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"'What is truth?' retorted Pilate. With this he went out again to the Jews gathered there and said, 'I find no basis for a charge against him.'"
- Gospel of St. John 18:38
I was recently reminded of a truth about Truth.
I was reading through a book on logic, written by the great Peter Kreeft of Boston College, when I stumbled across an old lesson in Aristotelian philosophy.
It has to do with the question "What is Truth, and why should we bother pursuing it?"
Now that might sound like a very esoteric question, especially in a time when Presidents are being arrested and everyday modern life seems to call out for your attention.
I hope to persuade you, however, that it is a question worth asking now more than ever.
The practical consequences of getting the answer to this question wrong are severe — A world without an answer to that question is a world where justice is dead, and the innocent can be punished — presidential or otherwise.
It's the sort of question that, if you get it wrong, you may just end up putting God Himself to death.
So let's get it right.
A Brief Answer On The Big Question
There are obviously two questions here:
What is Truth?
Why pursue it?
Now, unsurprisingly, philosophers have debated the first half of that question "what is Truth?" extensively.
In this article, I am not interested in engaging in that debate.
It is a long, confusing, somewhat annoying, and often impractical conversation to have, however necessary it is.
I will therefore mostly focus on answering the question "why pursue Truth?" in order to understand what the consequences are if we don’t have an answer.
For my own purposes, then, I will assume a version of what is called The Identity Theory of Truth. That is to say, that something is true if it is identical to reality.
For example, the fact "this apple is red" is true because it really is the case (reality) that the apple is red. Believe it or not, philosophers would find that statement controversial...
I'll use this definition of truth because it is commonsensical to me, and I assume to the vast majority of normal folks.
I also use it because if objective reality is grounded in a transcendent Being (say in a Tripersonal God) then it seems fair to assume reality and truth are identical.
With that out-of-the-way, let's talk about why we pursue Truth.
Aristotle and The Three Sciences
Nearly 3,000 years ago, Aristotle pointed out that there are at least three distinct reasons to pursue truth:
To improve the world around us
To Improve our behavior, decision-making, and lives.
To improve our very selves.
Each of these reasons results in the creation of three broad categories of "sciences." These sciences, respectively, are:
The productive sciences
The practical sciences
The theoretical sciences
The productive sciences seek to understand the world around us so that we may improve or transform it. Aristotle called these sciences "productive" because they seek to produce things (like cars, robots, glue, and pills).
Today, we call these sciences technology which comes from the Greek word techné which roughly translates as "know-how."
The productive sciences include such diverse fields as engineering, surgery/medicine, cooking, and farming.
Next, our desire to improve our own decision-making and actions leads us to develop the practical sciences. These change our lives, behavior, and improve our skill at various activities.
The practical sciences include fields like politics, economics, accounting, ethics, and even singing.
The theoretical sciences, or pure sciences, exist to satisfy our desire to know simply for the sake of knowing. They are aimed at the expansion of the self, or the soul.
Aristotle called these sciences theoretical from the Greek word theoria, which means looking or contemplating.
The theoretical sciences include mathematics, physics, biology, theology, astronomy, and philosophy.
While these sciences can have practical applications, they are "first of all aimed at simply knowing and understanding the truth, even if there is no practical application of it."
The reasons for pursuing Truth are thus threefold:
The transformation of ourselves
The transformation of our lives
The transformation of our world
The Significance of The Pursuit of Truth
So who cares? Why does any of this matter? Why should anybody give what Aristotle had to say two and half millennia ago?
I'd like to submit to you, that you care. However esoteric or boring what you read above may (or may not) seem to you, it is of the utmost significance to your everyday life.
Many people today feel that the theoretical sciences, like philosophy, are not very important.
The argument often goes that fields like philosophy, or cosmology, do not offer us any practical knowledge.
(I am always amazed, in particular, at conservatives who scoff at philosophy or the liberal arts, as if these were inventions of the far left. What could it possibly mean to be a conservative if not to hold specific philosophical positions?)
Aristotle, on the other hand, argued that the theoretical sciences are the most important of the three.
The reason is the same reason that the practical sciences are more important than the productive sciences. In a word, they are more intimate — "the reward is closer to home."
In the productive sciences, we seek to improve the world around us, in the practical we seek to improve our lives. But in the theoretical, we seek to improve our very selves.
Just as our personal lives are more intimate to us than the material world, so our very selves are more intimate to us than our personal lives (our deeds and activities).
I hope it's clear that our selves are at least more important to us than the external world. As Kreeft illustrates:
As a very famous and very practical philosopher argued twenty centuries ago, "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but lose his own self?" (Mark 8:36)
It is out of a desire to first pursue Truth for its own sake that we eventually come to the knowledge of how to improve our lives, and then the world around us.
If we forsake the theoretical sciences, then we forsake the practical and productive. Yet this is precisely what the modern man has done — denied the value of the theoretical.
Our schools today churn out millions of button-pushers, rarely do they produce a thinker. That is a greater threat to our society today than any possible invasion.
Everything, therefore, hinges on our understanding of what "Truth" is, and the reasons we have for pursuing it.
This Week In The News
For billions of Roman Catholics and Protestants, this week has two news stories worth considering —
(1) the triumphal entry, trial, crucifixion, and death of Jesus Christ
(2) the indictment of President Donald J. Trump
Suppose I release two articles today (Good Friday, 2023):
What is Truth? (With a picture of Jesus on it for Good Friday)
Everything You Need To Know About the Trump Indictment (With a picture of Trump)
Because most people only have enough time to read one article a day, they will have to choose between the two.
What astonishes me about our society is that virtually everyone will choose the second article over the first.
This is astonishing because what is promised in the second article is literally fulfilled by answering the question in the first.
Until we become the kind of society more interested in the first article, we will remain the kind of society where the second article can exist.
Conclusion: Consequences
We started with two questions:
What is Truth?
Why pursue it?
If you get the answer to these questions wrong, the consequences are fatal. In the first place, you lose the ability to have justice. In the second, you lose your soul.
A society that answers the first question with relativity or consequentialism will find ways to prosecute the innocent and punish the just.
A society that answers the second question with utilitarianism, pragmatism, or apathy, loses its very soul, the expansion of its consciousness, and the essence of its humanity.
Barbarism, corruption, and weakness ensue.
What happens on the front pages of the Wall Street Journal, therefore, is the fruit of our answer to these questions.
If we cannot (or do not) boldly answer and defend the importance of these questions, then we cannot wash our hands clean of the consequences.
Further Reading
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