David Breeden is speaking all week about Naive Optimism

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I am the Senior Minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. This is “Coffee and Wisdom”. And this week we are looking at optimism, foolish optimism, over-optimism, no optimism at all, and which is kind of what I’m going to talk about today. I’ve been looking at the phrase “Vertitas vox liberabit”, which means “the truth shall make you free”, and which is actually a quote from the Gospel of John 8:32 taken out of context, as I have been discussing. But that kind of appeals to people that somehow the truth will do something to make you free. So one of the things that I have been thinking about here is, you know, what is a concept of truth? How do we want to talk about that? And so I’m just differentiating here between truth and fact, and what’s the difference between a truth and a fact? A truth cannot be seen. For example, “justice” that is an abstraction, “democracy” that is an abstraction. And you can see also that these are human invented ideas. A fact can be seen or measured. And in this case, think about gravity. No, you can’t really see it, but you can see its effects. You can measure its effects, and that would be a fact. You can do gravity experiments anywhere in our world and come up with a lot very similar kinds of ideas and answers. So a truth is socially constructed, all right, a truth is socially constructed. And that’s how I want to talk about this then.

And if it is socially constructed a truth, we don’t have the truth with a capital T anymore. We have a whole lot of little T truths out in the world. Yesterday I discussed one of the first ideas that came along in the Western world to question this idea of what we see in terms of languag in reality. It was a philosophical essay by Frederick Nietzsche in the 1870’s called “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” He’s not going to worry about whether or not it’s moral to tell the truth or to lie. Rather, can we discover any truth at all? And his conclusion on that, to be very brief, if you want to know the whole thing, look back to yesterday’s program. But he says truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions. So we have elided a metaphor. We have elided concepts into something that we’re calling a truth that actually well, now it’s not really quite a truth. It’s just an abstraction. Now, one of the groups that looked at this a long time ago are the skeptics. And nowadays we, too, that use the term skeptical all the time. But it was originally a philosophical movement, first in India and then in Greece. A skeptic means “skepsis”, it’s based on the Greek word skepsis, which means investigation. So skeptics are those who investigate. And they also call themselves the “ephektikoi”, they are those who suspend judgment.

The Greek verb for this is Époque. They put things in brackets so that, you know, I’m not going to really decide about that at Epoque. So the goal is a relaxed life without unsubstantiated beliefs. I want to live my life in such a way that I don’t believe anything that I don’t know is in some way tested. Well, if you’ve been reading Nietzsche, you know that that’s not a whole lot that you’re going to be doing in terms of substantiated beliefs. So there you go. Now, this is based on a much older idea. The first skeptics are the Ajnana school which was absorbed later into the Jains and Buddhism in northern India.