What’s going on? Some degree of aletheia, hopefully.
[Greek) Merges the English ideas of truth and reality.
What do we mean when we label something as “true”? We mean that the statement or proposition corresponds with the way things really are. If I say, “There is a cloud in the sky,” and you look up to see a nice, white puffy cumulus mass of water particles, then we can in most cases agree that my statement is “true.” This seeming simplicity is a bit deceiving. Conversation can sometimes lead to disagreements, showing that the conversants have differing viewpoints regarding some component of “reality.” One’s facts are to another, opinions. One’s objectivity is to another, bias, and so on.
The word Aletheia brings a main source of conflict to the forefront. Whatever the argument is or pretends to be about, we are wise to recognize, even in the heat of battle, that it is a confrontation between two subjective realities. They no doubt touch objective reality at certain points, but the more the argument goes on, the less that matters to the participants. Why? Because the confrontation can become a war of subjectivities. Once it gets to that point, any real agreement is near impossible. When I am defending something a subjective viewpoint – no matter how true to facts it may or not be – then what I am really defending is me. My subjectivity. My experience. My sense of myself.
Do I really believe that a given viewpoint on any significant matter is completely out of my own cultural and psychological makeup? Have I not brought my own unique existence, life experience, deepest desires, and mental habits to my routine perceptions? To have a viewpoint is to have a subjective viewpoint, a viewpoint that is married to the subject: me.
One human being is a culture, participating in a greater culture, made up of millions of other cultures. “Reality” is vast beyond even the greatest minds, and the greatest minds have always admitted it, each in hers own way. “Reality” would be beyond even a large group of the greatest minds trying to work it all out. Even the most brilliant subjectivities, working together, keep “objective Reality” from being much more than a foggy jumble of shadows in the distance.
For some of us, it is only our frenzy to “prove” what we “know” to those who might disagree with us or judge us that keeps us from laying back on a nice warm comfy chair of good enough.
I have a few inklings, just as you do and don’t. But I am increasingly learning to peruse my own subjectivity qualmly. Same for my objectivity. Let us not unface it: Any world view based on the assumption that one post-modern (one who is hypnotized to the point of self-congratulatory bewilderment) can turn off subjectivity to explore objectivity, and thus subsequently pretend that there is an objectivity that can corral hers subjectivity…
…is probably, as I say, hypnotized to the point of self-congratulatory bewilderment. “Science”? Pshaw. “Education”? Bosh. “Justice”? Not on this watch. “Government”? Don’t get one side of the aisle (when the other is in power) started.
Am I pretending that my mirror is a window while telling everyone else that there window is also a mirror? Of course! Did you not read the prodromal? A person is a complex culture, set in the midst of a complex culture made up of countless other complex cultures. S/he may know how to fry an egg or hammer a nail, but that is a far fry from “making the world a better place” – or even defining the terms “make,” “world,” or “better” with some degree of the sanity we all pretend we have. Shall I hie on?
Having, and routinely employing, adequate personal resources for assessing what is inherently beneficial to humanity in general in the long term.
