No Truth but this One?

It is not uncommon to hear us Nietzscheans and Deconstructivists raving that "There is no truth!" And it is just as common to hear someone retort, "But that's the truth, right?" It is very much like the rejoinder to the similar affirmation, "'God is dead,' said Nietzsche," namely, "'Nietzsche is dead,' says God." And, I think, it is about as cogent, which is to say, not very. Am I contradicting myself when I say (it is true that) there is no truth? Is it methodological madness to say that we can never arrive at the truth? And am I therefore stuck saying that any old reading of the data (whether of scientific research results or literary texts) is as good as any other? I don't think any of these dire results follow. Let me try to get clearer on my position on truth.

I invite you to go back in history to the ancient philosophical sect of the Skeptics, founded by Pyrrho. Pyrrho, like his latter-day counterpart Tomas Henry Huxley (who coined the term "agnostic"), pointedly did not dogmatically deny the possibility of certain knowledge. He merely averred that he did not find it available. Skeptics ventured that certainty did not appear obtainable because the old philosophical debates still raged. If any side to any debate (on God, free will, the good, etc.) had definitive proof or knock-down arguments to mount, the debates would have been resolved long ago. It is not hard to see the relative force and the reasonable character of arguments on both sides of many issues, e.g., abortion and euthanasia. The Skeptics concluded, tentatively, mind you, that certainty, real knowledge therefore did not seem available to poor mortals. If somehow some genius one day did discover some new evidence or some definitive argument, well, good! It would be good to know. But in the meantime, it seems like probability is generally a good enough guide for everyday life in this world. Isn't it? We have to make tentative judgments under a deadline. In daily life, we usually do not have the option of sitting on the fence forever, as we do regarding unverifiable matters. So why worry about the supposedly ultimate questions which seem beyond our reach?

So, according to Skepticism, the truth seems so far to be unobtainable, though it may indeed exist. But if it does, it appears to be moot. If we cannot seem to access it, and that is all the assertion the Skeptic is making, what good is it? If there is an objective Truth "out there," there might as well not be and to all intents and purposes there isn't—if we can't know it. And so far it appears we can't. Objective, "capital T" Truth would seem to be like the tree falling in the forest with no ears to hear it. This is what I think the Nietzschean "death of Truth" proclamation amounts to. It is not a statement about Truth, a pretense of knowing it, knowing about it that it does not exist. That would be absurd. But the assertion is not directed to this hypothetical Truth that might or might not exist. It is rather directed back toward us as would-be knowers. It is a phenomenological account of epistemology. Inductive, not deductive.

Some are distressed by the broader implications of this skepticism for science, history, and literary interpretation. Is there no true reading, no definitive knowledge? Must we remain humbly satisfied with "merely" tentative and provisional conclusions"? It may frustrate some not to be able to dogmatize. They may fear a relativistic alternative, like that espoused by subjectivistic charlatans like the insufferable Deepak Chopra. But they needn't be. This sort of skepticism, what Tillich called "methodological doubt," grows out of simple experience. Look at the history of scientific "discovery," of literary interpretation, of historical revisionism. In all cases we see a regular, if tumultuous replacement of accepted paradigms by initially controversial new ones. More and more become convinced that the new paradigm makes better, more naturally inductive, simpler sense of the data, especially of data "anomalous" in terms of the old paradigm. Usually new paradigms encompass most of the old ones, expanding their scope and explanatory power, but knocking down false boundaries and solving longstanding puzzles. Since we have managed to get closer and closer, wouldn't it be premature to declare that we have finally arrived? Try out the latest paradigm and see if it helps. Maybe it will one day work it out of a job. As a skeptic's bumper sticker says,"What if you're wrong?" After all, you have been sure of this and that before, only to admit later on that you had been ignorant of this, had failed to take that into account. Think of "Truth" as like the North Star: you navigate by it, but you don't expect to get to it!

It is like the Via Negativa in theology: you can't ever know an Infinite Truth (God), but you can make progress by gradually disabusing yourself of more and more misconceptions. (This also means that we can learn to distinguish and reject implausible and groundless theories and interpretations, but to do that is not to supply the Truth as if by default.) There seems to be no escape from tentativeness, and that means there seems to be no likelihood of arriving at "Truth." This does not mean, as Sartre said, that nothing "is the case." It is simply a sober assessment of human capabilities. And then, again, what is the "cash value" of a Truth that supposedly exists but cannot, as far as we know, be obtained?

Another quipping objection often made is "How can you verify your methodology?" Aren't the scientific method and the techniques of biblical criticism merely posited dogmatically? Well, do you think that is true for mathematical axioms? It is not that they are self-evidently true, and that's the point here. It's just that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Especially since we are admitting that all scholarly research results are tentative and provisional, it is no shame to admit that we are "merely" following the rules of the evidential game because there is no alternative. Religious faith claims are certainly no better, being utterly arbitrary. Scientific, critical methodology is the only game in town, or probability means nothing. It seems to work pretty well, and that's all we're claiming. That's all we pretend to be doing. If somebody can tell us a better, a sure-fire way of obtaining objective Truth, I am eager to hear it.

Is there meaning? Or is meaning mere metaphor? Are concepts only metaphors whose metaphorical character we have lost sight of? And is to say so supposed to be a real truth, not a metaphor? No, because, again, whoever says this is only engaging in a self-critique of his own attempts to hold fast conceptual abstractions of objective truth. To say, "truth and meaning seem to be metaphorical" is to say, "Hmmm, I don't seem to be escaping metaphoricity and breaking through to an underlying Truth…" This is Skepticism, not dogmatism.

Compare our problem with the supposed "faith" of atheists who deny God. Are they not exercising faith in this denial, since they can never prove the negative that God does not exist? No, or at least I know of no such dogmatic "faitheists." As I understand atheism, its proponents are simply saying that belief in God, acceptance of the God hypothesis, does not seem one of William James's "live options." There just does not seem to the atheist that there is sufficient reason to take the God hypothesis seriously. Sure, there might possibly be a God out there, but is there really any reason to think so? There might be little green men living inside the moon, but what are the chances? Who's going to hold the door open on that one? Same with God for the atheist. He is not being a dogmatist. And the same goes for the denial of Truth.

So says Zarathustra.