A John Haught Reader - John F. Haught

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given to the mind by the senses of taste, touch, smell, sound, and especially sight (aided of course by scientific instruments of perception). But without denying that our senses do put us in touch with the real world, Whitehead emphasizes that the senses give us only a very abstract and narrow range of the universe. They are inadequate to mediate the full complexity—and beauty—of the world in which we are organically situated. They bite off only a very narrow range of the contemporary world and leave behind the unfathomable temporal depths and aesthetic intensity of the universe as a whole. And so, we typically tend to ignore the wider aesthetic patterning of reality, since it is left out by the clear and crisp impressions given to us by the five senses.

      Perhaps the reason is that the desire for truth is not the only passion governing our conscious and instinctive lives. Only a little reflection is needed to remind us that we are composed of a morass of drives, desires, longings, cravings, wishes, and hopes. Curiously, the inhabitants of this jungle of desires are often in conflict with one another. One part of us might want sensual gratification, another security, another power, another meaning, and another approval. Furthermore, one desire may be superimposed upon another, so that their disentanglement seems nearly impossible. It is often hard to determine which of the desires is dominant or to which of our various inclinations we should entrust the course of our lives. Often we experiment with a variety of our urges before we commit ourselves to any one of them as our fundamental option. Perhaps a serious pursuit of truth is one of the last of our desires to be accepted as a dynamic force in our lives because there is so much competition from other urges that are quite content to live with illusions.

      And yet, the message of our great religious, literary, and philosophical classics is that there is really only one desire that we can completely trust to lead us to genuine happiness, namely our thirst for the truth. Only when we subordinate our other inclinations to the eros for truth will we find what we are really looking for. But how dominant is this desire in our own conscious existence? Perhaps the passion to get to the truth has not yet assumed a central role in our lives. “I want the truth” may be only a tentative, barely audible utterance, buried under many layers of longing that are not at all interested in the truth. We may, at times, wonder why the prophets, visionaries and philosophers have made so much of the pursuit of truth, especially if there is little inclination for it in our own lives.

      What is the truth? Can it be defined? Or do we not implicitly appeal to it even in trying to define it, so that any attempted definition is circular? It would be an interesting experiment if you would pause at this point and attempt to define “truth.” The classical definition of truth is “the correspondence of mind with reality.” But what is reality? Can it be defined? The term truth often refers not only to the cognitional stance of one who is in touch with “reality,” but it may also be used interchangeably with reality itself. That is, truth may be understood either epistemologically (as referring to the correspondence of our minds to reality) or metaphysically (as the name for that reality our minds are in touch with). In one sense, truth means the attunement of the mind to being, to the real, to the true. In the following, however, I shall use the term “truth” primarily in the metaphysical sense—namely, as “being,” the “real,” or the “true”—which is intended as the goal of our desire for reality. In other words, I shall use the terms truth, being, and reality interchangeably.

      It seems that in the case of truth, we are once again dealing with a “horizon” that evades our efforts at intellectual control and adequate definition. If anything, truth would define us more than we would define it. The encounter with truth is more a case of our being grasped by it than of our actively grasping it.

      Perhaps, therefore, we can speak of the truth only in a “heuristic” sense, that is, as something we are seeking but which never allows itself to be completely ensnared by our instruments of discovery. We can speak of truth more as the “objective” or goal of a certain kind of wanting within us than as a possession firmly within our grasp. Yet even though we cannot possess the truth or get our minds around it, we can at least recognize clearly, among the multiplicity of our wants, a desire for the truth, even if it is not yet a powerful impulse. A brief reflection on your own thinking process will confirm the presence of this desire in your consciousness.

      You may just now have asked: “Is it really the case that something in me wants the truth?” You need no further or more immediate evidence that you do have some such desire. The simple fact that you ask such a question is evidence enough.

      It is in the asking of such questions, indeed of any questions at all, that we have the most obvious evidence of our undeniable longing for the truth. We may call this longing simply the desire to know. It may not yet be highly developed within us. It may be only a whisper that is easily ignored, an occasional impulse readily repressed. And yet, it may well be the deepest and most ineradicable part of ourselves, the very essence of our being. It may turn out that of all our longings and wild wishings our desire to know is the only one whose ardor we can give into with completely trusting abandonment. Maybe only an uninhibited following of our desire to know the truth can bring us into a genuine encounter with depth, future, freedom, and beauty.

      And yet we may already have given up the quest for truth, saying to ourselves: “There is no final truth; truth is relative to each person’s subjective preferences; truth is a useful social convention; truth cannot be found.” If we have been tempted to such conclusions, we may perhaps take comfort in the fact that some famous philosophers have also taught these same “truths.” But we must also note that other great minds—most of them, in fact—have demonstrated the self-contradiction in such dogmas.

      Suppose, for example, someone says that it is not possible to know the truth. This translates into: “It is a truth that it is not possible to know the truth.” Such a statement is self-contradictory because it appeals to our capacity to know the truth (at least the truth of the above statement) even in the very act of denying that we have such a capacity. It overlooks the fact that we implicitly appeal to our trust in the truth every time we raise a doubt about something or every time we say: “It is the case that such and such is so.” We could never hope to convince others even that relativism is a truthful philosophical position unless we assumed in advance

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