Essay on Knowledge and Consciousness
By Joe Weissman
December 2005
(Introduction)
There are questions regarding the nature, origin and purpose of conscious existence which undermine the entire pursuit of purposeful thinking in general and philosophy in particular. The valuation of truth, or whether there are undiscovered patterns or limitations of conscious and unconscious thought, or if there can be and what is the exact explanation of the purpose and meaning of the universe, are all questions of this kind. Such questions have a habit of being formulated in a way that is often paradoxical and lacking either an obviously intuitive or rational solution. For this reason, many philosophers of the twentieth century have criticized the investigation of questions like ’What is the meaning of life?’ or ’What are good and evil?’ or 'Does God exist?' as being simply nonsensical. To them, such formulations are inappropriate uses of language. Thus these critics argue that the questions themselves are contradictory. Undoubtedly, the analytics are correct in acknowledging the importance of being aware of the seductive power of language. We all must take heed of this sage admonition and consequently endeavor to be precise in order to ensure we are not talking past one another.
The kinds of questions the analytics criticize are those whose formulations lack empirical definitions, where any kind of answer seems to lack a scientific way to support itself under close scrutiny. But many of these questions arise from internal, subjective contradictions which immediately suggest that another sort of approach is required. We must hold in suspicion even the empirical mode of ascertaining truth for in the words of Descartes, de omnibus dubitandum*. We must remember that even seeking psychological, religious or metaphysical approaches already assumes a great deal that is perversely denied by the sheer force of doubt inherent in holding and posing honestly such questions to oneself. One can only be as confident of an answer as of the method by which the answer was obtained.
The ultimate answers—the precise, unambiguous explanations--are cruelly denied in full by structural limitations inherent in the traditional totalizing interpretations of reality. This is not to advocate pessimism, rather to motivate critical thinking about why traditional interpretations fail so dramatically to answer what, on the surface, are seemingly simple questions. In answer to the positivist critique of the validity of these questions, we indeed observe there is little that can be said objectively about the validity possessed by any particular answer which could resolve such difficulties. But we are not so much interested in any specific question of this nature yet; our inquiry begins by considering the origin and import of the human capacity to question.
We respond to the positivist critique only by remarking that invalidating a question by reducing it to a semantical game does not suffice to explain the reason why that sort of question has arisen or keeps arising in the first place. In the first part of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche suspects philosophers of having similar preconceived metaphysical motivations when he criticizes many thinkers for their uncriticized positive valuation of truth: "What in us really wants truth?…Why not rather untruth?" There is a hidden sort of faith in the assumption of the value of truth. Positivists reject the notion that this sort of faith reaches an absolute, arguing that meaning is always relative to context. We shall struggle in this paper to show this critique constitutes a false exclusion, that to the degree to which relativism is practical, interesting and important, the view can meaningfully coexist and synthesize with absolute faith. We shall demonstrate that faith, as such, is intrinsic to human nature, perception and consciousness. We conclude that faith is not a universal absolute but a desire for the infinite and the eternal—that is, a desire for foundationary conceptualizations characterized by a permanence and unity of which imply they are metaphysically other than the reality with which we are directly confronted. Exemplary members of this class of belief are consciousness, the infinite and the True. Our ability to question is not opposed to faith, as those who like to polarize religion and science, or science and philosophy (or for that matter, religion and philosophy) would like to have us believe. On the contrary, questioning characterizes the underlying motivation behind science, religion and philosophy.
Discussion
In a way, this entire essay is an answer to Nietzsche’s question about the will to truth. Accordingly, this essay is most simply an investigation into the nature of truth. Another aspect of the investigation focuses on the way we construct belief systems and what the relation is between beliefs, knowledge and external reality. Precisely we are interested in the sort of paradoxes and contradictions that emerge regardless of the way one chooses to construct subjectivity. I will examine the following sorts of questions: Are beliefs simply opinions or do some beliefs constitute knowledge? Is it possible to ground any belief system in indisputable evidence? Does meticulous investigation reveal an absolute, external being-in-itself, or do we distort our perceptions to align them with our predictions and belief systems? Answering any of these questions first involves answering a simpler, but immediately more confounding question: how can anyone overcome subjectivity (or if it‘s impossible, why is this so?) We now have a clearer idea of where we're headed with this line of questioning: we are critically investigating constructions of the nature of truth and what effect these constructions will have on our perception of both interior and exterior reality.
I shall argue that truth is only possible with rational beings, and even to them, only by transcending one-sided perspectives entirely. It is important to remember that any apparent order yielded by imposing any given conceptual 'grid' upon reality emerges as a result of the imposition of the system. If we decide to be skeptical of the idea of truth, we must in theory attempt to doubt systematized thinking entirely.
Scientific and mathematical axioms do not describe but prescribe reality, grounding it ultimately in fundamentals (like mass or gravity) or axioms (“both B and B’ cannot be true,â€) apprehending it finally as an abstraction. Reason generalizes from the particular to the universal and then in reverse: from universal laws and assumptions regarding environmental conditions generalizing to the specific event. Fittingly, such systems or grids succeed insofar as they apparently account for an objective totality--but unremarkably, the double movement structure involved in such explanatory schemata typically fails to do justice to the interior life, to qualia. They cannot encapsulate the simultaneously integrated yet separated quality of human existence, which constitutes a purely infinite existence trapped on all sides by subjective paradoxes (pain, suffering, sorrow, injustice) and both internal and external contradictions and limitations (reason and emotion, mind and body, life and death, individual and society, universal and particular.)
This double movement of the scientific method invites synthesis only in the form of revolutions, resulting in a sophistication of methods or a revision of perceptual interpretative schemata. Since the observations and the methods belong to and accomplish a particular belief system, the resultant interpretations are only as meaningful and free of flaws as the system from which they originate. We shall say, perhaps trivially, that belief systems (‘grids’) do not create or foster understanding in a vacuum, but that these constructions are always created, learned and used by consciousness as an aid within a specific context as a tool to extend a preexisting understanding which was not originally grounded in totalized rational systems.
This preexisting understanding (which I shall argue is the grasping of an origin, a going beyond oneself into the absolute) is one of faith. Thus, the first section of this paper is dedicated to an understanding of what faith is (we shall say there that faith is a form of trust without a priori knowledge.) The second section will be concerned with the relation between faith and truth, and we shall argue that there is a necessary relationship--we shall say that the idea of a truth is founded on an act of faith. Once we have scoped out the territory, we shall investigate in the light of our conclusions predictions about reason and the possibility of authenticity.
This kind of investigation is always motivated by confusion and wonder. Reality is not rational but we are (for better or for worse) animals equipped with reason attempting to make sense out of the world. The desire for orderly truths is a natural one; but we must not allow the will to truth to become so strong as to exert a distorting influence upon our perceptions. We must recognize when classification becomes falsification. Our cognitive life is an incessant grasping for, struggling with truth, so a theory of truth is important. We must recognize when our value systems conflict with our belief systems and we must be prepared as rational and emotional creatures to handle such conflicts, so it is an important and interesting question whether and how we can construct a roadmap of paradox and truth--such is the overall intention of this investigation.
(Though I am greatly indebted to the ideas of Levinas, Nietzsche, Kirkegaard, Sartre, Quine and Plato for inspiration, the arguments and conclusions reached in this paper are wholly the results of my own original cognitive functions.)
Section I: Faith
By faith I intend a form of trust without a priori knowledge. Faith is the primary relation describing the self’s reliance on the accuracy of the products of a cognitive function (memory, perception, etc.) Faith, then, will consist of two interrelated and overlapping parts: an emotional part and a rational part. The emotional or subconscious part is mostly unformulated, ambiguous and nonlinguistic, but nonetheless, this kind of faith (remember, faith in and of the products of one’s mind) underlies a majority of our beliefs about the world. The other part of faith is the rational part, which is recognition of an intrinsic good property a given ‘grid’ possesses. This kind of rational faith comprises practical cohesive beliefs about the consistency of everyday objects.
The superficial but practical aspect of the self recognizes familiar objects as objects, not as particulars but as universalizable instances of a central exemplary member of a class and a particular at once, finding no contradiction within this double meaning. These kind of practical, everyday assumptions and casual disambiguations are grounded in rational faith, which forms the basis of scientific and philosophical thinking. Faith, comprised of both a rational part and an emotional part, is a mode of the relationship of understanding, but rational faith--and thus rational understanding--is necessarily incomplete.
Our systems of totalizing and processing information on a conscious, rational level are structured in such a way as to permanently deny unfettered access to absolute truth (even though it must be assumed to exist in order to argue about anything at all.) Truth is beyond the horizon of rational faith. Also, not only are universals walking an uncertain tightrope, but any major or minor belief, or any one of our everyday heuristics (rules of thumb, or one of a set of guiding principles,) is always subject to modification or replacement.
Rational faith is then subject to endless criticism. Criticism is a doubting of a truth: it requires understanding, but not belief. Understanding is necessarily more primary than even emotional faith, for we cannot even apprehend, let alone believe, accept and have faith in something we cannot understand. Understanding is a grasping of an origin. Understand surpasses the individual consciousness and relates it meaningfully to an absolute. Understanding is the source of meaning and is thus related to cognitive functions, context and consciousness but is not faith, relates to but is not body, mind or soul. This is because understanding precedes these modes of existence, since understanding must precede any single act of clarification, distinction and classification.
Even a theoretical single act of “understanding†would not qualify as an object of consciousness. Understanding is always a relation to consciousness. Understanding is broader than faith, since faith is a mode of understanding. In a sense, faith would be a subjective measure of an individuals’ confidence in a belief or belief system. Since rational faith cannot ground itself except in its own patterns, the paradox of truth resurges since a belief in truth is grounded not in reason and evidence but in desire for certainty and faith. Truth is not definable by reference to anything but itself. Conceptualizations of truth are recursive since any definition assumes its existence a priori.
We understand a system through practice. Familiarity is already recognition of a persistent reality external to and radically different from, though participating in, my own. Repeated use of symbols becomes understanding through a gradual accumulation of beliefs about relationships, such as cause and effect, or associations between experiences expressed as emotions like anger or sadness. Observed phenomena are attached to internal physiological and emotional states, like pleasure or pain, and these associations then become the objects of new associations.
Gradually each of us forms vaguely coherent ‘systems’ (which will be understood now in the broadest sense possible) with pleasurable experiences associated with a successful utilization of a system and painful ones with failure to do so. Learning is a training of animal consciousness to respond in specific ways to certain stimuli, to make relevant distinctions. Training aims at understanding and obedience: we must be careful not to limit learning just to using an object since both the technique learned and an experience of learning the technique (understanding and consciousness) are involved.
Our primordial relationship with any knowledge is faith, which subtends both people and objects in a meaningful relation. For example, emotion is not founded on systematized thinking. The emotional aspect, which precedes and blossoms into rationality, is a relationship of enjoyment. Raw experience, from which emotions are slowly distilled, precedes both faith and understanding. Suffering and happiness belong more properly to this emotional sphere, yet to reason they are distinguished clearly as relations between the subjective and beliefs about exterior or interior reality. Such associations–but in the case of enjoyment, not the relation itself–are ultimately grounded on faith.
A great amount of faith is born within us the moment we become members of society. We are animals beaten and coerced into becoming human beings. We realize that faith can be and often is inculcated as a part of training. Indoctrination is based in faith. Indeed, the process of ‘civilization’ (or enculturation) is a by-any-means necessary attempt to found faith in certain institutions, belief systems, values, etc., within a mind. Both belief and faith can be and often are enforced just as a desire to perform a given action can be coerced. We like to deny this fact since it appears initially unpleasant, yet society is based on the idea that a mutual agreement can be made—freely chosen and consented to, coerced or enforced--between everyone.
Productive, cooperative activity assumes mutual agreement, which requires belief and facility in a neutral mediating system, like the legal system or international treaties or road signs or craft-specific terminology. Any specific occasion of use of these kinds of system is posterior to an agreement (enforced or voluntary) which was based on faith. Specific grids are perpetuated by social training and become embedded in the fabric of culture, changing only gradually, seeming to contain and thus explain reality. But faith is at once a submersion into the interior, immeasurable aspect of reality and thus reminds us once again of the basic questions we are seeking to answer.
We remember that society provides a great deal of information to us; some of it claims to be the sort of answers we have seeking. There is an implicit self-reference, a contradiction between the content of the message and the meaning of the message here that is troubling. This is because the basis of the valuation is recursive, I.e., this argument is right because the argument proclaims that it’s right. We must remember that the basic questions called into question exactly the kinds of systems that ask us to take things on blind faith, as assumptions, as givens. Society’s continued functioning is due to a great number of these kinds of assumptions and beliefs adopted on blind faith. Faith underlies most social relations and is responsible for the not intolerable amount of harmony that the human race enjoys.
As faith represents the basic form of agreement between people (“good faithâ€,) faith also describes a relationship between people and objects, that of usage. Faith forms the basis of all forms of learning and training, as an acceptance of a totalizing procedure to account for the functioning of phenomena, insofar as the information the system provides is relevant to the task at hand. Faith in a particular technique is implicit in any proposition which takes its axioms from the system. Since all propositions derive their truth by virtue of participation in some system, there is no belief which does not depend, ultimately, on faith. So we shall decide that faith is the basis of belief, the ultimate foundation and support of our belief structures.
All beliefs are consequent to an act of faith. An act of faith is a submersion into subjectivity. Conviction results from a recognition of the limitations of an interior perspective to wholly glimpse truth. A single act cannot account for faith--a process is required. By appealing at last to an absolute, by extending our trust, by taking a leap of faith, one has done precisely nothing. The simplicity is maddening; faith, laid bare, is cheap, is nothing but belief and action. The attempt to verify truth is similarly obvious: truth is true. But this circularity, this inherent paradoxicality seems suspicious. It is suspicious because it must be taken on faith or nothing at all. We can see the exit most clearly with morality: ethics requires sincerity, requires faith--not a single leap once in the past, but a present show of faith implying a future continuation. This process becomes transcendence beyond subjectivity and allows the idea of truth to be apprehended consciously.
Truth is impossible without faith and faith is impossible without truth. Without faith in truth, faith in anything else is a contradiction, but not a paradox. Preoccupying oneself with contradiction because it is always possible is a misuse of reason for which Socrates admonishes the sophists of his time. This leap of faith situates us well beyond endless but pointless contradictions, for faith in truth allows belief and thus the possibility of knowledge. That faith requires truth is nothing astounding in itself, but we must recognize in this primary relation truth as an expression of yearning for the fixed, the final and the conclusive. As an absolute subject, infinitely separated from the truth by the gaps between our belief structures and being-in-itself, we find in truth a reaching out for an absolute object: touching but not holding, seeing but not touching, knowing but not seeing, believing but not knowing. Faith is the bridge over the gaps between theory and observation, between principle and practice. Understanding merges with the absolute and transcends it, and this transcendence is denoted as faith.
Faith laid bare is belief in universals. The single absolute is the dynamic nature of external reality. The only directly apparent universal truth which is always immediately present to consciousness is that of incessant, relentless change, continuous and inexhaustible. Nothing is certain. Reality as it is observed is never repeats precisely. And since time is unbroken, the universe is never identical to itself as consciousness traverses the moments (not only do we not step in the same river twice, but not even once.) In the midst of this unending chaos, being-in-itself is a moving target, an elusive prey. Truth is a universal, and like all universals it expresses a desire for the static. This desire for changelessness emerges most clearly as a practical necessity. This will to universalize is clear in practical necessity because it is the leap of faith required to learn a belief system or skill. Thus pragmatism as this desire for changelessness is a common and relatively innocuous form of faith, as it is an expression of a will to universalize. This desire also reflects theoretical necessity since abstraction derives its powers of generality and prediction through an appeal to at least one universal, unchanging, unified essence (the basis of an axiom, or assumption.)
The desire for ‘sense’ ends in Reason, which cannot abide a voluntary contradiction. Hence reason locks itself into mortal combat with faith. Reason is born from emotions which emerge from the interplay of associations between experiences as they are present to consciousness, sustained by and inhabiting a dynamic world in continual flux. Reality is caught between the ticks of a clock. The world is not discrete, does not intrinsically lend itself to measurement, but reason demands numerical approximations, qualitative and thematic reductions, classifications, in short, stasis and identity. Reason, then, requires faith, for faith allows the abstraction of changelessness from incessant change, the absolute and the eternal from the momentary and fleeting. Faith creates the universal absolutes upon which rational thinking depends.
So, we shall say that truth is always in practice relative to context and thus cannot be singular. An absolute truth is a theoretical construction demanded by the structure of many of our belief systems. Not all belief systems require, demand, or seek truth in the same way: truth in ethics is different than truth in mathematics is different than truth in literature. In the next section we shall say that belief is a process which is related to understanding. Thoughts become beliefs through faith and beliefs become knowledge by the relation of truth.
We posed this question at the end of the introduction: how can anyone overcome subjectivity? We are now in a position to answer: through faith. We observe that the difference between understanding and belief is one of faith. Subjective individual consciousness is able to advance in the direction of truth through understanding on the basis of faith. This is a transcendence of subjectivity and a self-overcoming, a breach of interiority. Faith allows, indeed requires, a subjectivity-inverting paradox-- by apprehending the limited, totalized nature of our perceptions, we are able to overcome them through rupturing this totality. This paradox accomplishes consciousness, yet consciousness is required by faith. This resolution is itself unresolved; encapsulating this infinite regression is accomplished through faith. Through a desire for an absolute, unchanging essence which defies formal description, we have arrived at a de-totalized totality, a breach of subjectivity. Faith is the royal road to Truth.
We say this because faith allows consciousness to become a bridge between the interior and the exterior, but consciousness is also the interior itself. Rationally, this essential duality cannot be reduced into a singularity without falsification; yet our conscious experience is singular. To comprehend this seemingly inconsistent nature of consciousness, we must accordingly consider the nature of understanding.
What is the nature of understanding? I believe the most primary mode of understanding to be identity, the notion of equality, equivalence or unity. This understanding is a grasping of the origin of a single phenomena or the commonality between two disparate events. The secondary mode of understanding is dichotomy or distinction, recognition of both similarity and difference simultaneously. This kind of understanding is emotional in nature, and these kinds of understandings are not always easily translated into symbols or propositions. But with this mode of understanding, we have the basis for the rational ability to classify and organize information. We can divide our understood entities into groups: every other thing like this one thing in one pile, every thing not like it in another. Primordial ontology divides and conquers. This mode works over both the understood identities of the first mode (identities: a=b, cats=mammals, etch) and, recursively, the results of the second mode (hierarchies of classifications, functional analysis of interrelated binary causal systems.)
Understanding has a third mode as well, which is the grasping of a meaning, but this third mode is a process of understanding which results in consciousness itself. This mode is at once more primary than the first two modes and also a logical consequent of any conscious use of the first two modes. In this sense, this mode is close to intuition. Thus, as a mode of understanding, consciousness emerges and learns progressively from the first and second modes. Yet there is a paradox: consciousness is required for there to be an understanding. Without it, the information is dead, uninterrupted; consciousness gives meaning, relates it to a context, which already refers it to the modes of understanding. Investigating this mysterious mode of understanding, we see the rudiments of a non-binary, non-dualistic epistemology. The third mode is the grasping of a meaning, apprehending the origin of a plurality or an origin higher than ones own; it is the ability to cognize a universal, or an absolutely other metaphysically. As such, this understanding is a processing of infinite potential data endlessly and recursively.
We would say that this mode alone is constantly approaching Truth and is nearly there, and is always but infinitesimally distant from it. But we must remember than understanding is really just another cognitive process--we still must have faith in the capability of our brains/minds/cognitive processes to produce truth in order to believe. The difference between understanding and belief is one of faith. Faith is then a grasping of the infinite, but also a blind leap; since there are infinite infinities, we can just as likely grasp an endless but pointless foundation as one which is meaningful and true.
Section Two: Belief
Knowledge is traditionally formulated as “justified true belief.“ The difference between knowledge and belief is correlation to truth and justification (which in turn must correlate to the truth.) Truth is a relationship of identity between the meaning of a belief (a thoughts content or substance, that is, the mental entities to which the nouns in our propositions refer) and external reality, the context of a thought (the physical objects which are the real-world conditions which form the objects of our thoughts and actions.) We shall take a more modern approach and argue that both belief and knowledge are the products of a reliable cognitive function. This reliance is one of faith, which underlies the entire notion of truth which is said to separate knowledge from belief.
To meaningfully elucidate my view of belief, I will contrast it to a definition of belief found in Quine’s The Web of Belief: Quine argues there that belief “is a disposition to respond in certain ways when the appropriate issue arises.†Belief does indeed imply a disposition to respond in certain ways to specific phenomena, but the problem with this conception is that belief is described in purely behavioral terms. Yet we have already shown that consciousness cannot be explained away as belonging to either socially-inculcated patterns of behavior, physical responses or mental ‘states.’ Consciousness is not limited to that which is relevant to current actions. Belief is not a disposition--belief is a process, not reducible to an action, response-pattern or mental state. Secondly, actions do not necessarily reflect positive belief, though it is of course, in general, practical to judge anothers’ present location within a given belief process by their actions. The internal subjective states (belief, knowledge and faith) of others are as invisible to me, at least empirically, as my subjectivity is to others. So there are two sides to belief, in this way: the interior invisible aspect and the external behavioral aspects.
With any given belief (“It’s raining outside todayâ€) viewed from the perspective of individual consciousness, the question of truth simply comes down to evidence: are our observations in conflict with our theories? If not (raindrops on the windows, corroborating weather reports on television, water on my skin and clothes when I step outside,) then there are legitimate rational grounds for belief. Faith does not seem to be required. The problem here is that our observations are flawed, inadequate and partial. Most of our beliefs are subconscious, but even for the conscious beliefs, even for the reasonable ones, absolute truth is beyond the horizon of discourse and investigation. Our observations cannot be completed trusted since they represent a connection with appearances and not with the Real.
On the other hand, beliefs must first be understood, their meaning extracted, interpreted and made relevant in order to be believed. All our theories, which are contrasted with observations to produce belief, come bundled with preconceived metaphysical motivations, as well as other significant subjective factors many of which may be common to our entire species and thus in a sense non-eliminable. The individual human exists in a world of appearances, human society as a totality exists in a dynamic world of intersubjective judgments. If our perceptual processes share common features which lead to distortion, reality and truth may are, from a completely rational perspective, infinitely separated from human consciousness.
All theories and constructions are based on hypotheses and assumptions which inspire differing degrees of confidence. Confidence is not the same as faith, but more accurately distinguishes knowledge from belief (that is, confidence is a relation common to both beliefs and knowledge which more consistently distinguishes knowledge from belief than faith.) Specifically, the kind of confidence is important, and the kind of confidence in a given thought or proposition is based on which kind of cognitive process that the thought or proposition is a result of (memory, language knowledge, perception, reason, etc.) We further distinguish confidence from faith by noting that confidence is more emotionally based and more vigorously defended by reason and so must be both separate from and antecedent to faith. From the perspective of maximizing confidence, finding the truth can be seen as a game of selecting the most accurate hypotheses about particulars or classes of phenomena, associating each belief with the degree of meaning and truth it reflects and reveals. Faith provides the prerational assurance that the connection between belief and being-in-itself is one of truth. Yet not all truths are equal in this game: there seems to be a continuum of beliefs, based on the amount of certainty associated with each--or inversely, the amount of faith required in believing. Faith is not, for this reason, necessarily against probabilities: even though it is distinct and prior to reason and emotion, all three move in lockstep towards truth, searching for an origin.
What gives us the basis for this faith? In other words, how do we know the world is true? Appearances and sense data surely exist and are present to consciousness. However, the movement from a series of static, scattered appearances to a casually related totality is primarily one of faith, not of logic or desire. Being-in-itself is absolutely unapproachable to precisely the same degree the separation between interior and exterior reality is absolute. Yet we have said that between subjective and external reality, consciousness is an irruption and faith is a bridge--why can we not finally arrive at truth? Because all the more precisely truth is sought, the more futile the effort becomes; reason is eventually subjugated within paradox, forced to accept a contradiction, yielding to the impulse to believe. Yet, no matter how much faith we offer, absolute, eternal truth remains a construction from a desire and a fear, an expression of the need for the unchanging. Remember this was one of the requirements for the development and subsequent necessity to justify reason.
Reason lends itself to description and prescription. Natural science documents and describes the world of appearances as though our perceptions constitute a totality. From what I shall argue is a limited perspective (perhaps a ‘frog perspective’ after Nietzsche’s painters,) the Universe is seen to be a closed system. Entropy and chaos are inevitable, indeed, predicted by the formal model--yet all is somehow contained within the domain of discourse.
This ‘folk’ scientism has two basic flaws. Firstly, no totalizing scientific system does justice to the separated interiority of subjective conscious experience. Secondly, these kinds of totalizing systems are incapable of handling ethics with any grace. After all, morality demands a fundamental relation from the absolute to particular, from the infinite to the finite and these systems domains are always finite; indeed, they cannot be made infinite or they would be unusable*. The idea of infinity is itself an expression of faith, which is to say of desire and of fear, thus rational systems restrict themselves to the finite, empirical observations which are directly present to consciousness. To clarify with an example: we say this table, these coffee cups, these pigeons I am observing exist, but what is actually under discussion are various perceptions of appearances which we have chosen to call tables, cups, birds, etc. At a hundred feet away, or even at the level of the division between atoms which constitute the table and the cups and the pigeon and the air, the lines around them cannot be drawn with the precision our naming systems imply.
Names are a reference, a signification, a simplification, a reduction, a falsification of an isolated element of many complex and interlocking causal systems. Names constitute the implantation of an alien perceptual grid upon external being. How are we to be honest, then--are we forbidden of speak of things by name? Of course not, but we must be aware of the limitations of our totalizing schemata. By naming a unique phenomena we make the phenomena common and comprehensible, but by turning an open system into a closed one, we have lost the particularity of the phenomena. The meaning of an action, a thing or a concept needs no further discussion, its essence and definition having already been summed up with the application of a name. The questions we need answered most about its existence are already implicitly (and falsely) answered in the process of creating a static, encapsulating label for what is only a loose collection of appearances.
Most importantly, none of this even begins to get at what the table, the birds, the cups are. Since all worldly knowledge consists of inferences from appearances, that is, the products of cognitive functions encountered directly as observations present to consciousness, where can Truth be found? Truth must exist, since we must have faith (which is the positive, a priori assertion of the existence of a universal) in it or in nothing else, so truth enters into a necessary relation with being-in-itself. Appearances may disguise or reveal truth, but in themselves are neither true nor false. This is not to say that, for instance, propositions about appearances cannot be true or false. We must remember that appearances, taken as such, do constitute a reality.
We feel that something must be beneath the bundles of sense perception that surround us. The will to truth in this matter is undeniably strong, but the corroborating evidence is wholly absent. Does a description of appearances suffice to account for reality? Or must we abandon the quest for absolute truth about the world, confining ourselves only to that which we can know immediately and directly, that is, appearances? The latter path is that of complete skepticism and uncertainty (which is already a pessimism and often fails at the critical moment, plummeting out into nihilism,) which allows itself as certain only those things which are present directly to consciousness as observations and only those things which reason allows itself to admit are self-evidently true.
Reason then cannot be the only procedure which can reveal truth. A revelation is verification, a grasping of an origin; it is the last phase in understanding. Truth is required for knowledge, since it is obvious that one cannot be rightly said to know a falsehood. So, when an appearance deceives us, we lose faith in the cognitive process that produced the faulty information. When we take the con artist for a kind stranger or a man for a tree at night, we have erred not in perceiving but inferring. We have labeled incorrectly; thus truth (from a purely rational perspective) seems to be susceptible of estimation and approximation only if we can construct a symbol system with which every meaningful proposition could be represented in a precise, unambiguous formulation. When our system is complete, we design some sort of method for testing the veracity of any given proposition in some ‘final’ way. Remember that both of these steps involve starting off from a set of assumptions, hypotheses, axioms (some taken with only a small amount of faith required) in the ‘language’ of the system.
This approach is appealing, but ultimately unacceptable for reaching truth. Even if we had a perfect system, all we could do is prove and provability is a lesser notion than truth. Truth insofar as it relates to being-in-itself is infinite and infinitely distant. Truth is a prediction, an existential leaning towards what is not yet, a guarantee of stasis. We seek truth in order to finally “set things straightâ€; like the final judgment, a knowledge of absolute truth would finalize and determine being, enable one to separate every true proposition (specified precisely enough) from every false one once and for all. Compared to this notion, our idea of truth, in terms of the system and as it is approached by the system, seems as fleeting as the appearance of the pigeons and the coffee cups, a constantly moving target. Yet knowledge is not imaginary: observation statements, self-evident propositions, linguistic, logical and mathematical expressions reflect truth to the extent we derive meaning from them.
Meaning is relative to context, to a perspective. There is no absolute or final perspective which could illuminate reality in its entirety. Yet we cannot say truth does not exist, for truth as a concept must be believed in or nothing else. The will to truth cannot override our metaphysical doubt, but faith allows this leap, which enables deduction, verification, and affirmation. The existence of truth is self-evident on grounds of non-contradiction only by assuming its existence in the first place. This seems like a paradox: we must hypothesize truth in order to hypothesize in the first place. How can sense be made of this? Because truth as something abstract and eternal is impossible to defend or justify unless you assume it, since it forms the basis for discourse and argumentation.
There’s not much of a conclusion here yet, just some of the outlines for further research. Any questions, comments, etc. would be appreciated. Thanks for anyone who got this far! 