Truth and Subjectivity, Faith and History

Kierkegaard's Insights for Christian Faith

John

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781621899648
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

What is truth? Philosophical explorations have merely presupposed truth, rather than define it. The inscrutable nature of truth is a recognition of human finitude, which is both Socratic (the recognition that one does not know) and non-Socratic (the recognition that truth has to be given from without). This opens the way to locating truth outside the individual, which can be appropriated only when the condition to recognize it is given. For Kierkegaard, the incarnation of Christ is the point when both revelation and the condition to recognize it, are given. However, incarnation, being historical, raises the question of objectivity and evidence. This book explores what truth implies for the individual and examines the value of historical research for Christian faith.

Part I

Truth and Subjectivity

1

On the Very Idea of Truth

The difficulty is not to understand what Christianity is but to become and to be a Christian. — CUP 1:560

“What is truth?” asked Pilate, without expecting an answer. Over the centuries, philosophers have found it difficult to answer this question conclusively. Is truth a substance or a quality, a body of knowledge or the character of a statement? Where truth is understood as the property of a statement, it assumes a representational character as the right representation of reality, since a great number of statements—thought, spoken, or written—are about reality. Consequently, truth takes the shape of the varied understandings of reality entertained by philosophers and lay people. The most common notion of viewing the world is the “realist view,” which sees reality as something “out there,” independent of our minds. A realist notion is also dependent on the correspondence theory of truth, which sees truth representationally as that which corresponds to facts. Its origins go back to Aristotle. He wrote in his Metaphysics, “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true” (1011b). However, all along there have been skeptics who have challenged the possibility of definite truth. There are competing understandings to the realists’ position in anti-realism, idealism, conceptualism, relativism, etc., each of which has different strokes and shades of expression.

The difficulty in defining truth is that all the traditional theories of truth such as the correspondence, coherence, and pragmatic theories merely presuppose truth and do not really define it. Since truth in general evades conclusive decisiveness, knowing and possessing it become equally evasive. Yet, underneath the vagaries surrounding differing understandings of truth, one can notice human nature in its unending pursuit of truth. Irrespective of one’s nationality, religion, or vocation, the pursuit of truth has always been regarded as an important part of human life. Whether it is the pain of a life-threatening crisis that sets one off on such a pursuit or merely being weary of pleasure, human nature is designed to seek truth. The question of truth, therefore, seems to be essentially connected to the very essence of humankind.

This issue will engage our discussion in the first section of the book. Following a brief background on the modern and postmodern understandings of truth, Kierkegaard will be brought into the conversation. While most modern and contemporary discussions treat a pursuit of truth as primarily a cognitive “knowing” of what it is, Kierkegaard focuses not only on the “what” but also emphasizes “how” truth ought to affect our being, or the self. Thus having Kierkegaard as the conversation partner in our truth discourse is to accentuate the essential connection between truth and being. This oft-ignored Kierkegaardian emphasis offers a richer understanding of truth. To understand Kierkegaard’s objection to an “objective” pursuit of truth, I shall clarify what it means to raise the question of truth in an objective sense. Raising the question of truth in an objective sense is not the same as understanding reality as objectively real. It is perfectly plausible to raise the question of truth objectively and yet not see the world as objectively real. Kierkegaard’s objection, therefore, should not be understood as a denial of objective truth but as a concern for what is amiss in raising the question of truth purely objectively.

The Idea of Truth in Modernity and Postmodernity

Modernity and the Idea of Truth

The early seventeenth-century philosopher, René Descartes (1596–1650), who is referred to as the “father of modern philosophy,” considered truth to be a finished product. Truth was conceived as something that could be conclusively understood with our rational thinking. Thus, the Enlightenment approach was marked by an optimism that truth was out there, and could be discovered and mastered. The notion of truth was intricately tied to the emancipation of the individual—emancipation via Enlightenment/reason and the practice of democratic ideals, or through a socialistic commitment and revolution that liberated the individual from the clutches of the aristocracy.

The modern-Enlightenment thinking pursued truth in a narrow sense, accentuating merely the rational aspect of truth, where an objective pursuit became the most important mechanism to unearth the reality that was out there. The naturalistic assumptions that were gaining predominance undermined the metaphysical and theological dimensions of truth by reducing reality essentially to the empirically verifiable material world. This reduction was a convenient one in that truth-pursuits did not have to deal with the vagaries of the metaphysical dimensions of life. This entailed not only that truth could be arrived at through reason but also that the self assumed the position of an impersonal observer, who sees the world sub specie aeterni (a Latin expression to denote a “perspective of the eternal” or God’s-eye-view), devoid of an existential identity.

The term “objective truth” came to refer to reality that could be verified by the rules laid out by the logical positivists of the early twentieth century.1 Logical positivists employed empiricism and rationalism to make observational evidence a condition for knowledge and rendered metaphysical, ethical, and theological statements meaningless. Although those committed to logical positivism were a small group of philosophers within Western academia, the impact of its naturalistic thinking, in the aftermath of Enlightenment, was nonetheless powerful and garnered tremendous influence. Yet, a majority of humanity within non-Western cultures, mostly untouched by modernity, held onto some form of religious belief and never reduced reality or their understanding of truth to merely the natural world. “Reality” and “truth” for them included a world beyond the material and a belief in the supernatural. Furthermore, since religious beliefs in general viewed the supernatural as superior to the natural, it relegated a higher status for the spiritual over the material.

However, the religious conception of truth followed its own course, often by morphing itself in accordance to the contemporary theories of truth. Both modern and postmodern understandings of truth tend to swerve away from the Christian perspective of associating truth with the being of God. Perhaps the real disservice to the Christian conception of truth has come from within the church’s deliberate subversions of the truth, typified in the papal invention of several “religious truths” when the papal treasuries began to dry up. Perhaps Emperor Constantine’s “conversion” experience itself is suspect, as an effort to appease the sizeable and growing Christian population in his empire. Hence, his vision of the cross with the phrase, which is more popular in its Latin rendition, in hoc signo vinces (meaning “by this sign, be victorious”) that he saw during one of his expeditions, could be seen as being politically motivated rather than as spiritual obedience to a divine command. Likewise, medieval European history tells stories of the political heads of the church-state abrogating personal freedoms and individual rights. Such an instrumentalist view of truth, whether in the secular world or within the church, has persistently sought to manipulate reality to harness it for personal gains in the garb of progress.

Postmodernity and the Idea of Truth

Contrary to expectations, the early twentieth century saw a destruction of human life and optimism to an extent never witnessed before. The World Wars, gas chambers, and atomic bombs could hardly be counted as progress. The ensuing disillusionment with the Enlightenment project replaced modernistic optimism with pessimism and nihilism in postmodernity. The chasm between human expectation of progress and the reality of the devastation of structures and of hope resulted in an era of suspicion. Thus, in postmodernism, facts are seen not as truths but as interpretations, accompanied by a rampant suspicion of truth-claims, because reality is fundamentally viewed as invented an...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part One: Truth and Subjectivity
• Part Two: History and Faith
• Bibliography