I thought it would be good to follow up my recent essay on scepticism (which points out that we have no access to truth) with some positive comments about truth as a symbol. I was also particularly moved recently by finding this picture in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It is an anonymous picture, dated about 1620-30, called ‘Truth presenting a mirror to the vanities of the world’.
Artistic depictions of Truth as an allegorical figure are interesting. They are overwhelmingly female, and sometimes naked (obviously reflecting the idea of ‘disclosure’). This Truth, on the other hand, is sumptuously robed and dignified. Her expression seems appropriately severe. The use of a mirror to symbolise truth is widespread, and can be interpreted both as an indication that we should confront uncomfortable facts about ourselves, and also that we should look at our own role in creating the ‘truths’ we believe in. The skull is obviously a reminder of the ‘truth’ of impermanence and death, that we may often fail to face up to. What I found particularly striking here, though, is that Truth is also holding up a pair of scales. That suggests a particular emphasis on the need to balance our judgements in order to get closer to truth, a direct suggestion of the Middle Way as well as related philosophical ideas such as that of ‘reflective equilibrium’. From the Middle Way point of view, positive or negative metaphysical extremes would distort the scales either way, preventing the much more subtle balancing of the scales required to make judgements in experience.
As a sceptic, I don’t believe that we can have access to truth (and saying this is not itself a truth-claim but rather just facing up to our embodiment and inability to be God). However, that doesn’t in any way prevent us from imagining and symbolising truth. Indeed, maintaining truth as an ideal, and relating to it positively, seems to me an important process. There is no contradiction here. We can, at one and the same time, honour or even worship truth, whilst recognising our inability to access it. Indeed, at a more profound level it is our very commitment to truth as an ideal that drives us to recognise that we do not have it. That commitment (or faith) in truth does not consist in propositions about truth that are claimed to be true (or false), but in the meaningfulness of truth to me. I may have all sorts of neural connections that enable me to respond to ideas of truth, these being linked into embodied experience and activity in all sorts of ways, but none of these are so entrenched (I hope) that they result in claims that such-and-such is formally true.
The embodied nature of what truth can mean for us is evident in this picture, as all the ways that truth is depicted are not about ‘the truth’ itself, but rather about ways that we need to face up to conditions that we are resistant to. The scales, as I have already mentioned, are a more directly embodied metaphor for the judgement process. The mirror and skull are directly associated with often unwelcome recognitions of the imperfection of our bodies. But the woman herself is also an embodiment of truth rather than an abstraction from it, and can remind us of some facets of the meaning of truth for us: dignified, restrained, and slightly severe.
‘Truth’ has sometimes been relativised by pragmatic philosophers (such as Nietzsche and William James), who would talk about ‘our truth’ rather than ‘the truth itself’. This does reflect ordinary informal usage, where I’m quite happy to admit that the phrase ‘That’s true’ does sometimes cross my lips, meaning ‘that accords with my experience and understanding’. But in my view truth has too much dignity – is too sacred, if you like – to be treated in this way on the more formal occasions when we talk or write more reflectively about it. It’s only because we find truth meaningful in this way, and preserve its symbolic absoluteness, that we are able to be sceptical when it comes to truth claims. Indeed, it seems to me that sceptics are the people who find truth most meaningful, at the same time as recognising fully that they have never met with her in person.
The metaphor of ‘truth as a woman’ was famously developed by Nietzsche at the beginning of his ‘Beyond Good and Evil’:
Supposing truth to be a woman – what? is the suspicion not well founded that all philosophers, when they have been dogmatists, have little understanding of women? that the gruesome earnestness, the clumsy importunity with which they have been in the habit of approaching truth have been inept and improper means for winning a wench? Certainly she has not let herself be won – and today every kind of dogmatism stands sad and discouraged.
An attractively embodied point of view, though obviously a very male one. ‘Clumsy importunity’, though, seems quite an appropriate metaphor for how many people, male or female, treat truth. They completely misjudge her, thinking she’s like them and can easily be made part of the group. Beyond that, however, perhaps we shouldn’t push Nietzsche’s analogy too far. It is not so much Truth that has not let herself be won, but rather us who are incapable of winning her.
Some of the ‘dogmatic philosophers’ attacked by Nietzsche for importuning truth have more recently taken to more indirect, hypothetical appeals to her. The truth-dependent theory of meaning widely accepted in analytic philosophy is something like a fake cheque supposedly drawing on Truth’s bank account. We’re told that a certain claim is meaningful because we understand the circumstances in which it would be true – even though, in practice, we have never experienced and never could experience an occasion when we know anything to be true. If we were ever to pay in the cheque, rather than just passing it round as a medium of exchange, payment would be refused, because Truth does not let her account be drawn on in such a way. Hypothetical appeals to truth in practice have nothing stronger than convention to draw on.
As a symbol, Truth can also be understood as another version of the God archetype recognised by Jung. If the archetypal God in our experience is a forward projection of the possibility of our integration, Truth is very much the same, for the outward process of removing delusive barriers reflects the inner one of removing conflict: in both cases it is absolutisations that stand in our way. Just as those who really have respect for truth should not claim to possess it, similarly those who really have respect for God should not claim to be in possession of revelations that reflect God’s will.
The acceptance of truth as meaningful at the same time as recognising that we don’t possess it is a difficult balancing act, but, I think, a crucial aspect of the Middle Way. There are lots of judgement calls as to where the boundaries between truth-claim and truth-meaning lie, and different people may disagree on exactly where they lie in different cases. But if you want to practise the Middle Way, I think it is the overall balancing intention that is important here. Not getting sucked into claims about truth or falsity requires resolution on the one hand, but respect for truth as a symbol of what is out there may be equally important.
Hello Robert! After having focused some years on Nietzsche’s work throughout my life, I sometimes find how others view and/or use his work a valuable place to begin conversation. I’ve found his work to be immensely helpful in constructing a trajectory on my own over the years similar to Middle Way Philosophy (MWP), although my reading of Nietzsche doesn’t seem in accord with the majority of the discourses regarding his work. That said, I’d like to make a few comments.
You wrote: “An attractively embodied point of view, though obviously a very male one. ‘Clumsy importunity’, though, seems quite an appropriate metaphor for how many people, male or female, treat truth. They completely misjudge her, thinking she’s like them and can easily be made part of the group. Beyond that, however, perhaps we shouldn’t push Nietzsche’s analogy too far. It is not so much Truth that has not let herself be won, but rather us who are incapable of winning her.”
First, my sense is that your last sentence actually echoes what Nietzsche is saying in the Preface to Beyond Good & Evil from which you took the quote (“Supposing truth to be a woman – what?…”) *. In German, truth is indeed a woman, that is, ‘truth’ is feminized with the article ‘die’ in ‘die wahrheit.’ It’s also worth noting that some of the ancient Greek philosophers and early Christians feminized ‘truth/wisdom’ as Sophia, with the later German philosophers, to whom Nietzsche was responding, following suit (or is that, pursuit?) via the arbitrary engenderment at play within their language (elsewhere Nietzsche comments on this very arbitrariness).
As a very sensitive philologist, Nietzsche was keen on the inseparability of ‘form’ and ‘content’, which seems to me to correspond in some way to MWP’s similar posture on the fact-value distinction and along similar lines. For Nietzsche (and myself) reading a text is an embodied experience (what a redundant thing to say!) and as such can be a form of nutriment or, conversely, bring on a case of food poisoning. What Nietzsche indicates time and again is that metaphysics and (the rules of) grammar far too often correspond within philosophical discourse and in the case of ‘truth’ within German discourses the ‘feminine’ is subjected to ‘masculine’ groping (if not outright abuse!) via the grammar (form) itself. Platonism (including that of Christianity, according to Nietzsche) provided a historical justification for both the idealization of Truth and the representation of this ideal as a chastened female under the authority of the all-too-masculine philosopher and his ascetic whip.
So, in a very real way Nietzsche was pointing out that the ‘metaphysical cobweb-spinners’ with whom he engaged have both inverted ‘truth’ in their denial of “perspective, the basic condition of all life” and contradicted themselves on their own terms. Oh sure, according to our web-spinners, the dust of embodied, earthly life can be subjugated toward the ends of metaphysics (used as ‘evidence,’ for instance) but it should never contaminate the court of the ‘highest ideals’ on its own. These ‘highest ideals’ are presumed (psychologically) adequate, and even a primary to, this ‘woman’ upon which they subject to ‘the whip’ of their cobweb-spinning (reasoning, justification). It’s then no accident that after the short preface Nietzsche launches his first chapter ‘The Prejudices of the Philosophers’ where, in part, he works to flesh out this trajectory, undermine the conceptual separation between, the ‘truth’ of the philosophers with ‘basic condition of life’ (perspective, embodiment) and begin to re-linking them. The play of form-content that is the book (indeed, I’d argue, most of Nietzsche’s corpus) undercuts the presumed primacy of any discourse over embodiment; and thus the unjustified, but corollary separation of ‘content’ from ’form’.
It seems to me that it’s on those who give primacy to the content (ideas) of a text (a form) to account for 1) how that content can be available without the form; and/or 2) according to what, exactly, they can devalue ‘form’ and give primacy to ‘content’.
All in all, I don’t find the provided quotation of Nietzsche to express a development of ‘truth as a woman’ (symbolization) on his part, but rather pointing out this prior development, and its maintenance, in the hands of ‘clumsy, importunate’ philosophers who prefer a “handful of ‘certainties’ to [the] wagon-load of beautiful possibilities” found within the very messiness of our lives.
* http://www.thenietzschechannel.com/works-pub/bge/bgep.htm
Hi Allen, Thanks for your comment. I don’t think I have anything to disagree with or to add to what you say about the interpretation of the passage from Nietzsche that I used, which obviously engages with him more closely than I was doing.
I’ve encountered a range of people who interpret Nietzsche in a wide variety of ways, and concluded that he is so ambiguous that we can make him say virtually what we like. There’s probably a Nietzschean Middle Way, though, in terms of a helpful and embodied reading of Nietzche as a source of inspiration, that you may be able to pursue if you find him inspiring.
The traps that people seem to fall into most when interpreting Nietzsche, in my experience, seem to be those of assuming that he has a ‘true’ message that they have cracked and that supersedes the philosophies he is criticizing rather than being counter-dependent on them. It seems to be so easy to be seduced by his critical acuity into thinking that he must also therefore have a helpful positive message. But his Uebermensch ethic seems to have a strong ascetic element to it that I find hard to reconcile to the Middle Way, apart from its strong aristocratic class-basis. A Buddhist I used to know called Robert Morrison (also known as Sagaramati) wrote a book called ‘Nietzsche and Buddhism’ in which he basically claimed the compatibility of Nietzsche’s ascetic ethic and Buddhism, but he could only do this by ignoring the Middle Way in Buddhism!
Hello Robert, and thank you for responding.
As you’ve written elsewhere, the Middle Way in Buddhism has itself been interpreted, and in many ways absolutized, by Buddhists themselves, while ignoring explicit passages where Gautama both challenges such absolutization and/or remains silent when his interlocutor insists upon doing such.
Yes, I’ve read countless criticisms of Nietzsche’s supposed elitism and aristocratic class bias. I’ve read the same regarding the Uebermensch. But, are such critiques warranted? And, if so, from where? What perspective?
I sense most criticisms of Nietzsche arise out of the presumed separation of ‘form’ from ‘content,’ and the (moral/evaluative) primacy given to the latter (including the insistence upon ‘logical clarity’ above all else), on the part of the reader. Thus, it seems, as you say, Nietzsche remains ambiguous for many folks due to the focus given to the ‘ideas’ at play in his texts apart from their ‘form.’ Again, this seems to suggest more the reader’s state of mind than Nietzsche’s work.
For instance, in regards the ‘Uebermensch’ concept, it seems to escape most people that this notion came after his writing _Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (Human, All-too-Human)_where he critiques the habitual values and metaphysics up to his day. This can be experienced. It’s ‘material’ even. We can see this in the very ‘form’ his works developed through. And yet it’s routinely ignored, I think, due to the bias giving ‘ideas’ pride of place in exactly the way he (and, if I’m not mistaken, you) critiques. The Uebermensch appears to me more of a name, or grammatical place holder, for a potential ‘post-human, all-too-human’ existence, no more mysterious, really, than David Chapman’s expressed desire to ‘transition’ to a ‘next stage,’ in the quote on the Society’s ‘join us’ page. (As a side note here: Nietzsche was also explicit on his own inability to fully see it much less ‘be’ it.)
In terms of ‘aristocratic class-bias,’ again, I think Nietzsche is very clear in where his ‘aristocracy’ stems from and, yes, it is incompatible with Buddhism in the main in that the latter has allowed itself to slip into the very negation of our own lives, and the possibility of joy here and now, in favor of metaphysics and metaphysical authoritarianism, as you’ve eloquently written of elsewhere. One such passage highlighting the ‘ground’ of this ‘aristocracy’:
“My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary—but love it.”
For cobweb-spinning elitists (absolutists) and ‘democrats’ (relativists) such an ‘aristocracy’ may be both incomprehensible as well as intolerable, given that in the first case not everyone should have access to the ‘highest ideals’ and in the latter everyone has the equal ability and should have access to such ideals. (Note the moral imperatives, the ‘shoulds’) Neither, however, accent unhesitatingly to life as we can only live it. This theme recurs throughout his writing, including the ‘form’ and titles of his books (ex: The Joyful Science) as this trajectory developed.
In another way, most criticisms ignore Nietzsche’s profession as a philologist due to this separation between ‘form’ and ‘content.’ His ideas are important in order to critique from out of this presumed separation, but not so much his form – his life…excepting the fact he went mad and/or possibly had syphilis (of which we’re reminded constantly as if to warn us!). As a philologist he engaged not only ancient and contemporary texts, but was obviously keen on the structure, grammar, and meanings/values at play within the words used. Again, he was explicit in this engagement:
“…I raise the following question for the consideration: it merits the attention of philologists and historians as well as those who are actually philosophers by profession: ‘What signposts does linguistics, especially the study of etymology, give in the history of the evolution of moral concepts?’ “
And indeed, as you’ve pointed out often in your critiques of the fact-value distinction, our verbiage is hardly amoral/value-free. It’s chock-full of meanings stemming from moral evaluations, those of our society, of our experience, etc. I don’t think it’s difficult to see Nietzsche encouraging the re-valuation of these older, unquestioned values from a joyous ‘ground’ of approbation – rather than one hostile – toward our conditions, toward our lives. This entails abandoning the all-too-human ‘cuts’ we make with conceptual scalpels like ‘form-content’, ‘facts-values’ etc. Thus, the ‘best,’ ‘most fitting,’ ‘noblest’ (that is, the ‘aristos’) way we can live is from an attitude of unhesitating approbation, and this theme does appear to me to be the hardwood (as in an etymological play on ‘true’) of Nietzsche’s message, given its recurrence. If anything, his work shares the acceptance, objectivity, and indeed, joy I sense in your own works.