Truth
12. February, 2007Continuing with my article about the Nine Noble Virtues in Heathenry, I will next address the second virtue, truth, and what it means to me. I’ve written before that this virtue signifies the following: “to seek and provide truth is to seek and provide reality, to have the wisdom to determine reality from fantasy, then further determine one reality from another.” In reading this short description, it would seem that I believe there are different realities, opposed to a singular ‘Reality’; and if I equate truth to reality, and believe there is more than one reality, then it stands to reason that I believe there is more than one truth – which I do. The essence of this virtue is, to me, involved in the determination of which truths to seek and provide….
On the surface, this might sound like a slippery approach to something that should be absolute – on the contrary, it’s the most effective way I’ve been able to approach something that is itself rather slippery. A quick look around the Internet takes me to Wikipedia, which states the following in the first paragraph of its truth entry:
“There is no single definition of truth about which the majority of scholars agree, and numerous theories of truth continue to be widely debated. There are many differing claims on such questions as what constitutes truth, how to define and identify truth, what roles do revealed and acquired knowledge play, and whether truth is subjective, relative, objective, or absolute.”
So to just take a simplistic, absolutist approach to the truth, when a majority of scholars has yet to reach consensus on exactly what truth is to begin with, seems to me a bit brash and thoughtless. To say that truth is related to reality is a safe statement. Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary uses reality in its definition for truth, after all:
truth: 3 a: the property (as of a statement) of being in accord with fact or reality
But as I said, there are multiple realities – as many realities as there are people to experience them. By this, I refer of course to subjective realities – the personal experience of reality. In commiting to the seeking of truth, it’s important to keep this in mind because people will experience and perceive things differently from one another … in commiting to the providing of truth, one must also keep in mind the subjective experience of his or her own reality. Another word used in the above definition fragment is fact – this is something different, as it relates to actuality, which I take to be more objective in nature than reality. Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary includes this in its definition for actuality:
actuality: 2 a: existing in act and not merely potentially
An example of the differences here would be the shape of our planet. For most of the 15th Century, consensus reality for most people living in Europe was that the Earth was flat. It was eventually demonstrated that the Earth was not flat, that it was round. The great weight of people believing it was flat did not alter the actuality of Earth’s shape, nor did the lesser weight of people who believed it was round have anything to do with the shape of our planet. At the same time, though, if you had asked people in the early part of the 15th Century about the shape of our planet, and they replied that it was flat, they would have been speaking the honest truth – as they perceived it to be. Just the same as nowadays – we express with confidence that the Earth is round, despite the majority of us never having actually gone all the way around it – we are expressing in this case the truth as we understand it to be, based on the experiences of what we have been taught by others. If the Earth were triangular in actuality, all of our believing the truth of the roundness of the Earth would do nothing to alter its actual shape. Hopefully, this will illustrate what I mean when I posit that there exists truth, and there exists fact, and that the two are not always one and the same thing. It would be tempting to say at this point that the virtue of truth in the Nine Noble Virtues (NNV) is best approached by commiting to actuality; but as the above example shows, this would ignore the subjective realities of others and of the self, and to ignore a major component of what comprises truth is not a good way to commit to this virtue.
Another example comes from my own experiences in catching thieves (one of my past jobs). I once caught someone who worked for the same company I did, who was involved in an organized theft ring. The facts of the matter were that he had personally moved over a thousand dollars worth of material from company premises, and done his best to conceal this until I interrogated him. The truth of the matter was that our company, in a draconic approach to streamlining its profitability, had cut this employee’s hours unexpectedly at a time when his wife was pregnant and his chances of getting another job elsewhere were pretty bleak – he stole because he was desperate. The facts of the matter condemned him to jail time for felony theft, while the truth of the matter condemned me to betraying a fellow human’s desperation to company and law. At that point in my life, I’d never heard of the NNV … but I learned then that absolutism, even in something as virtuous as truth, can cause real harm.
So in commiting to the virtue of truth, I recognize that there is no single, transcending ‘Truth’ but instead multiple subjective truths, based on individual experiences of reality, and objective actualities that remain independent of human subjectivity. In embracing this virtue, I commit myself to trying to remain conscious of these things. But if I believe in multiple truths, is it possible to still believe in the existence of lies? This question brings us back to my short description of this virtue – determining truth from fantasy, or to determine truth from lie. Merriam Webster’s Online Dictionary offers this as its first definition for lie (noun, fourth entry):
lie: 1 a: an assertion of something known or believed by the speaker to be untrue with intent to deceive
A truth can exist without being actual or fact because it is the truth as experienced by an individual or group. A lie, on the other hand, is something that is known to be untrue, and exists for the purpose of deceiving others. The difference, then, is marked by honesty … and commiting to the virtue of truth involves developing the skill and wisdom to judge honesty, it is in fact pivotal in an approach to seeking and providing truth. If you are naive or gullible, and easily mislead by fantasy and lies, your discoveries of truths will be sporadic, accidental, and marked by a tendency to not recognize them when they’re stumbled upon – you certainly would not be able to determine the different truths of given situations. The same holds true for those who apply an absolutist’s approach to truth; and it is for these reasons that I consider both the naive and absolutist approaches to truth as being unrealistic at best, and destructive at worst. Oddly enough, by its definition, a lie is easier to define (despite its deceptiveness) than truth.
I mention wisdom in my description of the virtue of truth, the wisdom to determine or distinguish reality from fantasy, and to further determine one reality from another. My use of this word is deliberate, as I feel that wisdom is itself a virtue implied by truth, in that I consider wisdom to mean sound judgement and insight, based on experiences. If I had to describe the relationship I see between the two virtues, I would say that they are symbiotic: it takes wisdom to approach truth, to understand the different truths that are out there and distinguish them from lies; and in return, the process of doing this increases wisdom, which in turn increases one’s ability to approach truth. Another virtue involved here is that of justice, in that without truth and wisdom, justice cannot exist … neither can trust, nor troth.
Sorry, first of all, to take so long to comment on another excellent post, Bernulf. I’m hopefully all caught up now after dallying over the weekend!
I wanted to say that I agree with you regarding multiple realities, and multiple realities really demand multiple truths. The idea of a capital “T” truth is really self-limiting and denies reality rather than accepting and explaining, much less defining it. We should not place limits on how we view the world around us, because our limits are self-imposed and exist inside us but not as part of the external world or realities.
So I think your remarks about absolutism are right on the mark. It makes me think of the old line about enforcing rules because they are the rules. Rules sometimes have little to do with reality and impose an unrealistic structure upon something that is actually quite fluid and often chaotic. As a manager, I always felt that the rules needed to be bent to suit the moment and I was fortunate at times to have bosses who agreed with me.
As an example of the absurd lengths to which we can take the enforcement of rules (and this might be applicable to truth as well) is the story of Bob Farrell who founded a restaurant based on the concept of good customer service (Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlour). One day, one of his managers refused to give a customer additional pickles, saying that he’d have to pay for them. The customer responded that he’d never had to pay for them before, but the manager insisted that was the rules. The outcome was the slogan, “Give ‘em the pickle!” An absolutist approach, whether to rules or to truth, can be self-defeating.
I thought also that I’d mention with respect to lies that our Heathen ancestors felt to be under no compunction to tell the truth to those who had lied to them. One lie deserves another:
A man should be loyal through life to friends,
And return gift for gift,
Laugh when they laugh,
but with lies repay
A false foe who lies.
(Hávamál – Hollander translation)
Thank you for your comment, Hrafnkell – part of the reason I paused in my series was to provide a little more time for digestion and discussion for the first three posts :-)
Your citation of Hávamál raises a pretty good point, (one that I was hoping someone would raise) that our forebears felt themselves under no obligation to speak the truth to someone who was trying to swindle them. I’m curious about which edition of the Hollander translation you’re using – the one I have, the second (revised) edition, renders stanza 42 of Hávamál thusly:
For those who have no copy of the Poetic Edda sitting on their desk, you can find another rendering of this stanza here (also stanza 42). Stanzas 45 and 46 (in either version) would also be relevant to this topic.
Something else I find of interest, somewhat along this vein, is when Sigurth lied about his name to the dying Fáfnir, because it was believed that the dying could actually curse their foes if they knew their true names (Fáfnismál, stanzas 1 – 2, in either the Hollander or Bellows translations).
When I discussed the commitment to truth in my post, I deliberately avoided saying that a commitment to this virtue meant that we would never lie; and focused instead on the judgment involved in sorting truth from lie when dealing with others. I did this because telling lies is not really a virtue in my opinion – but being able to judge when a lie is being told, and being able to judge those situations in which it is best to respond to a lie with a lie of one’s own, these are aspects of the virtue of truth as I see it; so, like I said, I’m glad you raised this point :-)
You know, Bernulf, I’m not sure what translation that was…I had it in a document I had made and saved to my hard drive sometime in the past, noting simply that it was Hollander. I have the same edition of Hollander as you and it matches your rendering of the stanza. It’s quite possible that it’s not a Hollander translation at all, as he did like “eke” a lot – something that drives me crazy.
Bernulf: telling lies is not really a virtue in my opinion – but being able to judge when a lie is being told, and being able to judge those situations in which it is best to respond to a lie with a lie of one’s own, these are aspects of the virtue of truth as I see it
I agree entirely.
Eke and ween, lol.