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277 John Milbank 10 S Truth and Identity The Thomistic Telescope The question of truth is deeply related to the question of identity and stability . If we think of truth as saying ‘what is the case’, as in ‘it’s true that there’s a cat perched on the windowsill’, then the cat has to stay still long enough for one to be able to verify this. And there has to be something distinctly recognizable as a cat. Too fast a flash of mere fur would undo everything. However, we do not necessarily have to have anything to do with cats, who may be too elusive for the cause of truth. We can invent something stable for ourselves by making it sufficiently rigid and treating it always the same way (more or less), like a table that we eat on. Then it seems that we can be sure of saying some true things about the table. Still we may wonder if the table is really as it appears to us to be, securely shaped and colored, and some people may use it to sit on, thereby redefining it. A more radical recourse is to invent something more abstract like the number 1. This seems more certain and controllable—until we realize that we can define it only in relation to 2, but 1 as twice exemplified in 2 does not seem to be the pure 1 that cannot be multiplied or divided. It quickly appears that the most fundamental self-identical thing is elusive and inaccessible : it would have to be immune to participation and multiplicaOther versions of this article have appeared in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 80 (2006): 193–226; reprinted in Transcendence and Phenomenology, edited by C. Cunningham and P. Candler, 288–333 (London: SCM Press, 2007). Printed here with permission from the American Catholic Philosophical Association. 278   John Milbank tion, but the 1’s we know about can be divided and so multiplied into two halves and so forth. Then we resort to a further abstraction: turning from arithmetic to algebra and logic: whatever 1, the self-identical is, we do at least know that it cannot as 1 be also zero—even if, as 1 it can also be 2, 3, 4 and so forth. This gives us the law of the excluded middle or of non-contradiction: 1 cannot be at the same time zero, and no 1, no single thing, can be and not be what it is at the same time and in the same respect . If this were possible, then even tautologies would not be true, but we do at least know that a standing tree is a standing tree is a standing tree, recursively, ad infinitum. Since the ancient Greeks, just this law has been seen as the foundation of all logic, and so of all truthful discourses. Here at least one has a formal truth: modern thought, starting long ago with certain medieval currents, has often hoped to build on this formality toward a secure epistemology and even an ontology. But here a doubt must always persist as to whether one can cross the chasm between logical possibility and given actuality. Is anything more than a thin formal truth available to us? For the ancients and much of the Middle Ages, things stood otherwise . The law of excluded middle ruled actuality only because there were real stable identities out there in the world. Ralph Cudworth, the seventeenth-century English philosopher and theologian, noted that in Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates’ skeptical interlocutor, Protagoras, by arguing that reality is only material particles in random flux, entailing that our knowledge of them is only the contingent event of our interaction with them, renders the law of non-contradiction inoperable.1 For Socrates points out that if reality and knowledge consist only in sequences of events, then a affecting b must presuppose a1 affecting b1 and so on ad infinitum. Every item at the same time and in the same respect would already be not this item, and our knowledge of something could only be knowledge of this knowledge and so on recursively, such that either we could never stay still long enough to be subjectively aware, or else our staying still must be an illusion—the illusion of being a subject. Likewise , Aristotle in his Metaphysics said that without stable substance the law of non-contradiction cannot hold.2 One can at least read this asser1 . Ralph Cudworth, A Treatise Concerning Eternal...

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