David Breeden is speaking all week about Naive Optimism

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden and senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. This is coffee and wisdom. And this week we are looking at skepticism and naive optimism and those kinds of ideas. And to start, let’s think about a question: “What do many universities, the CIA and the ancient secret order of the Knights Templar all have in common?” And the answer is their motto, “Libreria Vertitas Acireale”, the truth sets or will set us free. Why are they all saying this? And do they all mean the same thing? I think that’s an interesting question. Well, the truth shall make you free originates in the Gospel of John 8:32. Yesterday, I discussed a little bit of the context of that and specifically this is taken out of context. And purportedly these are the words of Jesus who is talking about sin and the way to get out of sin. So is this a moveable idea, and are we able to cherry pick it and take it out of the context is indeed one of the questions that we need to answer. “Whose truth?” Is one question and “what is free?” is another question, and yes, there are all kinds of assumptions built into something that sounds at first fairly profound, doesn’t it? Well, so let’s think for a moment about this idea of truth. I would distinguish truth, in fact, in my mind anyway. And I think as some philosophers agree with me, there is a difference between truth and fact.

Truth cannot be seen. Justice, for example, is abstract. Yes, there are examples of justice, but actually as a truth, you can’t put your finger on it. It is a concept. On the other hand, a fact can be seen or it can at least be measured. Gravity, for example. We don’t actually see it, but we can measure it. And so the difference between a truth and a fact has to do with how abstract it is and how measurable it is. So my conclusion on that is that truth is socially constructed and in fact is universal. Universal is a problematic word, just as truth, in fact. But you get the idea. Truth is different in different social contexts, but fact is something that can be measured anywhere on the planet. That’s probably where we want to go with that, anyway. The foundational idea to talk about what truth is in the way that we talk about it nowadays comes from Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844 to 1900. So often in philosophy, Nietzsche was the first to think of ideas that would become whole fields of philosophy later in the 20th and now in the 21st centuries. What I want to refer to today is on truth and lies, in a non-moral sense. This is a philosophical essay that you can find in various places. It is available online. If you don’t read German, you are at the mercy of various kinds of translations with various programs to go along with that.

One of the challenges of reading Nietzsche these days is that his work has gone through the baffles of so many different people, judging, deciding, etc. And, yes, because he had a fan club within the Nazi party, he is often written off as something over here. But I think that’s a misunderstanding of most of his work. So a lot of people these days, at least, are trying to relook at Nietzsche by removing the baggage that built up in the during the the 20th century, especially. A book that just came out, I think a year or so ago, is on Truth and Untruth, which is a new translation of some of Nietzsche’s work. So you can find these out there. You can buy them relatively inexpensively or there are lots of them free in PDF online. He has this to say. And again, he’s going to say that I’m going to look at truths.