What Is Truth?
We live in a time when truth gets pulled apart by the move towards ‘I am right, you are wrong’ and the parallel move to make all truths equal and indistinguishable from one another. And in coming at truth this way, we easily pull ourselves and one another apart.
But what if finding out ‘what’s true’ is a process, not a thing? A process of loving, disciplined attention, in which walk a path together, taking one another’s judgements into account, bringing our best reason, imagination, intuition to bear, in which we experiment together?
This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about the lives we might build it we treated the search for truths to live by as a loving, attentive path of responsibility and openness. It's hosted as always by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
This week's Turning Towards Life is a conversation about the lives we might build it we treated the search for truths to live by as a loving, attentive path of responsibility and openness. It's hosted as always by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
Here's our source for this week:
What is Truth?
'Truth is the asymptotic limit* of sensitive attempts to be responsible to our actual experience of the world ... 'sensitive attempts to be responsible' means truth is the result of attention. (As opposed to inspection). Of looking informed by love. Of really looking.'
... Though truth is always my personal judgement, it is not just possible, but necessary, that my judgment should take into account yours and many others. It is far from random, but is, rather, informed by experiment, perception, reason, intuition and imagination.
Ian McGilchrist, from 'The Matter With Things' pp396-397
*[*in mathematics, an asymptotic limit is a value that you get closer and closer to, but never quite reach]
Photo by Mads Schmidt Rasmussen on Unsplash