Category: Truthfulness

Notes on Kierkegaard and Truth

From a December, 1985 journal entry.

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Why does Søren Kierkegaard maintain that truth is subjectivity, and in the Danish equivalents of those very words? What could he mean by such a strange assertion?

To rehearse the obvious: S. K. does not mean that truth is subjective or relative, varying with persons, places, times, perspectives, or any other index. The Dane presupposes that truth is objective. But then what could the central claim of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, "truth is subjectivity," mean?

Since Kierkegaard assumes the objective truth of Christianity, and does so without question or caveat, the only issue for him is the subjective appropriation of Christian truth. To appropriate is to make one's own, and the one in question is not the abstract one in general, but in every case the concrete existing individual. S. K.'s greatness is his honesty in expounding the demands that genuine Christianity makes on the would-be Christian and in exposing the state-sponsored Christianity Inc. of his day. Given the tacit presupposition of Christianity's truth, it makes sense for S. K. to say that truth is subjectivity. For it is not the objective truth of Christianity that is an issue for him, but the individual, and thus necessarily subjective, task of becoming a Christian. That is my charitable reading of the famous dictum.

But to be precise in our use of terms, truth is by its very nature objective, not subjective; what is subjective is truthfulness. Only a person can correctly be said to be truthful in the primary sense of the term. It would make no sense to describe propositions as truthful any more than it would make sense to say that persons have truth-values or stand in entailment relations or correspond to reality.

Objective truth and subjective truthfulness, though distinct,  are related. (It is worth noting that 'objective and 'subjective' in the immediately preceding sentence are redundant qualifiers: truth would not be what it is if it were not objective, and truthfulness would not be what it is if if were not a personal attribute.) They are related in that one can be truthful only by respecting the truth, by living in accordance with it, by refraining from lying, deceit, and deception, by telling the truth.

Subjective, lived, existential truth is entirely vacuous if disengaged from objective truth; at the limit subjective truth thus disengaged is indistinguishable from vicious self-will. It then becomes what in contemporary parlance is called 'my truth.' But there is no such thing as my truth; truth by its very nature is objective. What is mine can only be my appropriation or non-appropriation of the truth, truth that cannot be mine. One cannot appropriate and live the truth unless there is truth to be appropriated.

I said that truth and truthfulness are related. But I don't want to give the impression that while truthfulness requires truth, truth can subsist without truthfulness. That may be, but it is not obvious and may be reasonably controverted. So I now take a further step by stating that truth and truthfulness are mutually implicative. They are, if you will,  'dialectically related:' no one without the other, and no other without the one. It is clear that truthfulness implies truth; less clear, but arguable is that truth implies truthfulness. That is to say: there cannot be objective truth without subjectivity, without a truthful subject.  Can I prove it? No. But I can make a case for it, a case that renders the thesis reasonable to believe.

Truth is made for the mind at least in this sense: Objective truth is necessarily such that is it possibly recognized by someone. Truth mediates between mind and reality.  Truth is the truth of reality in both the objective and subjective senses of the genitive. Truth is about reality, but it is also reality's truth. Reality's truth is reality's intelligibility, its aptness to be understood. So if it is objectively true that Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, then that truth, that true proposition, is necessarily such that it is possibly recognized or known by someone.  But it cannot be possibly known unless there actually exists someone who can know it. Now what is really possible must be grounded in the abilities and powers of actual agents. But there are many truths that are not possibly known by any finite agent. And yet they too are possibly known because knowability is an essential property of every truth. Therefore, their knowability is grounded in the actual power to know of an actual being. "And this all men call God."

Now that was rather quick, wasn't it? But I meant it merely as a sketch for an argument to be laid out rigorously. (The modal moves I made invite close scrutiny.) So laid out, the argument still won't be rationally compelling, but then no substantive argument in philosophy or theology for that matter is rationally compelling.  But many such arguments do supply grounds for reasoned belief which all that is available to us here below.

So suppose God exists. He is the truthful subjective source of all objective truth. In God, truthfulness and truth are one, the subjective and the objective coalesce. The mutually implicative relation of truthfulness and truth is as tightly grounded as could be. This is exactly what we should expect give the divine simplicity for which there many arguments. 

To sum up. Truthfulness for us here below is a matter of the subjective appropriation of objective truth. Read in this sense, S. K. 's dictum is defensible. It is not truth that is subjective, but truthfulness. 

There is no truthfulness without truth. This is well-nigh evident if not self-evident. That there is no truth without truthfulness is less clear but arguable as above.

Naomi Wolf on Tucker Carlson’s J6 Revelations

A rich Substack article that ends thusly:

The gatekeepers who lie to the public about the most consequential events of our time — and who thus damage our nation, distort our history, and deprive half of our citizenry of their right to speak, champion and choose, without being tarred as would-be violent traitors – deserve our disgust.

I am sorry the nation was damaged by so much untruth issued by those with whom I identified at the time.

I am sorry my former “tribe” is angry at a journalist for engaging in — journalism.

I am sorry I believed so much nonsense.

Though it is no doubt too little, too late —

Conservatives, Republicans, MAGA:

I am so sorry.

Tulsi Gabbard Exposes George Santos

Would that Tulsi would and could lay  bare the brazen bullshit of every single swamp critter in the District of Columbia from the life-long liar Joey B. on down and not leaving out Alejandro Mayorkas, 'Director of Homeland Security' — how is that for an Orwellian title! — and Elizabeth 'Fauxcahontas' Warren, and do it with the style, grace, and integrity she demonstrates in this amazing video. 

Please watch it and propagate it. 

Yes, I Repeat Myself

Leftists constantly repeat their brazen lies in the hope that eventually they will be taken for truths. So we of the Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable need constantly to repeat truths. Not our truths, for there is no such thing as 'our' truth or 'my' truth or 'your' truth.' Truth is not subject to ownership. If you have it, you have it without possessing it.
 
So speak the truth and speak it often. Don't be afraid of repeating yourself. Living well is impossible without repetition. All learning, all teaching, all physical culture, all musicianship require repetition. No mastery of anything, no improvement in anything, is possible without repetition. Can you play that riff the same way every time? If not, keep practicing. 
 
By practicing blows, whether verbal or physical, you learn how to land effective ones.

Spiritual Mountebanks

The world is full of hustlers and charlatans who prey upon spiritual seekers. One ought to be suspicious of anyone who claims enlightenment or special powers. The acid test, perhaps, is whether they demand money or sex for their services. If they do, run away while holding onto your wallet. 'Bhagwan Shree' Rajneesh  is a good example from the '80s. 

Recoiling from the mountebanks, some go to the opposite extreme, holding as fraudulent all spiritual teachers.

Some people are gullible and credulous, without a skeptical bone in their bodies. Others are skepticism incarnate, unable to believe anything or admire anything. A strange case of the latter is U. G. Krishnamurti, the anti-guru and 'anti-charlatan.' Please don't confuse him with the much better known J. Krishnamurti.

An obsessive doubter and debunker, U. G. Krishnamurti is a bit like the atheist who can't leave God alone, but must constantly be disproving him. U.G. can't leave the enlightenment quest and 'spirituality' alone. It's all buncombe, he thinks, but he can't be done with it.

Buddha, Jesus, and the rest were all just kidding themselves and misleading others. But U. G. can't just arrive at this conclusion and move on to something he deems worthwhile. For he is an 'anti-quester' tied to what he opposes by his self-defining opposition to it. Curiously perverse, but fascinating. He is a little like the later Wittgenstein who, though convinced that the problems of philosophy arose from linguistic bewitchment, couldn't move on to something worth doing, but instead obsessively scribbled on in any attempt to show a nonexistent fly the way out of a nonexistent fly-bottle.

Thomas Merton on Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

The gullible Merton appears to have been taken in by Trungpa.

Lie or Exaggeration or Bullshit? Politics in an Age of Bullshit

A redacted re-post from 30 November 2016

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Over the weekend, Donald Trump bragged in signature style that he “won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” Lefties are calling the statement a lie.  But it is no such thing.  In the typical case, a lie is a false statement made with the intention to deceive.  In the typical case, one who lies knows the truth, but misrepresents it to his audience out of a desire to deceive them.  But no one knows the truth-value of Trump's braggadocious conditional.  It could be true, but neither Trump nor anyone else has any evidence of its truth.  Although verifiable in principle, it is not practically verifiable.

When lefties call a statement a lie which is not a lie should we say that they are lying about what it is?

Was Trump exaggerating when he made his remark?  That's not right either.

I think what we have here is a species of bullshit in the sense pinned down by a noted philosopher.  According to Harry Frankfurt, a  statement is bullshit if it is

When did the Age of Bullshit begin in American politics?  Perhaps with the inauguration of Bill Clinton.  But it really gets underway with Barack Obama.  Obama is the shuck-and-jive precursor of Trump.  So let's recall some of his antics.

As Frankfurt points out, the essence of bullshit is a lack of concern for truth.  But truth and consistency are closely related notions.  Two statements are consistent (inconsistent) just in case they can (cannot) both be true.  Now I do not know if there are any cases of Obama contradicting himself synchronically (at a time), but there are plenty of examples of him contradicting himself diachronically.  He said things as a senator the opposite of which he says now.  Victor Davis Hanson supplies numerous examples in Obama as Chaos:

. . . when the president takes up a line of argument against his opponents, it cannot really be taken seriously — not just because it is usually not factual, but also because it always contradicts positions that Obama himself has taken earlier or things he has previously asserted. Whom to believe — Obama 1.0, Obama 2.0, or Obama 3.0?

When the president derides the idea of shutting down the government over the debt ceiling, we almost automatically assume that he himself tried to do just that when as a senator he voted against the Bush administration request in 2006, when the debt was about $6 trillion less than it is now.

The problem here is not merely logical; it is also ethical: the man is not truthful.  Truth, falsity, consistency, inconsistency pertain to propositions, not persons.  Truthfulness, deceitfulness, lack of concern for truth and consistency — these are ethical attributes, properties of persons.  Obama the bullshitter is an ethically defective president.  When Nixon lied, he could be shamed by calling him on it.  That is because he was brought up properly, to value truth and truthfulness.  But the POMO Obama, like that "first black president" Bill Clinton, apparently can't be shamed.  It's all bullshit and fakery and shuckin' and jivin'.  There is no gravitas in these two 'black' presidents, the one wholly white, the other half-white.  Everything's a 'narrative' — good POMO word, that — and the only question is whether the narrative works in the moment for political advantage. A narrative needn't be true to be a narrative, which is why the POMO types like it.  Hanson has Obama's number:

But a third explanation is more likely. Obama simply couldn’t care less about what he says at any given moment, whether it is weighing in on the football name “Redskins” or the Travyon Martin trial. He is detached and unconcerned about the history of an issue, about which he is usually poorly informed. Raising the debt ceiling is an abstraction; all that matters is that when he is president it is a good thing and when he is opposing a president it is a bad one. Let aides sort out the chaos. Obamacare will lower premiums, not affect existing medical plans, and not require increased taxes; that all of the above are untrue matters nothing. Who could sort out the chaos?

[. . .]

The media, of course, accepts that what Obama says on any given day will contradict what he has said or done earlier, or will be an exaggeration or caricature of his opponents’ position, or simply be detached from reality. But in their daily calculus, that resulting chaos is minor in comparison to the symbolic meaning of Obama. He is, after all, both the nation’s first African-American president and our first left-wing progressive since Franklin Roosevelt.

In comparison with those two facts, no others really matter.

The Infirmity of Truth

Having the truth is no defense in the court of the politically correct. For that court lies in the precincts of power, and here below truth is no match for power unless those who are truthful also have power.  But the paths to power are often paved with lies and their necessity. Rare then is the truthful one who attains power with his truthfulness intact.  

‘Knowingly Lied’

'Knowingly lied' is a pleonastic expression. One cannot lie without intending to deceive. And one cannot intend to do X without knowing that one intends to do X. So one cannot lie without lying knowingly: there is no such thing as an unknowing or unwitting lie. It follows that 'knowingly lied' is a pleonastic or redundant expression.  Good writers avoid pleonasm.

Good writers also know when to break rules in the service of what they want to say.

LIes and Counterfactuals

Suppose I say

1) Had Jeb Bush won the 2016 Republican  nomination, Hillary Clinton would have won the presidential election.

Suppose a Never-Trumper calls me a liar.  Have I lied?  A lie is an intentional misrepresentation of a truth known by the one who lies in order to deceive the person or persons being lied to.  Now (1) is either true or not true, but no one knows which it is. So no one can rightly call me a liar for asserting (1).  

If I am not lying when I assert (1), what am I doing?  I am offering a reasonable, but practically unverifiable, speculation.  And the same goes for a person who denies (2).

Donald Trump famously boasted, 

2) Had it not been for all the illegal votes, I would have won the popular vote as well as the electoral college vote.

Leftists, who compile long lists of Trump's supposed lies, had among their number some who counted (2) — an accurate paraphrase of what Trump said, not an exact quotation — as a lie.

But it is obviously not a lie. The worst you could call it is an unlikely self-serving speculation.  He did not assert something he knew to be false, he asserted something he did not know to be true.

Trump haters who compile lists of his 'lies,' need to give a little thought as to what a lie is; else their count will be wrong. 

Spiritual Mountebanks

The world is full of hustlers and charlatans who prey upon spiritual seekers. One ought to be suspicious of anyone who claims enlightenment or special powers. The acid test, perhaps, is whether they demand money or sex for their services. If they do, run away while holding onto your wallet. 'Bhagwan Shree' Rajneesh , now the subject of a Netflix documentary series, is a good example from the '80s. 

Recoiling from the mountebanks, some go to the opposite extreme, holding as fraudulent all spiritual teachers.

Some people are gullible and credulous, without a skeptical bone in their bodies. Others are skepticism incarnate, unable to believe anything or admire anything. A strange case of the latter is U. G. Krishnamurti, the anti-guru and 'anti-charlatan.' Please don't confuse him with the much better known J. Krishnamurti.

An obsessive doubter and debunker, U. G. Krishnamurti is a bit like the atheist who can't leave God alone, but must constantly be disproving him. U.G. can't leave the enlightenment quest and 'spirituality' alone. It's all buncombe, he thinks, but he can't be done with it.

Buddha, Jesus, and the rest were all just kidding themselves and misleading others. But U. G. can't just arrive at this conclusion and move on to something he deems worthwhile. For he is an 'anti-quester' tied to what he opposes by his self-defining opposition to it. Curiously perverse, but fascinating. He is a little like the later Wittgenstein who, though convinced that the problems of philosophy arose from linguistic bewitchment, couldn't move on to something worth doing, but instead obsessively scribbled on in any attempt to show a nonexistent fly the way out of a nonexistent fly-bottle.

Thomas Merton on Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

The gullible Merton appears to have been taken in by Trungpa.

Why Lie?

Why lie when the facts are easily established and indeed well known? Hillary is famous for this, but Elizabeth Warren, the 'Cherokee' Pinocchio, takes the cake. See also Elizabeth Warren Went Native.

Related: Hillary the Fabulist. It begins:

It has been said of Bill Clinton that he'd rather climb a tree and tell a lie than stand on the ground and tell the truth.  Hillary continues the family tradition.  One of her latest untruths is that all four of her grandparents came to the U.S. as immigrants when only one of them did.  She lied, brazenly, about something easily checked. To prolong the arboreal metaphor, why would she perch herself far out on a limb so easily sawn off?  Beats me.