Complementary Patterns of Meaningful Truth and the Interface between Alternative Variants

-

Part 2 of Renaissance Zones: experimenting with the intentional significance of the Damanhur community

[Parts: Last | All] [Links: To-K | From-K | From-Kx ]

Meaningful truth: varieties of coherence

The assumption is easily made that there is only a single form of truth. However in the complex global society of today, this is not the case.

Truth about truth: The contasting understandings of truth are helpfully explored by Walter Truett Anderson (The Truth about Truth: de-confusing and re-constructing the postmodern world. 1995) whose central point is that:

...we are in the midst of a great, confusing, stressful and enormously promising historical transition, and it has to do with a change no so much in what we believe as in how we believe it. (p. 2)

In endeavouring to summarize the views of a range of authors, Anderson indicates that this transition has four main dimensions:

• self-concept: transition from a "found" identity fixed by social role or tradition to understanding of self in terms of a "made" identity
• moral and ethical discourse: transition from an inherited "found" morality to a "made" morality forged out of dialogue and choice -- a relativism as characterized by constructivists, ironists or postmodern humanists with respect to the "ever-shifting ground of our own sociallly constructed cultural worldviews"
• art and culture: transition from a domoinant style to endless improvisation, thematic variation, and eclecticism calling upon all the world's cultural symbols
• globalization: transition from restrictive stable boundaries to fluid boundaries recognizable as social constructions that may be freely crossed

In concluding, Anderson asks:

What is it that people are discovering now? Ernest Becker said people are discovering "the fictitious nature of the action world", developing eyes to see that "flimsy canopy" that hangs over human life. Others say people are discovering the symbolic universe, the socially constructed nature of reality -- or, simply, culture. People are constructing maps that enable them to find something new and different about the powerful symbolic structures thazt shape our lives: We are beginning to see all manner of things -- values and beliefs, rituals, ideas about childhood and death, traditions, interpretations of history, ethnicity, even the idea of culture -- as inventions. This discovery itself, now being made by people all over the world, becomes a part of our common ground. It is central to an emerging understanding of the human condition, and also a central part of a new global culture which is, in a sense, a culture about cultures. (p. 241)

He then argues:

So, as it turns out, we have not one Englightenment project, but three: a Western one based on rational thought, an Eastern one based on seeing through the illusion of Self, and a postmodern one based on the concept of socially constructed reality (p. 243)

It could be argued that at Damanhur the community navigates skillfully between these different projects.

Seductive truth: Anderson might also have included the view on truth of Jacques Attali [Noise: The Political Economy of Music, 1985], as explored elsewhere.

"Au-dela des problemes que pose toute selection d'idees....voici 1'essentiel: si tout ce savoir n'est encore aujourd'hui ni synthetisé, ni assimilé, s'il reste un lieu d'affrontement et d'anathemes, c'est parce qu'il charrie une image du monde d'une intolerable fixité; et que tout groupe social trouve interet a en occulter certain fragments pour tenter d'asseoir sa domination." (5, pp. 10-11)

"Face a 1'immensité de 1'enjeu, faut-il alors cesser ce combat rudimentaire entre un vrai et un faux, mettre un terme a cette denonciation de la parole de 1'autre? Et avoir le courage d'admettre que plusieurs discours peuvent etre simultanément vrais, c'est-a-dire peuvent valablement interpreter le monde?" (5, p.11)

1. A theory is true if it can be articulated according to the rules of formal logic, and if its consequences can be verified empirically by any observer. This is the most common scientific criterion of truth, and is that used by establishment institutions of every kind in every society. It gives rise to difficulties if some of the consequences it implies are contradicted by experience. The institutions are then obliged to construct a representation of the world which denies any possibility of its own negation.
   
   
2. A discourse is true (and therefore scientific) if it provides a useful mode of communication for a group in its struggle for power. Unanimity is then forcefully imposed rather than emerging from agreement with a universal rational structure.
   
   
3. A discourse is receivable, and thus true, the moment it produces an understanding of the world for those articulating it. Unanimity is achieved neither by pure logic, nor by force, but by the virtue of seduction. As with beauty, and because it is intimately related to it, truth is not in itself universal. Truth is aesthetic.

"Aujourd'hui cette multiplicité est difficile a preserver. C'est que les deux premiers mondes de la science ont proné, 1'un 1'universalité, le second la force: ni dans 1'un, ni dans 1'autre i1 n'y a place pour la tolerance. Aussi, toute societe qui accepte de se representer le monde selon une seule de ces deux classes de discours s'oblige a i'uniformite. Elle ne peut laisser vivre le troisieme sens du vrai, et le voila inevitablement contrainte au mensonge et a la dictature: tout ordre qui elimine 1'esthetique comme langue et la seduction comme parole implique inevitablement la dictature." (5, pp.15-16)

Probability theory of truth: The Russian statistician, V V Nalimov (Realms of the Unconscious: the enchanted frontier, 1982) provides a remarkable synthesis, drawing on the entire range of knowledge (including elements of semantics, natural and social sciences, mysticism, and the arts) in an effort to understand how the human mind perceives the world. The methodology is borrowed largely from physics (as capable of tolerating paradoxes within its own theories), with considerable attention to the role of metaphor and the function of human imagination in capturing manifestations of consciousness and unconsciousness.

His primary ontological position is that the world is an open one, the outcome of processes that are probabilistic in nature and constantly the domain of novelties and unce

[Parts: Last | All] [Links: To-K | From-K | From-Kx ]