Truth, Self, and World

By Crispin Sartwell

Probably the first question you need to deal with if you're writing about the nature of truth is this: what sort of thing is it that can be true or false? The most traditional answer to that question is that the bearer of truth value is the proposition. The proposition is conceived to be an abstract object, not appearing in any natural language, but expressible in language. So, for example, "Tous les gens meilleurs regardent beaucoup de television" and "All the best people watch a lot of television" are different sentences, but they express the same proposition. One might say that "they mean the same thing." Well, this "thing" they mean is supposed to be a particular proposition.

Of course, propositions seem to be rather occult entities, a bit ectoplasmic for modern tastes. We'd like something a trifle less Platonic, something we can get our hands on more easily. Thus some philosophers of a more nominalistic bent have rested content with sentences as the bearers of truth value, and then tried to finesse the problems by saying that certain sentences co-vary in truth value, so that there are more or less logical entailments between them. Thus, if "All the best people watch a lot of television" is true, then so is "Tous les gens meilleurs regardent beaucoup de television." The famous Tarski theory or account of truth seems to use sentences as the fundamental bearers of truth value, in this wise: "snow is white" is true iff snow is white.

Now there are various problems with this. One of them is that sentences are no less abstract as entities than are propositions. For example, "the same" sentence appears on this sheet of paper and this sheet. Right now I'm looking at a sentence (in fact, this very sentence) on the page, and I'm also speaking the same sentence aloud. So where is this sentence? On the page? In my mouth? In the air? I could burn this typescript, but I wouldn't on that account have actually burned any sentences, which might always crop up again somewhere. Actually, sentences consist of things like words, letters, and punctuation marks, which are themselves no less abstract than sentences and propositions.

Perhaps we shouldn't be so bummed out by abstract entities. Maybe we need to have a lush ontology, or maybe there's some way to produce a translation from abstract to concrete things, and we could regard talk of sentences or propositions as a kind of shorthand, substituting for much longer assertions about inscriptions and utterances: actual particular objects and events. But there are other problems - devastating problems - for the idea that the proposition or the sentence is the fundamental bearer of truth value, and these are problems that arise precisely from the distinction of propositions and sentences from their concrete occurrences. There's a famous paper on reference by Keith Donellan in which he shows the kind of problems I mean.

The Donellan example runs roughly like this. Let's say we're gossiping at a party, and I say "He's cheating on his wife." And you say, "Really? Who?" And I say, "Don't look now. It's the guy drinking champagne." And you say "oh my Lord, it's Freddie!" or whatever. Now the phrase "the guy drinking champagne" in this example refers to Freddie, right? But let's stipulate that Freddie is a teetotaler and in fact what he's got there in his flute is sparkling cider, indistinguishable from champagne at this distance. See? Now Donellan's view is that even though the description "the guy drinking champagne" is not satisfied by Freddie, I have successfully referred to Freddie. I think that is right: we perfectly well understand each other. And if Freddie is indeed cheating on his wife, then it follows that my utterance of "The guy drinking champagne is cheating on his wife" is true.

Now what's the point of this example? Just this: it's not the sentence that is true, because actually considered as an abstract entity, apart from the occasion of its utterance, it is false. The phrase "the guy drinking champagne" only refers to Freddie in this particular context of its utterance, in which it enables you to understand what I'm asserting. This makes it appear that what is true or false are not propositions, not sentences, but utterances or inscriptions: particular things that occur in particular situations. Well, I think this is what we should expect given the whole momentum of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. If we think about the accounts of meaning and truth that we get in philosophers like Austin, Wittgenstein, Quine, or Rorty, we'd have to identify meaning with use (though of course what such philosophers mean by use differs somewhat from guy to guy). If meaning only emerges in a context of use, then of course sentences are true or false only within that context, since it's fair to say that truth has something to do with meaning.

It will be a relief to you that I am gearing up to leave the discussion of the analytic philosophy of truth behind. Let me start by pushing Donellan's example in what we might call an existentialist direction. First of all, I wonder whether you think it is possible that when I say "The guy drinking champagne is cheating on his wife" I might be lying, even though it turns out that what I'm saying is true. Do you see what I mean? Let's suppose that Freddie is my professional rival, and we're both interviewing for a job with your firm. I've got no reason at all to suppose that Freddie is cheating on his wife. Quite the reverse, in fact: he's always been a (to me) disgustingly upright type. Plus he's married to Liv Tyler, who's hopelessly devoted to his every whim. I'm merely trying to discredit Freddie in your eyes by purveying scurrilous trash about him.

Unbeknownst to me, however, Freddie, incomprehensibly, is actually cheating on Liv. He's having a mad passionate affair with Judy Dench, or maybe with Liv's dad Steve. This is a variation on what in the theory of knowledge is called the Gettier problem, but there it's a problem about knowledge and here I am pushing it as a problem about truth. If lying is intentionally saying something false, then in one sense in this case I lied, and in another I didn't. Just to stay analytic on you for a moment, if the concept of "truth" here appears within the scope of an epistemic operator like "believes" then I lied. If it doesn't, then I didn't.

Well, one thing we might agree on is that something has gone ethically wrong with me in this situation, even if in some sense "what I said" is true. Whether or not what I said is true, I'm a damn liar. You with me on this? Even vicious inveterate liars get lucky now and then. So the problem, the locus of falsity, in this case, is not the sentence, and it's not even the context or occasion of use, exactly. It's me. The falsity is in my soul, we might say: it's my hypocrisy, or my overweening ambition, that renders *me* false, even though again in some sense "what I said" was true. "It" was true. But coming out of my lips at that moment, emerging from the complex of character and motivation that infests my head, emerging from my personality at that time, it was a lie: it was false. Truth, we might say, is not only an epistemic or metaphysical notion, it is an ethical notion, and the locus of truth is not only the utterance and its social context, but also the person of the person who's doing the uttering.

Dorothy Parker (?) famously said of Lillian Hellman that everything she said was a lie, even "and" and "but." We understand all too well what that means. It not only accuses Hellman of actually lying, it accuses her in some sense of being a lie, of being a deeply false person, of being utterly self-deceived and utterly deceiving of others. Of course now and then I imagine Lillian Hellman said something true, but if Parker was right, she was herself false, if you will allow me that form of words. Let me give you another example, one that I've developed at perhaps absurd length in my political writing: Al Gore. I did not believe a single damn thing Al Gore said when he was running for president. Not a damn thing. Let's take his view of Bush's Social Security plan. Al said that it was a "risky scheme." He said it over and over again. He said it mechanically, like a parrot or a tape recorder. Now the phrase "risky scheme" had emerged from focus groups. When people in focus groups heard the phrase "risky scheme" they pressed the little "negative" button on their monitors. Not only that, but the actual intonation that Gore used was focus-grouped, and it turned out that if you put the emphasis on "scheme" people pressed the negative button even more vociferously.

And so Al Gore mumbled the words "risky scheme" every few sentences throughout the entire campaign, and he always said it with exactly the same intonation. Now perhaps Bush's plan to privatize Social Security actually was a risky scheme. And perhaps Al Gore actually believed it was a risky scheme. Nevertheless I tell you that he was lying and that what he said was false. In fact, everything Al Gore has said for perhaps the past decade has been false, not because in some abstract sense the sentences coming out of his mouth aren't true, but because he has had a wholesale failure of personality. He says things - even things he believes - not because he believes them, but because he thinks other people want him to say those things; he thinks he'll end up being president if he just keeps blahblahing the same hoohah.

The locus of Al Gore's falsity is not his words; it's his life. Al Gore, we might say, isn't really a liar; he's a lie. It's not what he's saying that's false; it's what he is. And so I would like try out on you the notion that the primary locus of truth and falsity, the primary bearer of truth value, is not the proposition, not the sentence, not the utterance, but the self.

Nietzsche, in Genealogy of Morals, argues that the origin of the words for "good" in various languages were invented by the powerful or noble to refer to themselves. He says this:

They call themselves, for instance, 'the truthful'; this is true above all of the Greek nobility, whose mouthpiece is the Megarian poet Theognis. The root of the word coined for this, esthlos, signifies one who is, who possesses reality, who is actual, who is true; then, with a subjective turn, the true as the truthful: in this stage of conceptual transformation it becomes a slogan and catchword for of the nobility and passes over entirely to the sense of 'noble,' as distinct from the lying common man, which is what Theognis takes him to be and how he describes him - until finally, after the decline of the nobility, the word is left to designate nobility of the soul and becomes as it were ripe and sweet.

What I want you to notice about this passage is not the association of truth with aristocracy, which is obviously fundamentally self-serving and questionable. It is, rather, the idea that a person can be true or can be false, and that this signifies a central moral dimension. The "noble" for the Greeks, was essentially the personality that had enough courage to speak and embody the truth; the noble for the Greeks, the true man, was precisely everything that Al Gore is not: the true man is the opposite of the contemporary politician.

We see very much the same idea embodied in Confucius. Perhaps the fundamental notion of Confucius's ethics is jen. The term is usually translated into English as "human-heartedness" or "humanness" which preserves the flavor it has in common with esthlos as capturing something about the "height" of a person or nobility: the "gentleman." But "gentleman" as the man of jen is misleading because in English "the gentleman" signifies above all one with a cultivated etiquette. Now no doubt Confucius means that too; for him the jen person is a person who acts in accordance with the li: the rites. And yet there is an aspect of "inwardness" in Confucius's notion: the jen person is not merely a person who observes the outer social forms; he is the person whose inward life corresponds to these forms, who is truly present within them. There is, we might say, a central sincerity or truth with which the jen person observes the li, or in fact with which he performs all his actions. And so if I were working on a translation of the Analects I would translate jen as "sincerity" and in place of "gentleman" I would write "true person." And this is, I think, something we'd all understand: a perfectly familiar use of the word "true."

Now one basic use of the word "true" in English is to mean "keeping faith." For example, this is precisely what Freddie has failed to do in relation to Liv Tyler: he hasn't been true to her: he hasn't kept faith with her; he's betrayed her. I think probably a lot of philosophers would ignore this construction, or regard it as a derivative vernacular. But I want to regard it as fundamental. I think the construction "I'll be true to you" is the basic use of the word "true" in the language, and that the treatment of utterances, sentences, or propositions as true derives from the truth of the persons who use or utter them. To be true is to maintain a certain faith, whether with another person, or with oneself, or with the world. One aspect of this might be the personal quality we call "sincerity," but more profoundly it is a resolution of the whole self. To say a truth about the world is to keep faith in that respect and to that extent with the world itself; it is to be open or transparent to the world in that respect or to that extent. If we think that science, for example, is a way to discover truths about the world, we are saying that it is a way in which people can come to keep faith with the world or make themselves transparent to the world, to receive the world in the way that Freddie should receive Liv Tyler: with openness, with sincerity, with courage, with truth.

In what is usually regarded as the basic statement of the "correspondence theory of truth," Aristotle famously wrote this: "to say of what is, that it is, or of what is not, that it is not, is to speak the truth; to say of what is, that it is not, or of what is not, that it is, is to speak falsely." Actually I think this is more or less right, so far as it goes. I think that as regards sayings, it captures basically what makes them true or false. But notice that it locates truth and falsity not in propositions but in human actions, that is, acts of saying. And human actions emerge from human personalities in relation to the social and physical world: acts that emerge from what we might call a real relation are true, and acts that emerge from a fantastic relation are false.

I would like, as I say, to consider falseness as a form of cowardice. Why can't Freddie just tell Liv about Judy Dench? He's scared. And why can't we, say, face a world without God, or in which death is final, or in which people are starving? We're scared. We can't face death squarely because it scares us. And so we can't live truly. We can't face pain, our own or others'. And so we falsify the sources of that pain. We can't face a world without meaning. And so we invent meanings and lose faith with the world. We become false, and then we start saying false things. We say false things - say of what is that it is not or vice versa - because we have lost faith with the world and with our own experience of the world.

Alright. I've gone cosmic on you, obviously. We are pretty far away from Donellan or even Rorty at this point. But if you think that's cosmic, brace yourself. Because now I'm going to talk about what sort of thing this human self is that can be true or false both to the world and to itself. Here's a quotation from Emerson:

A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flowers and fruitage is the world. . . . A mind might ponder its thought for ages, and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach it in a day. . . . No man can antedate his experience, or guess what faculty or feeling a new object shall unlock, any more than he can draw today the face of a person whom he shall see tomorrow for the first time.

The idea that a human being is a bundle of relations is beautiful and also, I believe, in the strictest sense, as Emerson wrote it, true. Perhaps the deepest and most pervasive betrayal of faith, the deepest falsity, is solipsism. And solipsism is not only a perverse philosophical doctrine, it is a pathology of the self in which the self cannot experience the reality of things beyond itself, or in which it experiences this reality as internal to the self. That is, solipsism is a total loss of faith with the world. But all falsity, we might say, is a little solipsism, all betrayal is an intensification of the self or a detachment from other people and the world in which the reality of other people and of the world is lost. And that in germ is every delusion; every delusion is a loss of contact with the world. The epistemology of Descartes and of the classical empiricists (and, I might add, also of much contemporary cognitive science and its philosophical representatives), according to which I have contact only with my own ideas or images, and only through them with the world, is the deepest sort of betrayal of the world.

Emerson's idea that the self is intrinsically nothing but in relation everything is one of the most profound and oldest of human thoughts. It is found in the Upanishads, where it is embodied in the great sentence "tat tvam asi": "that is thou." The tree in the forest? That is thou. The stone in the field? That is thou? The woman in your bedroom? That is thou. The world? That is thou. God? That is thou. And to know that you're that and that's you is to come to live in truth, to make the self a zone of traversal of the world, or to acknowledge that the self is always a zone of traversal of the world. It is found repeatedly in the literature of Taoism and Zen in which the self is treated as a mirror, or as clear water: as a flow within and a reflection of the real. The truth emerges in a resolution to remain open to the world in experience, in what might be termed an abandonment of or emergence from the delusion of detached selfhood.

You'll probably be surprised, then to hear me segueing into Kierkegaard at this point. Because of course Kierkegaard famously said that "truth is subjectivity," and I have been saying that truth is the emptying of subjectivity. But I think Kierkegaard's view is deeply in keeping with what I'm saying. Kierkegaard had the idea that all purely objective talk was a kind of empty yammering, an attempt to shuff off the burden of human existence. That was his criticism of Hegel, for example: that Hegel had managed to account for all of world history, the entire history of "Spirit," without actually saying anything at all about who it is who could know all this or experience it or find meaning in it. Hegel accounted for everything without even mentioning what it might be like to be an actually existing human being living in the world. So, for example, we could know as much as we like objectively about death: could know, for example, that if your heart doesn't beat for awhile or you quit breathing for a few days, you're dead as a doornail. But that doesn't help you come to grips with the actual fact that you yourself are going to die, now does it? And in fact the endless piling up of objective truths seems to Kierkegaard to be just a way of evading your own encounter with truth, a way of insulating yourself from the world.

Probably my favorite passage in Kierkegaard is about a madman who escapes from an asylum. As he walks toward town, it occurs to him that he will have to convince the townspeople that he's perfectly sane, so he resolves only to say what is objectively true. He sees a rubber ball by the side of the road, picks it up, and puts it in the tail pocket of his coat. Every time he takes a step, the ball hits him in the butt. And every time it hits him in the butt, he says "bang, the earth is round." When he arrives in town, he strides around the square saying "bang, the earth is round. Bang, the earth is round." The townspeople promptly cart him back to the asylum. But, asks Kierkegaard, is the earth not round? Does the asylum crave another sacrifice to this belief, as it did in the times when everyone thought it was flat as a pancake? There is, says Kierkegaard, a subjective madman who cannot reach the world through the veil of his own delusions. But there is also an objective madman, who cannot reach himself through the veil of the objective facts. One shudders to look in the eyes of the subjective madman because one may see there the depths of his insanity. But one shudders too to look at the objective madman, because one might discover that there is no person there at all: only a suit of clothes concealing a playback device.

Now "objectively true" sentences can come out of a tape recorder. Tape recorders, that is, are capable of producing utterances in contexts, and if there is any such thing as a sentence or a proposition, tape recorders are fully as capable of presenting them as are people. But I wonder whether you think tape recorders speak the truth. Well, the problem with a tape recorder is the same problem that Al Gore has: he's a mere mechanism and hence incapable of speaking the truth. And that shows us exactly what truth is and where it is: truth occurs in the human self as it opens itself to the world. And that, boys and girls, is my theory of truth.