hand; what could I do but read it?

And what can I say about Blackburn? I’d like to say that he writes about truth pretty much what you’d expect of a twentieth-century British analytic philosopher; but that might imply that I knew what I meant when I said that. I did say something very much like it, though, at a recent party—to a philosopher, and he nodded as if I’d said something that actually meant something, that might, in fact, be true—not just bull****. (I’m using that term philosophically, as you shall see—and because this is a family newspaper, I shall henceforth substitute a form of shooting the bull for the asterisked term, except when quoting from Harry Frankfurt’s book, discussed below. Then, I’ll use the asterisks.)

I nodded back at my philosopher friend and breathed a sigh of relief when we moved—quickly—to another subject: kitchens, I think. Still, I regretted we hadn’t said more. I had just read Blackburn, who isn’t writing so much about telling the truth (as opposed to lying or shooting the bull) as about what is Truth— with a capital T—what constitutes Truth. Blackburn, as I understand it, ends up with a pretty minimalist notion of that. What science discovers is true. And common sense: those things we know in common, that are universal in our experience, they are true.

God is not true, according to Blackburn’s standards, because the experience of God is not universal. God may be part of your experience; but God is not part of Blackburn’s. That does not mean, however, that Blackburn doesn’t accept as true a number of things that he has not personally verified: the result of any number of scientific experiments, for example, performed in labs with equipment not available to him. True, these are repeated, repeatable experiments. But it is also true that he has not repeated them, and in any number of cases no doubt can not repeat them himself.

So, I put the book down wondering (among other things) about the experience of mystics, their sense of being in the presence of divine transcendence. This experience has also been repeated universally—across national, cultural, even religious boundaries. Blackburn might argue that repeated doesn’t mean repeatable. But is it simply possible that these men and women also have “equipment” that Blackburn lacks? If he had it, would what is true change for him?

In her 1989 minor classic Lying, Sisela Bok is not really interested in what is True; Bok is interested in telling the truth as opposed to lying. I’ll confess I didn’t read Bok’s book when it first came out, but it was republished in 1999, and it remains in print because it is still worth reading. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t very much of its time, long on local detail and preachy—one might even say at the risk of being politically incorrect schoolmarmish. But schoolmarms have often offered good advice. At one time—in a fictional America— we depended on them along with preachers for our moral compass. And they were right: we ought to tell the truth; there are good reasons for it.

Bok is especially good at examining the reasons we lie—both the “good reasons” we give ourselves and our real reasons. We often argue, for example, that we are lying to protect someone or something, especially a larger public interest, when we are actually lying because it is easier. Or, it seems easier. At the time. As Bok points out again and again, we tend to think of lies as single events; we fail to gauge their long-term consequences. Moreover, we tend to believe that our lie won’t be uncovered. But it very, very often is; and the result is that the one we lied to no longer trusts us to tell the truth—except, perhaps, when it’s convenient. But when is that? The one lied to can’t tell.

Bok is also good at placing us again and again in the position of the one lied to, and asking, “If the tables were turned, if you were the one on the receiving end, would you rather be lied to ‘for your own good’ (or any of the other reasons liars decide to lie), or would you rather be told the truth?” We would almost always rather be told the truth, she concludes; and I’m convinced.

We would also generally rather be told the truth than shot the bull, though that does not mean that bullshot, which is to be distinguished from lying, doesn’t have its uses. This is according to the moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt in his little essay “On Bull****,” recently republished in a small book by Princeton University Press. To get at the distinction between lying and bullshooting, Frankfurt cites a conversation between Fania Pascal and the philosopher Wittgenstein. Pascal had just had her tonsils out and was feeling sorry and sorry for herself, when Wittgenstein called. When she described herself to him as feeling “just like a dog that has been run over,” he responded, in effect, that that was bull. She didn’t know what it felt like either to be a dog or to be run over.”

Wittgenstein reacts as he does, Frankfurt avers, because he “construes [Pascal] as engaged in activity in which the distinction between what is true and what is false is crucial, and yet [she is] taking no interest in whether what she says is true or false. . . . It is just this lack of connection to a concern with the truth, this indifference to how things really are,” Frankfurt goes on, “that I consider to be the essence of bull****.”

So, how is it not lying? Consider “bull sessions.” While such discussions may be both intense and significant, they are not “for real.” Rather, they allow participants “to try out various thoughts and attitudes in order to see how it feels to hear themselves saying such things and in order to discover how others respond, without its being assumed that they are committed to what they say: it is understood by everyone in a bull session that the statements people make do not necessarily reveal what they really believe or how they really feel.” The purpose of bull sessions is not to communicate truth, or even belief, but to try on various arguments to see how they fit.

This helps us see again how bullshooting and lying are different. The liar is concerned with the truth. “In order to invent a lie, he must think he knows what is true.” The bullshooter, on the other hand, “is on neither the side of the true or the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all,” but rather on the impression he is making and what he may gain from that impression.

So, finally, Frankfurt believes, the bullshooter is a greater enemy of the truth than the liar. The liar plainly rejects the authority of the truth and opposes himself to it. The bullshooter doesn’t care about the truth at all. And this can become a habit as “other gains” become more important than the truth.

Finally, it is not true that you can’t bullshoot a bullshooter; for a bullshooter can end up bullshooting himself.

One of the many things Michael Lynch is concerned about in his book, True to Life: Why Truth Matters, is how truth and caring about the truth may contribute to human happiness. But even before happiness is integrity.

Having integrity is more than being authentic. Authenticity has only to do with “being true to yourself . . . identifying with the desires that guide your [own] action.” Integrity requires “caring for the truth for its own sake,” beyond the self and its desires. It means being willing to pursue the truth, to stand for the truth you have pursued and discovered, but also to be open to the truth. Moreover, “to be open to the truth is to be willing to admit you are wrong.”

This is all well and good. Faith involves pursuing the truth; it involves living in the truth one has found in faith; and it means a willingness to be corrected, because we see now only in part. But Lynch’s notion of what is true is nothing like faith. It is no larger than Blackburn’s, “that a belief is true when things are as that belief says they are, and not because, say, nine out of ten people recommend it” (Lynch says). “The point of having an idea of truth,” then, “is to sort correct judgments from incorrect ones” (italics mine).

No doubt I am guided through the world of things by—I make judgments about this world based on—that kind of truth. But while such a “minimal objective truth” helps me negotiate, I don’t see how it brings any more satisfaction than correctly solving a crossword puzzle. Or how it brings happiness at all, not to mention true happiness, or joy.

For more from Rick Dietrich, Dee Wade and others, log onto their blog, theologic-als-bar-andgrill. blogspot.com.