December 19, 2021

219: What Is Truth?

36 minutes

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 is Turning Towards Life, a weekly live 30 minute conversation hosted by Thirdspace in which Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn dive deep into big questions of human living. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google and Spotify.

Here's our source for this week:

What is Truth?

Truth is an encounter: it needs to be 'felt in the blood and felt along the heart', in Wordsworth's famous phrase... We have become accustomed, in our Western way, to see all exchange of ideas as a kind of battle-ground in which there will be conquest and defeat. In the East, ancient truths have not commonly been thought such that they can convince (the word comes from the Latin 'vincere', to conquer) through argument, but rather that they become appreciated (the word comes from Latin 'pretium', value) through a patient, disciplined opening up of the self to experience. Jan Zwicky puts it like this:

'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

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