(This is not only an important entry in itself, but it is also indispensable as the key part of my series on truth in fiction. In presenting this entry, as well as the whole series, to the reader, I must acknowledge George Bernard Shaw as my chief inspirer in developing the whole train of thought best summarized as “the truth of fiction.” In Shaw’s delightful quip, never trust history, because it tends to lie, but always trust every word that Mr. Shaw has made up.)
Let us start with the following challenge, which I have made up, for which reason it must also be trusted:
---Inside every creation, “the truth” is the hypothesis at the foundation of this creation, whereas “a lie” must be anything that contradicts that hypothesis. However, the truth of one creation is most likely to be a lie if it travels outside its host, to the worlds of other creators. Only “The Absolute Truth” is absolute.
Nietzsche’s Truth, plus The Value of Truth, plus The Will to Truth, all these simple-made-mysterious words, which he conjures up with his habitual flair (e.g. “…there are no absolute truths!”), raise the most natural question: What “Truths” is he talking about? What is the value and the very concept of a metaphysical truth here, and how does his prejudice affect the meaning of his “truth”?
There must be several ranks, several folders, all marked with the word “Truth,” and no one can do anything about this bane of homonymy. For instance, I talk about fiction as truth, and I cannot do it otherwise. Now, obviously, this fiction-as-truth should be somehow different from the Absolute Truth in God! Mathematical hypotheses are truths, but we know that even two mutually exclusive truths can work side by side, as long as they are differently applied, and kept consistently separate throughout those applications.
…Now what is a lie, if a non-truth can also be a truth? Fiction is often mistaken for a lie, so that people may casually call a lie something which I would unhesitatingly call a truth. For instance, is “Harry Potter” a lie? Does he really exist or not? I would find even the slightest suggestion of his non-existence totally ludicrous. He is, indeed, the truth resting inside the world of his creator, like in every work of fiction there is a creator, and he (she) has a license for the truth, as long as he (she) is careful not to intrude into the space of another, preexistent creator. Now, God is also a Creator, and within His created world He alone holds the license for truth. Because there is no preexistent creator to God, His Truth has to be Absolute.
Well, it seems that the universal truth in this logic has none of the lofty concept of the philosophers and the theologians, but is something so amazingly and crudely trivial that it is almost insulting. And we can push it further still. To say that Dorothy is in Oz, when she is conspicuously and admittedly not in Kansas (“We are not in Kansas anymore”), but in Oz, must be a truth so obvious that even a hardened disputationist shouldn’t be able to dispute it, or should he? After all, Dorothy still is in Kansas, and, playing by the rules of Kansas, there is no such thing as Oz anywhere in the world. Or let us take another case. A person is in Washington, but he says that he is “in New York.” Is he lying, or can he be telling the truth? Perhaps, it is quite possible for a person to be physically in one place, while his mind is indeed elsewhere? That’s where we can see the difference between the literal and the figurative, raising an all-new debate about the true meaning of truth! I can next proceed with stuffing my argument with so many similar and non-similar “qualifications,” that the word casuistry won’t be strong enough to convey the ensuing disgust with the whole process of reasoning, and the core question of truth [linguistic or meta-linguistic, or whatever other angle may be introduced into the ridiculously bloated overanalysis] will be completely lost in the suspicious smoke rising from it.
Apparently, there are many more truths around us than most of us will be ready to acknowledge at a glance. What makes all these truths possible, in their countless multiplicity, is that they are all limited, stuck inside the worlds of their creators, from where they cannot escape without risking to become lies. If we talk about Harry Potter’s magic without the necessary attribution, we may well be lying, but a proper attribution turns a lie into a truth, meaning that these concepts do not possess any absolute value, are meaningless, and even harmful, without proper attribution, which means that they must be qualified as specifically limited, and by no means universal, or else, “the ice it isn’t water, and the water isn’t free, and you don’t know that anything is what it ought to be” (fancifully quoting from Dickens’s Cricket on the Hearth), only in our case Dickens’s concluding optimism: “But he is coming, coming, coming!” quickly sours into “So what?” No matter who is “coming,” no help is on the way!
What we have seen here were not numerous types of truth, but only the following two distinct classes:
(1) Instances of truth limited not so much in space and time (these two Kantian “Undinge” are not sufficiently descriptive, even though the only type of creation comprehensible to human brain is creation in time and in place), as in the circumstance of their creation.
(2) The Absolute Truth, which is infinite and not subject to any limitation. Such Absolute Truth, like God, is so incomprehensible that it can only be accepted by definition and viewed by each culture, civilization, or some extra-terrestrial race, for that matter, through the prism of their limited religious traditions.
…I wonder if Socrates, the great seeker after truth,--- if he could be summoned from his afterlife in the same manner Nietzsche summons his eight favorites, and asked right then and there: What is truth?,--- if he, dead, would be just as honest as when he was alive (admitting: "I know nothing, except the certainty of my ignorance!"), to answer: “I don’t know!”?
Let us start with the following challenge, which I have made up, for which reason it must also be trusted:
---Inside every creation, “the truth” is the hypothesis at the foundation of this creation, whereas “a lie” must be anything that contradicts that hypothesis. However, the truth of one creation is most likely to be a lie if it travels outside its host, to the worlds of other creators. Only “The Absolute Truth” is absolute.
Nietzsche’s Truth, plus The Value of Truth, plus The Will to Truth, all these simple-made-mysterious words, which he conjures up with his habitual flair (e.g. “…there are no absolute truths!”), raise the most natural question: What “Truths” is he talking about? What is the value and the very concept of a metaphysical truth here, and how does his prejudice affect the meaning of his “truth”?
There must be several ranks, several folders, all marked with the word “Truth,” and no one can do anything about this bane of homonymy. For instance, I talk about fiction as truth, and I cannot do it otherwise. Now, obviously, this fiction-as-truth should be somehow different from the Absolute Truth in God! Mathematical hypotheses are truths, but we know that even two mutually exclusive truths can work side by side, as long as they are differently applied, and kept consistently separate throughout those applications.
…Now what is a lie, if a non-truth can also be a truth? Fiction is often mistaken for a lie, so that people may casually call a lie something which I would unhesitatingly call a truth. For instance, is “Harry Potter” a lie? Does he really exist or not? I would find even the slightest suggestion of his non-existence totally ludicrous. He is, indeed, the truth resting inside the world of his creator, like in every work of fiction there is a creator, and he (she) has a license for the truth, as long as he (she) is careful not to intrude into the space of another, preexistent creator. Now, God is also a Creator, and within His created world He alone holds the license for truth. Because there is no preexistent creator to God, His Truth has to be Absolute.
Well, it seems that the universal truth in this logic has none of the lofty concept of the philosophers and the theologians, but is something so amazingly and crudely trivial that it is almost insulting. And we can push it further still. To say that Dorothy is in Oz, when she is conspicuously and admittedly not in Kansas (“We are not in Kansas anymore”), but in Oz, must be a truth so obvious that even a hardened disputationist shouldn’t be able to dispute it, or should he? After all, Dorothy still is in Kansas, and, playing by the rules of Kansas, there is no such thing as Oz anywhere in the world. Or let us take another case. A person is in Washington, but he says that he is “in New York.” Is he lying, or can he be telling the truth? Perhaps, it is quite possible for a person to be physically in one place, while his mind is indeed elsewhere? That’s where we can see the difference between the literal and the figurative, raising an all-new debate about the true meaning of truth! I can next proceed with stuffing my argument with so many similar and non-similar “qualifications,” that the word casuistry won’t be strong enough to convey the ensuing disgust with the whole process of reasoning, and the core question of truth [linguistic or meta-linguistic, or whatever other angle may be introduced into the ridiculously bloated overanalysis] will be completely lost in the suspicious smoke rising from it.
Apparently, there are many more truths around us than most of us will be ready to acknowledge at a glance. What makes all these truths possible, in their countless multiplicity, is that they are all limited, stuck inside the worlds of their creators, from where they cannot escape without risking to become lies. If we talk about Harry Potter’s magic without the necessary attribution, we may well be lying, but a proper attribution turns a lie into a truth, meaning that these concepts do not possess any absolute value, are meaningless, and even harmful, without proper attribution, which means that they must be qualified as specifically limited, and by no means universal, or else, “the ice it isn’t water, and the water isn’t free, and you don’t know that anything is what it ought to be” (fancifully quoting from Dickens’s Cricket on the Hearth), only in our case Dickens’s concluding optimism: “But he is coming, coming, coming!” quickly sours into “So what?” No matter who is “coming,” no help is on the way!
What we have seen here were not numerous types of truth, but only the following two distinct classes:
(1) Instances of truth limited not so much in space and time (these two Kantian “Undinge” are not sufficiently descriptive, even though the only type of creation comprehensible to human brain is creation in time and in place), as in the circumstance of their creation.
(2) The Absolute Truth, which is infinite and not subject to any limitation. Such Absolute Truth, like God, is so incomprehensible that it can only be accepted by definition and viewed by each culture, civilization, or some extra-terrestrial race, for that matter, through the prism of their limited religious traditions.
…I wonder if Socrates, the great seeker after truth,--- if he could be summoned from his afterlife in the same manner Nietzsche summons his eight favorites, and asked right then and there: What is truth?,--- if he, dead, would be just as honest as when he was alive (admitting: "I know nothing, except the certainty of my ignorance!"), to answer: “I don’t know!”?
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