Aristotle on the Nature of Truth (review)

The drive of this book, without ever quite saying so, is to recommend Aristotle’s teaching on truth for contemporary thought. The book is more about concepts and arguments around truth than about truth per se. The explanation of the famous definition of truth, as saying of what is that it is, occupies a few pages. The rest of the book elucidates the vast subtext of this limpid passage. What must intellect be, what must speech be, what must beings be, for this saying of what is? The “correspondence theory of truth,” which textbooks routinely attribute to Aristotle, is repudiated. Correctness and accuracy are not the fundamental values of truth. They are byproducts of a more fundamental responsiveness to the way things naturally express themselves.

The linchpin of Long’s interpretation is that nature at large is expressive. This idea tends to be repeated rather than explained. “It is the nature of things to express themselves” (7). “By nature, things speak” (12). Not merely speak but almost shout. “The things themselves demand . . . to be put into words” (71). The claim is “not merely that language can lend voice to the nature of things,” but more emphatically that “the being of things naturally expresses itself” (55). So if we want truth, we must allow things to speak for themselves. “The truth of things is discernable to those who live in intimate communion with the things of nature” (10), presumably because they “cultivat[e] habits of relation nourished by the attempt to say things as they are” (48). Truth is a question of responsibility, being true to things, and a question of justice, being true to everything else to which it and oneself are related, and which must momentarily be silenced to hear a thing say what it is.

What do things say when they speak? Mostly, it seems, their voluminous unicity, “an insistent unicity that enjoins response” (242). ‘Unicity’ is Long’s word for the fullness, substance, or individual essence of things, at once their being and their otherness, their being, an identity they have in themselves and not by human mediation. This unicity is what we have to tap into to know the truth. Our response, our truthfulness, begins in perception, when we first take in what things say. Long corrects the impression that for Aristotle perception is passive reception. It is receptivity, yes, but receptivity as an active capacity. In being open to determination by the other, the soul becomes more fully itself. Perception is neither sheer passive reception nor transcendental aggression. It is simply “wakeful discernment” (129). Perception is awakened by expressiveness, and responds with a power of phantasia that translates the logos of things into the idiom of the soul.

Kant needs to understand how that happens. What is this power, and how do we know it conduces to knowledge? For Long, as for Aristotle, such problems do not arise. It is nature, and nature is sincere. He actually says that. “Nature is sincere; it expresses itself honestly and in ways that are naturally accessible to human beings” (158). We live in “an organic ecology of encounter” (156), where “by careful attendance to the individual as such its very what-it-is can be discerned” (191). That does seem to be Aristotle’s thought. But is it not simplistic these days? I am not thinking of epistemological scruples about representation, but only of what we understand about the neurology of perception. The brain and its circumstances massively condition all the interaction between mind or soul and whatever exists on the other side of the skin. A perception is invariably a human construction because perception evolved for survival, not ontological justice. It seems to me that little of value remains for Aristotle’s teaching on truth for anyone who takes Darwin seriously. Such a confrontation is unfortunately alien to the “phenomenological” tradition in which Long’s reading is entrenched.

The true problem of truth, on this reading, is to understand the ontological encounter...