It seems more and more apparent to me all the time that we can never get at the truth of anything. Don’t despair. In fact it seems more and more likely that even God, if God exists, cannot get at the truth of things. Things don’t have a truth in the sense that is recognized by that phrase “the truth of things.” We can, however, just possibly get at the human truth of things.
What does this phrase, “the truth of things” even mean? The “truth of something” is its meaning. And its meaning-as-truth can only something separable from itself without loss or addition, a perfect paraphrase, if the thing is text, a perfect representation in language, without lack or remainder. “The truth of something” is what one believes one has when one does not feel the need to ask any more questions about it. One understands it perfectly. It may be possible to understand certain simple math problems perfectly: 3 + 2 = 5. But if so, only that. And I doubt even that is true. But if it is so, it is so only because the human truth of number is finite, and only ours.
The truth of things is not available to God because for God no representation is necessary. The thing is itself. It is not “itself…as.” God may know things, though things as separate beings from being is probably not in the divine mind. I can’t know. Unless we define the truth of a thing as the thing itself—which is do divide unity in two—we cannot say that God knows or experiences the truth of things.
We however, without ever losing sight of the limitations that keep us from perfect knowledge of anything we didn’t create (and create utterly, such as the concept of number), can approach the human understanding of whatever we can put into language, whatever we can represent by numbers or words or equations or sentences.
That comes with some great satisfactions. We cannot be right, but we can agree.
This however is not perfectly satisfying. “The human understanding” is in fact too unqualified a phrase. There can be innumerable understandings equally human. They all depend on who is breaking down “reality” (what it is possible for humans to perceive or conceive) and how, which depend on when/where and why. Reality (I dispense with the quotation marks but not their function) is infinitely reclassifiable, can be cut up and pasted together in infinite ways, each to one degree or another incompatible with all the others. That doesn’t matter. At least not for what I’m trying to say.
Because we are all human and reality is (for us) what it is possible for us to perceive and conceive (i.e. to represent) we can in principle understand, whatever our preferred perspective, all the others. Were there world enough and time.
Sadly, we prefer to fight for our own. Even Nietzsche, from which whatever is valid in these observations derive, preferred to fight for his own.
