What is Truth?
I wrote this discussion for my principles and practices class at the University of Rochester. The professor asked us to discuss a topic from a menu of topics, the topic I chose related to "what is truth?" which an emphasis on distinguishing between "big-T Truth" and "little-t Truth" as were presented in our course material. I have included my recorded discussion and a text version of it below.
What is Truth?
If we have so-called, Big T and Little t truths, then what is a truth overall?
To me, truth is a state of agreement. This agreement can exist within oneself, among a group of people, or between different aspects of nature—from soil, to plants, to animals, to us.
Truth is an agreement that only exists temporarily, each time the moment asks it’s question, truth, if it decides to agree, is embodied and reconstituted anew.
Truth is like water freezing just enough to skate on; Truth is harmony in song that makes you want to tap your feet, or dance. Truth is the feeling we get when we gaze at a sunset, a baby's smile, our lover's eyes. Truth is the beautiful and the sublime, the comic and the tragic. Truth is the majestic order found in science and laws of math and physics, truth is the marvel of complexity in the mind. It’s the awe we feel when we ponder the vastness of outer space. Truth is art. Truth is the sequoia and the waterfall. Truth is the soup of chemical neurotransmitters being mixed in just the right way to activate a biological state of agreement. Truth is good.
How do we reach truth? For humans, there appear two main ways. One is via facts (so called Big T’s) the other is via feelings (so called little t's).
Immanuel Kant looked extensively into what truth is. He also divided the world into facts and feelings. He said there are two main faculties in the human mind, one is the faculty of sensation, the other is the faculty of understanding.
This faculty of sensation takes in the entirety of every sensory input you can imagine, all at once, for example, all our sights, sounds, smells, touch, all get taken in by the faculty of sensation. Think of this as like every single pixel on your computer screen, each one a different color, but instead of pixels, Kant called each of these sensory inputs intuitions. Kant felt at any moment there are an infinite number of intuitions available to us, for this reason he called it a manifold of intuitions (which means infinite). The way I see it, If our organism is in agreement with this manifold of sensory intuitions, in positive intuitive judgment with them, well then we feel good, we feel right, and we have a felt truth at the sensory level. This to me is a kind of little t truth.
The second faculty that Kant recognized is the faculty of understanding. For Kant the faculty of understanding takes the manifold of intuitions and converts all these pixels into concepts. Imagine all the pixels on your screen, start off blurry, but ultimately, you can see the picture, they form into, say it is a house, with a door and two windows. If the other person I am with also recognizes the picture as a house with a door and two windows, well then we potentially have truth, because we both agree that this is a house with a door and two windows, conceptually. But what kind of truth is this?
Kant realized for any concept to be agreed upon in this way, each person doing the agreement must already know what a house, a door and a window is. Kant also realized that, in order for this to be the case, then we must teach people what a house, a door and a window are. So even here we have only little t truths, they are dependent on the world and subjective opinions in the world, such as us learning what a house, a door and a window are, and a tribesperson in Africa may not know a house, door or window the same way we do, whether that is a house or not is really just a felt truth.
Kant wanted to go further, he wanted to know is there any knowledge that is not relative, that is absolutely true? Kant calls this kind of absolutely true knowledge “a priori", that is prior to (empirical) existence. For example, if we had a human brain in a jar, who was never told anything and also never had any sensory inputs, what would it know?
Kant then looks at mathematics and geometry as a possibility of being this a priori knowledge, he says we are getting closer, but he knows that even mathematics requires language that must be taught, like 1, 2, 3, etc he wanted to go deeper. Kant then looked to Aristotle, he extended Aristotle’s work on categories, to realize that actually beneath math, is something far simpler, base logic, in order to have any knowledge at all, from mathematics, to knowledge of a house, the faculty of understanding really only needs 4 things,
Quantity (Unity, Plurality, Totality, One thing, multiple things, all things)
Quality (Reality, Negation, Limitation)
Relation (Substance, Causality, Community)
Modality (Possibility, Actuality, Necessity)
So, for Kant, the only real big T truths that are absolute are these things. He calls them his categories. But he goes on to say these things are not really knowledge, they are governing principles of our faculty of understanding, and that knowledge only actually comes about when we combine these categories with the manifold of intuition, from before, that we spoke about.
This is where Kant gets a bit spicy, he challenges Newton as well as Leibniz and now Einstein on the concept of space-time. He says, so, if knowledge only ever comes from the combination of categories, in my mind, with this manifold of intuition (all my sensations), then knowledge must be something constructed, as part of a relationship between the observer and the object being observed.
He extrapolates from here stating that space-time therefore cannot exist in the world objectively, space time must be a property of our own mind. Furthermore, nor do the laws of physics, math or science, exist in the world, instead they live only in our mind, and we put them in the world through our act of observation. Nature agrees with laws of math, because we impose them on nature by observing it, nature itself, has no laws. We, the observer, can never know what the real world is like, because all we can do is use our mind and our faculties of understanding and sensibilities to see it, we are bound by our tools of observation.
So, to sum, truth is an agreement. We can reach agreement in multiple ways, two of which in humans seem to be feeling and fact, so called little T and big T. Feelings are true agreement when there is a shared positive intuitive judgment. Facts are true agreement when there is a shared positive conceptual judgment.
There were two kinds of facts we spoke about, recall those that require empirical learning, such as what a house, door and a window are, these cannot be objective because they rely on subjective learning data. Then we have mathematics and beneath that our logical categories, but these do not exist in nature as laws, but live in our mind and are imposed on nature by our mind.
Many human minds, such as children developmentally in the Piagetian pre-cognitive phase or neurodiverse individuals, or animals and plants, do not perceive reality necessarily in the same way as me. They don't formulate reality from categories and concepts, again categories and concepts don't exist in the real word, we just impose them there with our minds, the same way colors don't exist in objects, our mind puts them there. So I cannot rely on these categories and concepts as my only way of reaching agreement, I must account for people who cannot or do not want to reach agreement this way.
Nietzsche, a student (and dissenter) of Kant provides some of my favorite expounding on truth. I recall the opening of his work Beyond Good and Evil, where Nietzsche tells us that "Truth is a woman". What does this peculiar statement mean? Well, Nietzsche sought love in his lifetime with women and was very unsuccessful, he saw love as something irrational and mysterious, and Nietzsche felt then, to know truth is to win a heart, for Nietzsche, the quest for truth is a seduction not a science. We may use reason and the god of Apollo as one way to romance truth, but we must also account for Dionysus, and the path towards truth via feeling and chaos.
For Nietzsche he wanted both Apollo and Dionysus to agree. He claimed our western world of today has been dominated by Apollo (via Socrates) and that we are entering a new age which he accounts with his proclamation that God is dead.
How does this apply to my counseling practice? For me, a fundamental tenet of mental health is letting go of negative judgments. If I can realize that nothing is good, nothing is evil, nothing needs to be any certain way and I don't need to do any certain thing. In fact even death is nothing to be frightened of, just another change in a world always changing. If I can realize this, I have health, health is obtained by removing negative judgments, and treating each moment as it is. If we can do this, we can move from a state of war to a state of peace, where my faculty of understanding and my faculty of sensibility are in harmony within myself and with others and my environment.
