A searcher for truth

A searcher for truth

By Jimmy Petruzzi

Every person in this world, no matter what his or her role in life is, is a searcher for truth. Scholars delving into the past; scientists seeking to explain the universe, the atom, the butterfly; neighbors conversing over the back fence: each of us in every daily situation endeavors to see things as they truly are.

Plato and Aristotle, two great philosophers, were in the pursuit of philosophical truth. (Blackburn, 1996). Plato believed that one should use his mind/intellect/reason in search of truth, knowledge and ultimate reality. In Plato’s search for truth, he viewed the body as a hindrance, an obstacle in this search and one that must be struggled against by the soul at all times. It plagues the mind with all sorts of desires and appetites, barely giving the mind time to think. So it is the job of man to remove himself as entirely as he can from his body, to use it only in the barest, simplest fashion, only to survive. Without the body being an obstacle, truth was easier for Plato to search for. Aristotle believed that although any disciplined study is promising because there is an ultimate truth to be discovered, the abstractness of metaphysical reasoning requires that we think about the processes we are employing even as we use them in search of that truth. Aristotle believed that there was a truth to be found and he went about it by observing what he and other people in life do. As always, Aristotle assumed that the structure of language and logic naturally mirrors the way things really are. Even though Plato and Aristotle had a different way of going about things, they both still were in hot pursuit of the truth.

Friedrich Nietzsche believed the search for truth or 'the will to truth' was a consequence of the will to power of philosophers. He thought that truth should be used as long as it promoted life and the will to power, and he thought untruth was better than truth if it had this life enhancement as a consequence. As he wrote in Beyond Good and Evil, ‘The falseness of a judgment is to us not necessarily an objection to a judgment... The question is to what extent it is life-advancing, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-breeding...’ He proposed the will to power as a truth only because according to him it was the most life affirming and sincere perspective one could have.

Robert Wicks discusses Nietzsche's basic view of truth as follows:

‘(...) Some scholars regard Nietzsche's 1873 unpublished essay, ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’ ("über Wahrheit und Lüge im au?ermoralischen Sinn") as a keystone in his thought. In this essay, Nietzsche rejects the idea of universal constants, and claims that what we call ‘truth’ is only ‘a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms.’ His view at this time is that arbitrariness completely prevails within human experience: concepts originate via the very artistic transference of nerve stimuli into images; ‘truth’ is nothing more than the invention of fixed conventions for merely practical purposes, especially those of repose, security and consistence. (...)’ (Wicks, 2008)

Why this insistent urge for the true? It seems to be an integral part of us, a nostalgia in the soul, a longing for a more real comprehension, a hunger that nothing less than what is true will satisfy. What does this imply? That we seek to know the state of affairs in our neighborhood, our nation, the world. We are also concerned with what is happening in ourselves — mentally, emotionally, physically. Why does one fall ill? What are the causes of disease? What are germs, bacteria, viruses? Is the world similarly affected? Do we human viruses have the power to poison our globe? This is a worry to many people. Can the Earth get sick? If so, it must be more than the lump of matter we have been led to believe it is. All these questions illustrate our abiding concern with truth; and our search for truth goes hand in hand with our ability to comprehend it.

Everyone has a kind of longing to know how things really are. The quest for truth is not an intellectual game. It is a looking within and a looking without. Nothing we see outside would mean anything unless it sparked something in us. How may we know beauty, grandeur, courage, unless these qualities are within us to respond? In this sense, truth lives in us as a divine potential.

We can only conclude that truth resides in the heart of the heart of all beings, great and small. Some have unfolded more understanding of this truth. We are at the human stage of comprehension and self-expression. Birds are birds by reason of the same process. Gods are gods because they have unfolded the godlike. Hence truth-seeking has throughout the ages been linked with the idea of the path, the path of unfolding latent capacities. We are on this path leading to our flowering as human beings, whether or not we realize it. And when we extend our view to encompass many lives or reincarnations we realize we have the time scale needed for everyone to develop his higher potential. Those who have successfully accomplished this are the great teachers and philosophers: Christ, Buddha, Zoroaster, and a host of others, among them Plato and Pythagoras. Truth needs no outside force, for it persuades by its innate veracity. What kind of truth are we looking for? Religious, philosophic, or scientific? It is sometimes believed that these three are incompatible. This is not the case, however, for they are facets of the one truth — in man, in nature, in the cosmos. One may approach reality from the spiritual point of view, another from the intellectual, a third from observing the physical world with all its marvels and beauty. They could no more contradict one another than the fact that I am a soul contradicts that I also have a body. Properly understood, the wisdom of each branch of learning can only augment and extend the others, for each approaches the same reality from a different angle.

The great universe surrounds us on every side. It is our parent; we were born of and from it. All that we are in the small, it must be on an immensely grander scale. We have only to step outside some night when the wise old stars are shining. Looking up into the immeasurable heavens something stirs within us, a feeling beyond the reaches of the finite mind. The soul yearns for an immensity it cannot grasp: deep calling to deep.

According to the old traditions, our universal parent has a certain structure and operates in certain ways. It was born as we were born, lives its life and, like us, will one day die, rest. And sometime in the far, far future it will be reborn. Religion, science, and philosophy seek to explain it and our relation to it. They search for the truth of it, approaching the problem from their respective points of view, using their own terms. There can be no final statement of truth. To the degree that an individual penetrates the mystery and reports his findings honestly, to that degree will his conclusions coincide with the equally honest findings of others, whether these be metaphysical or physical. But when the spirit of free inquiry has fled an organization designed to house it, what is left are the empty ceremonial, the sterile, cerebral platitudes. Persecution usually stands in the wings.

We are all learners sharing with one another, and we would learn very little if we consulted only those who hold our point of view. Often more is to be gleaned from those whose thoughts seem to differ from ours. But sometimes the barrier of semantics separates those whose beliefs, actually, may be very close. If one were to search for similarities rather than differences, he would find agreement in the broad area of general principles. What is the difference between the karma of the East and the sowing and reaping of the New Testament? There is no reason we must have unanimity of opinion. Truth is one, it cannot be otherwise, but the paths to it are as numerous as are the searchers.

What this means is that all efforts through the ages to explain the cosmos are based, indeed must be based, on certain principles and experiences common to all, including the mystical and the poetical.

The way to keep truth alive and growing in our hearts is to reexpress it constantly. Otherwise we shall become worshipers of commas and semicolons, and truth will lie buried in unthinking mantras endlessly repeated. In the long reach of the moving centuries the living spirit of truth becomes entombed in its very institutions. Dogmas grow in the minds of men. Once symbols of the living message, they sooner or later become like shells found on some lonely beach, often beautiful, but a structure from which the life and meaning have fled. The answer to our search does not lie in institutions, it lies in ourselves.

The spirit of the most high is in all things. In the wind moving against our faces, in the sparrow and the daisy and the pebble, in those who suffer and those who are glad, in the beautiful and in the ugly, and in the ugly made beautiful by the spirit within. The wisest of mankind have pictured man as a child of the cosmos. They saw the worlds that bestrew the fields of space as animated by cosmic divinities in whom we live and move and have our being; that the life that animates universes breathes in us also, and that we too are the beneficiaries of its serene laws.

Truth is out there and in here. It is the way things are in us and in our world. We are urged to search for it by forces within ourselves, soul qualities. How much will come to us through suffering? How much through joyful realization? How much in the day-to-day giving of our best to the calls of duty? How much through our love for companions, known and unknown, who travel the road of life with us

References

Blackburn, Simon (1996), The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, Oxford University Press

Wicks, R (2008), Friedrich Nietzsche - Early Writings: 1872-1876, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy