The great myth is that truth is an emergent property of truth, that it rises from the depths of reality once the mind has acquired enough points to be true. But the objective truth – all those things like gravity and light and the remains of Archeopteryx that exist whether we believe in them or not – is full of many independent facts, each of which is reflected in the specific quality of the receiver, each function not of the mind alone but of the whole living thing and all its living experiences, combined and made by a complete being. What we call truth, and how we arrive at it, has more to do with that absolute knowledge than with a logical psychological analysis of truth.
Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882-March 28, 1941) explores this with her tenacity of thought and love of language in a wonderful story about the Ancient Greeks that was later included The Common Reader (public library) — the classic collection that also gave us Woolf how to feel your soul.
By looking at the “irrepressible honesty, courage, love of truth” that made Socrates a timeless wisdom (which, I think, is the perfect use of truth), and with Descartes' fiery disdain, he insists that we get to the truth – about the world, about us, about the essence of life made – beyond reason:
What is important is not the end we reach or our means to reach it… Reality is diverse; truth comes to us in different ways; it is not only with intelligence that we see… Truth must be pursued with all our abilities. Should we shun pleasure, tenderness, emptiness in friendship because we love the truth? Will the truth be quickly discovered because we shut our ears to music and drink no wine, and sleep instead of talking through the long winter nights? We must not turn to the reclusive disciplinarian, but we turn to the sunburnt man, the man who practices the art of living in the most beneficial way, so that nothing is tangible but some things are more eternally valuable than others.
The great irony is that truth – truth – is at once complex and cohesive, something Woolf captures in her delightful meditation on composition as the “absent” antipode that slips over truth like cotton wool, finally writing:
Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern… The whole world is a work of art [and] we are part of the work of art. Hamlet or Beethoven's quartet is true about this great multitude we call the world. But no Shakespeare, no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are words; we are music; we are a thing in itself.
