The intimate strangeness of being: metaphysics after dialectic

7. Pluralism, Truthfulness, and thePatience of Being

185 7 S Pluralism, Truthfulness, and the Patience of Being Truth exists. Only lies are invented.             Georges Braque Truth and Construction How we understand truth cannot be disconnected from how we understand ourselves, or from how we understand how we humans are to be. “How we are to be”: this phrase indicates the human being as a creature with a certain promise of being that calls out to be realized in one way or another. Some ways will enable fulfillment of the promise, if we are true to what we are. Some ways may betray the promise, if we are false to what we are. The intimate connection of being human and being true is not a merely theoretical issue but has inescapably ethical and indeed religious significance. In philosophy we are familiar with a plurality of significant theories of truth. I mention a few of them. There is the correspondence theory: truth is the adequation, more or less exact, of our intellect to things. There is the coherence theory: what is most important is not an external correspondence but the immanent self-consistency of our concepts or thoughts or propositions. There are idealistic theories in which the identity of being and thought is claimed, or in which, in Hegel’s famous words, “the true is the whole.” There are pragmatic theories of truth: truth is what works for us, in the long run. And there are more. This plurality of theories might seem congenial to our own contemporary ethos which seems highly pluralistic. Yet none of these theories celebrate sheer plurality in an undiscriminating way. Our diverse answers to the question of truth call us back from any attitude that endorses “any- 186  Metaphysics beyond Dialectic thing goes.” Not everything goes. Rorty smirked that truth is what your colleagues let you get away with, but no discerning colleague would let him get away with this. We would smile at the joke and pass on. We would carry on thinking. For there are different senses of being true, some more appropriate to the more objective determinations of actuality, some more fitting for the elusive enigmas of the human heart. To be true to something is to enact a certain fidelity to that thing, hence depending on that thing, our “being true” will be different. There is a pluralism with regard to “being true” in that sense; but this does not preclude something more than diversity without relation. I will come to this later in terms of the spirit of truthfulness.1 Nevertheless, in the contemporary pluralistic ethos there is a fairly widespread attitude that is worth noting. I mean the view that connects the true and the constructed. Truth is our construction. Initially one might think this is a fine view. Not only do we the constructors of truth become the sources of truth, but we also begin to enjoy our proper destiny as its coming masters. What better augury for the betterment of the human condition , and the pathway toward the (true) self-empowerment of humankind , could there be? And, of course, the practices of science and medicine are one central area where this self-empowerment is in play. If we are such constructors, perhaps we can reconstruct the conditions of life that will overcome the given patiences that often drag down our energies, such as sickness, disease, death, everything bearing on our frail, finite bodies. Truth as a construction seems to offer a marvelous beacon of hope. There is a widespread cultural attitude that endorses a pluralism of approaches to things, a pluralism possibly unlimited except perhaps by the powers of human invention and imagination. The call is to celebrate the many, let a thousand flowers bloom. This is not unconnected with a democratic ethos in which each different one is said to deserve the same respect as the next one. It is not unconnected with a view of tradition as a hegemonic univocalism that subordinates differences to a more or less tyrannical homogeneity. Truth, with a capital T, is judged guilty of such a tyranny. We must not seek Truth, but truths, or as Nietzsche claimed, my truth. Let a thousand truths bloom. But this is entirely too passive a proclamation : let us make a thousand truths. Again, on this view, all turns on 1. On different senses of truth and being true, see my Being and the Between, chapter 12. Pluralism, Truthfulness, Patience of...