Truth Served Here

I can't tell if this post is difficult because the subject is difficult or because my brain is just being difficult. Nevertheless, here it it. If nothing else, it demonstrates why this blog will always have an upper limit of popularity.

I am in 100% agreement with Berdyaev in his assertion that "Truth is revealed only by the creative activity of the spirit; outside this, truth is incomprehensible and unattainable." Here again, this goes to the freedom without which truth cannot be known. So, in freedom we discover the truth that truth may only be discovered in freedom.

The bottom line is that freedom, truth, and creativity are all bound together, to such an extent that they are really three sides of the same object. What could be this higher object? Person, perhaps? Well, for Berdyaev, "I am the Truth" equates to "The Absolute Man is Truth," so we seem to be sniffing around in the same attractor.

Or, if we reverse imagineer Person, what do we discover? Freedom. Creativity. Truth. What else? Love, which is free and creative goodness; beauty, which is the truth of creativity; virtue, which is the beauty of freedom.

These seem to be the biggies. There is also courage, which is fighting for what is good and true; prudence, which is the balanced consideration and application of all these general factors in particular situations; and justice, which, according to my son, means treating others the same way they mess with you.

What about personal failure, i.e., the failure to become a proper person? What are these assouls missing? Well, let's see, it depends. There is Harry Reid, who is soulless; Nancy Pelosi, who is brainless; Barack Obama, who is ruthless; the media-academic complex, which is truthless; the politico-cultural left, which is freedomless; etc.

Each of these testifies to a "social accumulation of lies which have been made into social norms," and to sub-persons who "consider falsehood more useful than truth." Indeed, falsehood is always useful, even pragmatic, whereas the highest truths are completely useless to the depraved worldlings who worship power instead of truth. Their falsehood is "holy duty" for the sake of some higher purpose revealed only to them, e.g., socialized medicine.

In contrast to these fractured fairytools, "Truth, the one integral truth, is God, and to perceive Truth, is to enter divine life."

And "truth serves no one and nothing." Rather, "we must serve truth" (Berdyaev, emphasis mine).

Now, here is a subtle point: can truth be "proved?" Yes and no. The answer is "no" if by proof we mean by using only the tools of the tenured, because such tools are ultimately tautologous.

In reality, the world is an open system, so nothing within the world can possibly contain the world in its own truth. Thus, according to Berdyaev, what is called "proof" may well be "an obstacle of necessity encountered in the way of knowing the truth," for "every proof rests in the unproven."

For this reason, "Creative philosophy must free itself from the tempting power of proof, must fulfill the act of renouncing this safe adaptation to necessity." The operative word there is creative philosophy, for there can be no end to creativity, even while it must be oriented to a truth that can never be attained, i.e., proved.

Rather, it seems that truth must be assumed, or better, lived, in free creativity. To simply "prove" it in the mundane way would be an end of the adventure, would it not? After all, no one spends their life in search of a truth already proved.

Indeed, that word: "proved." It is in the past tense. But what if truth is in the future, or vertically above? In that case it can never be proved, if only because of the temporal structure of reality. You could say that to prove it would spell the end of time. In other words, if there were a fully attainable timeless truth, it would deny the distinct -- and humanly vital -- differences between past, present, and future.

In the closed world of scientistic proof, truths are necessary truths, and therefore undermine creativity, i.e, truth lived. This kind of truth is adaptation to the world, whereas the very different truth we are advocating involves adaptation to... to what?

We can't say what, because to say it would be to contain it in language, which is the one thing we cannot do, on pain of neutralizing it. Which is why we use the placeholder O to accumulate the truth-meaning which never stops. I hope. Its most important feature is the hole in the middle, which, thankfully, is always half empty. If it weren't, I would have nothing left to say with this big shovel.

"In philosophy, what had been proved would not be creative knowledge: it would only be adaptation." This latter type of proof "lies always in the middle, neither at the beginning nor at the end, and hence there can be no proof of initial or final truths."

Except perhaps in the appearance of the first and last, Absolute Man, i.e., Alpha and Omega. Thus, "The reason why Jesus did not reply to Pilate's question, 'What is truth?,' is related to this. He was Truth, but Truth which is to be divined and discovered through the whole course of history."

"There is no criterion of truth outside the witness of truth itself, and it is wrong to seek absolute guarantees, which always demean the truth. Such is the consciousness of man, at the borderline between two worlds."

And in this confined area, "pure truth" would "burst the world apart" (Berdyaev).