In Canto 26 of Dante’s epic poem, Inferno, the poet meets the Greek hero, Ulysses. In Greek and Roman mythology, Ulysses was the clever mastermind behind the Trojan Horse which led to the fall of Troy. His journey home was told in Homer’s Odyssey. We find him in the 8th Circle of Dante’s Hell, condemned for abandoning his family and leading his men on a doomed quest for ultimate knowledge at the edge of the world. Dante writes:

Neither the sweet affection for my son,
nor piety due my father, nor the love
I owed Penelope to bring her joy
Could drive me from the burning to go forth
to gain experience of the world, and learn
of every human vice, and human worth.
I sent myself on the deep open sea
with only a boat and that small troop of men,
my friends, who never had abandoned me.
(Dante Alighieri, Inferno, trans. Anthony Esolen)

Ulysses’ sin? Abandoning his family and cleverly talking his men into a doomed quest for knowledge for the sake of knowledge. The 8th Circle of Dante’s Inferno is reserved for “evil counselors,” but it was Ulysses’ curitas, his disordered curiosity that led him and his men to shipwreck within site of Mount Purgatory at the edge of the world.

In the opening of the Summa Contra Gentiles, Thomas Aquinas writes of the twofold office of the wise man: 1) “to meditate and speak forth of the divine truth” and 2) “to refute opposing error.” Aquinas goes on to argue that “Among all human pursuits, the pursuit of wisdom is more perfect, more noble, more useful, and more full of joy.” In other words, it is good, necessary, and joyful, to pursue the truth, and, we are called to do so.

We live in an age with vast knowledge available with a mouse click. Some might argue all knowledge. Not only can we find virtually any imaginable fact, we now have programs we call Artificial Intelligence that will do our “thinking” for us by responding to questions by querying pools of data that comprise the sum of all digitized knowledge, and then return data sets which answer, redirect, or provide options for whatever it was we wanted to know.

But truth remains a tricky thing. Modern rationalism has driven us to a fixation on knowledge through observation and experiment. In our world, truth is the observable, the provable conclusion. And yet, we still argue about “my truth and your truth” suggesting that the truth of the matter is still quite subjective. We intuit the fallacy in this thinking as we recognize that there are many absolute facts – true things that are real, verifiable, and measurable.

Why do we still argue over truths? Or facts? Or proven points of knowledge? Well, the truth of the matter is that much of what we consider knowledge or fact or data or truth, is subject to interpretation. We may have a set of facts, a piece of information, or a data set, but what it means often lies in the eyes of the beholder.

What I’m describing above are ways of knowing, and I’ve confused the issue by mixing and matching words: truth, knowledge, data, fact, information, meaning. Epistemology is the study of how we know things – the ways of knowing and discerning belief, truth, evidence, and reason. How we come to know, to believe that something is true, varies and our ability to reason based on evidence amid our own biases forms much of the “my truth – your truth” disconnect.

But there are objective truths and there are observable facts. Natural law underpins our common understanding of morality and though some will argue around the edges, most will agree on the basics of right and wrong – taking life, stealing, lying, cheating, etc. – we generally agree that these are not good behaviors. And we can normally agree on observable facts: 1+1=2 or what constitutes a human being or a dog or a color.

Returning to Ulysses and Thomas Aquinas, I wonder about our ongoing quest for knowledge. Our continuing desire to know more, to understand more deeply, to have the answers, or to get the scoop. Why do we want to know? Are we searching for the truth or the answers that support our position? Are we asking out of sincere intent or our desire for an advantage? Do we dig more deeply to justly solve important problems or to merely to enrich ourselves? When we finally find truth, are we willing to change our minds or our behaviors to align with it or will we bury or rationalize it away so we don’t have to change?

There is an acute danger in pursuing knowledge and with it comes great responsibility. A serious problem of our modern age is the belief that all knowledge is good knowledge and observable knowledge is the only form that counts. There is an even greater danger in pursuing the truth because it might demand something of you. Will you recognize it when you find it? Are you willing to respond accordingly?

Ulysses final words to Dante are cautionary:

When far off there appeared a mountain shore,
hazy and dark, which seemed to loom so high,
no man had seen so high a peak before.
We cheered, but soon that cheering turned to woe,
for then a whirlwind born from the strange land
battered our little vessel on the prow.
Three times the boat and all the sea were whirled,
and at the fourth, to please Another’s will,
the aft tipped in the air, the prow went down.
Until the ocean closed above our bones.