LITMIR.BIZ

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times have explicitly despaired of ever finding the truth, we have not been able to eradicate either our desire for it or our implicit appeal to criteria of truth every time we use the verb “to be.”

      Every act of judging or questioning presupposes the possibility of our finding the truth. Without an implicit “faith” that intelligibility and truth can be found, we would not have the courage either to seek understanding or to make judgments about the world around us. If deep within us some cynical voice dominated our consciousness by saying “there is no intelligibility or truth to be found in the world or yourself,” then we would never even so much as ask a question. Yet by the fact that we do ask questions and make judgments (even, for example, “it is a truth that there is no intelligibility or truth”) we give ample evidence that we cannot eradicate our primordial trust in the intelligibility and truth of reality. Like it or not, we are irremediably tied to truth—even as we take flight from it. We have already seen that the same applies in our relation to depth, futurity, freedom, and beauty.

      I stated earlier that the direct evidence for the fact of your having a desire to know lies in the simple fact that you find yourself spontaneously asking questions. If you find yourself questioning this, then it is because you have a desire to know. If you are asking what the meaning of these peculiar reflections is, or if there is any truth to them, then this spontaneous questioning is also evidence of your desire to know. You have a desire to know the truth, and it sharply reveals itself in your asking of these simple questions.

      But there are different types of questions. Some of our questions inquire as to what a thing is or ask about its meaning, intelligibility, or significance. This type of questioning is resolved when we are given an “insight” into the essence of something. If you find yourself asking what the author of this book is trying to get across in these sentences, then this is an example of the first type of question. It may be called a “question for understanding.” It will reach its goal when you find yourself saying: “aha, I now see the point.”

      But the gaining of understanding is not the end of the questioning process. Not every insight is in touch with reality; there can be illusory along with realistic understanding. So a second type of question spontaneously arises, leading you to ask whether your insights or those of others are true. For example, in reading this chapter, if you reach the point of saying, “I see the point the author is trying to make,” an uneasiness will eventually emerge that will be given expression in this fashion: “Yes, I see the point, but is the point well taken? Is it faithful to the facts of my own experience? Is it based in reality? Is it true?” This type of questioning provides evidence that you are not content with mere insight and understanding. You want truthful insight and correct understanding. Thus you ask: is it really so? Does this or that viewpoint correspond with reality? Is it a fact?

We may call this second type a “question for reflection” or simply a “critical question.” It is especially our critical questions that give evidence of our desire to know and of our fundamental discontent with mere understanding. We want to make sure that our insights, hypotheses, and theories are true to reality. Otherwise we remain unsatisfied with them. This restlessness in the face of mere “thinking” leads us to undertake “verificational” experiments, in order to test whether our insight and understanding fit the real world or whether perhaps they are out of touch with reality. Our discontent with mere thinking—no matter how ingenious such thinking may be—is what leads us toward “knowledge.” Our sense that knowing is more significant than simply thinking is the result of our allowing ourselves to be motivated by a “desire to know.”50

We have all had the experience of listening to very clever people and of reading very learned books. We often assume that their brilliance amounts to veracity and so we sometimes fail to raise further questions about them. It is very easy to be overwhelmed by the genius of an argument or the brightness of an idea. But if our critical sense is sufficiently awakened, we realize, as Bernard Lonergan puts it, that “not every bright idea is a true idea.”51 There is always the need to ask whether “bright ideas” are in touch with reality. We must heed the imperative in our mind that tells us: “be critical; do not settle for mere understanding.” Science is perhaps the most obvious example of this need to challenge hypothetical insight with critical questions.

      Again, it takes only a little reflection on our own experience to notice how difficult it can be at times to follow this critical imperative and wean ourselves away from fallacious or shallow understanding. This is the case with respect to our knowledge of others and of reality in general, but especially with respect to self-knowledge. Because the desire to know is not the only motivation in our conscious lives (and perhaps not even the dominant one), we may easily allow some other impulse to construct self-images that have little to do with what we really are. And we may find these fictitious self-images so appealing to our desire for power, gratification, or approval that they divert us from attaining appropriate insight into ourselves.

      Our propensity for self-deception is one of the most interesting and most philosophically troubling characteristics of our human nature. Why should conscious beings, whose questions constantly reveal the fact of an underlying desire to know as an ineradicable aspect of their consciousness, also have such a tendency to repress this desire to know when it seeks self-knowledge?

      At least part of the reason for the flight from insight into ourselves lies in the fact that, in addition to having an ineradicable desire to know, we also need acceptance and approval. And it appears at times that we will pay almost any price to be held in high, positive regard by significant others. We will go to the point of denying even to ourselves those aspects of our lives and characters that we suspect might not be approved of by others. And so we will hide these “unacceptable” features not only from them but from ourselves as well. Self-deception occurs when, in trying to fulfill criteria of worth established by our immediate social environment, some part of us simply fails to live up to its standards. Rather than admit the presence in us of an “unsocialized” component, we often deny its presence and pretend that we fit comfortably within the circle drawn by familial, national, academic, ecclesiastical, or other societal conditions of self-esteem. The “unacceptable” side of ourselves does not simply go away, however, and our latent interest in the truth feebly attempts to bring it into explicit recognition. But our need for immediate approval provokes us to take strong internal measures to keep it out of explicit consciousness. Thus, in the context of social conditions of personal value, our pure desire to know comes into conflict with our desire for acceptance when the area of knowledge to be explored is that of the self. This divided condition makes us wonder, then, whether we can find truth at all without first giving up our desire for approval by others.

      Are these two desires—the desire for acceptance and the desire for truth—condemned to perpetual mutual combat, or is there not some way in which they can be reconciled? Is there any sense in which the need to be loved can coexist with our need to know the truth?

Some philosophers, both ancient and modern, have despaired of such a union. They tell us that if we honestly follow our desire for the truth, we will ultimately have to admit that reality as such is either hostile or indifferent to us. They point especially to the facts of suffering and death as evidence that, in the final analysis, we are not cared for.52 They admit that we have a powerful longing for affection and love, but they also advise us to reach some compromise between the demand for acceptance and the ultimate opaqueness of “reality” to any such desire. This view may be called “absurdist” since it sees an irrational flaw at the heart of reality, dividing it dualistically into two incommensurable elements: human consciousness, with its desire for acceptance, on the one side, and the universe, with its refusal to satisfy this desire, on the other. The incongruity of these two sides of reality—namely humans and the universe—means that reality as a whole does not make sense. It is absurd.53

      One must question, then, whether our deep need for a sense of self-worth can ever be satisfied as long as our sense of reality is an

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