What Makes Possible both Lying and Truth as Human Accomplishments
Back in 1943 Heidegger wrote an essay “On the Essence of Truth”. He starts out defining “truth” in the medieval fashion as the conformity of thought with thing. But then he asks, “Yes. But what is the basis for the prior possibility of such correspondence? How is this ‘truth’ in the medieval sense possible in the first place? How is correspondence possible between thought and things?” And he provides no answer, just the question only the answer to which, Heidegger argues, would provide us with an understanding of the essence of truth. It is a profound point (yet one which I have yet to see faced in the neothomistic literature).
When I read Poinsot on the singularity of relation as the only mode of being which is indifferent to being or not being in awareness, and the only mode of being which is suprasubjective even though dependent on some cognitive or cathectic subjective quality in order to provenate, establishing a terminus as object whether that object does or does not (indifferently) have also a subjective physical dimension, I realized that Poinsot’s Tractatus de Signis had in advance provided the answer to Heidegger’s profound question. A pity that Heidegger never read Poinsot on signs, and an even greater pity that the neothomists chose to follow Gilson in ignoring Poinsot rather than Maritain in reading him. If Thomism has a future (and I am sure it does), that situation can only reverse. Listening to Maritain on the subject of sign as treated by Poinsot is as important to the future of Thomism as listening to Gilson on the subject of esse was important for recovering the past of Thomism from the oblivion into which it had fallen with the modern “turn to the subject”.
I have used the example of a guy digging a garden who strikes a rock and casts it out of the way. A friend comes over to visit who happens to be trained in paleontology. On seeing the stone he immediately grasps it and askes “Where did you find this? Do you realize what this is?” “Yeah”, says the gardener, “It’s a stone.” “You mind if I take it?” “No, go ahead.”
The paleontologist has come into possession of a fossil bone, to the gardener a mere stone in the way of planting. The bone didn’t use to be stone. It used to be part of a Brontosaurus, really related thereto. It can’t be “really” (relatio realis) related to a Brontosaurus any more, for there is no Brontosaurus to be related to any more. Under the current set of circumstances, the mind of the paleontologist has revived in an awareness-dependent way (“ens rationis”) exactly the relation that under past circumstances was an awareness-independent relation (“ens reale”).
So we have from Poinsot (thanks in no small part to Maritain) the answer to Heidegger’s question on the essence of truth.
Comment
“Listening to Maritain on the subject of sign as treated by Poinsot…” We should, in fact, listen to John Poinsot (Joannes a Sancto Thoma, OP, 1589–1644) on a great many things—perhaps most of all on signs, but he was a thinker most acute. I hope to make more of his work available and affordable.
Turning to the overall point of this section from the presentation, however, let us note that Deely gives us an enthymeme. Such enthymemes were usual for him: here are the pieces, put it together yourself. (If you could not, he would not bother talking to you.) The key point here is this: lying and truth are both possible for us human beings to accomplish because we recognize, to varying degrees of explicitness, that one and the same relation can be either awareness-independent or awareness-dependent.
Lying and Truth-Telling
When I lie to you, I present an awareness-dependent relation as though it were independent. For example, if we are having a conversation and, looking over your shoulder, suddenly I shout: “Wow, it’s Mike Tyson!” and you turn around to see a three-legged goat chewing on an old shoe, you will realize that I have taken an unrealized intelligible possibility—that behind you is Iron Mike, the ear-biting pugilist—and falsely represented it as factual. (Of course, it is possible that the goat is also named Mike Tyson, but for our purposes, the goat has no name.) Since relation stands open to a potentially infinite complexity, however, I can also present to you an awareness-independent relation as though it is merely awareness-dependent: “Of course I didn’t eat your scones, Marcia. Why would you accuse me? It was probably Jim” (when I did eat the scones; and they were delicious). This prevarication still relies upon the primary condition, however, of presenting the dependent as independent: namely, as though I am representing what is the case.
Put otherwise, all lies intentionally deceive an audience concerning some relation between the object signified through a linguistic (or post-linguistic) representation and what is.
Conversely, truth accurately conveys the relation. That the relation of itself has a kind of indifference to the realization of the object signified makes possible both truth and falsity. Mike Tyson could be standing there. Someone else could have eaten the scones. I can signify either: for the very nature of signs is to relate an object to an interpretant. The object may exist independently or only dependently.
The Future of Thomism
Why is this so important to the future of Thomism? Here again, we ought to listen to Maritain:
If civilization, which is profoundly shaken today, is to be reborn, one of the basic conditions for this rebirth must be, in the realm of human communications, that the function of language, which has been perverted by the procedures of the totalitarian states, be returned to its true nature, and, in the realm of the inner life of the spirit, that knowledge likewise be returned to its true nature; knowledge must cease being ordained to power or being confused with it; the intellect must recognize, at all degrees of the scale of knowing—whether we consider the most simple factual truths of daily experience, or truths by which science formulates, in terms of observation, the laws of phenomena, or truths by which philosophy grasps, in terms of intelligible perception, the structures of being and the universal principles of existence—the intellect must recognize in the whole expanse and diversity of its domain the sacred nature of truth.
Jacques Maritain, The Range of Reason, 16 (originally published in Thought, 1949).
Warnings of civilizational decline are not new, of course. They were quite familiar even by 1949; and quite evident too, in those post-war years. Today again they are evident—not only in the outbreak of war, but in the decay of education and crisis of competence. We live, 75 years after Maritain wrote the above words, in an environment far more saturated with human communication. We can hardly ever escape human communication. It follows us everywhere we go. Have language and knowledge returned to their true natures? Far from it; we have allowed them to be perverted even further. Do we regard truth—all truth—as sacred?
What are we to do, in this communication-saturated environment of the digital age? If Thomism is to have a future, it must better understand the environment. A deficient understanding of relation will not do. To quote another Thomist (one less recognized for being so), Marshall McLuhan:
Our typical response to a disrupting new technology is to recreate the old environment instead of heeding the new opportunities of the new environment. Failure to notice the new opportunities is also failure to understand the new powers. This means that we fail to develop the necessary controls or Anti-Environments for the new environment. The failure leaves us in the role of automata merely.
Marshall McLuhan, 1966, “The Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment” in Media and Formal Cause, 15-16.
Doubtless we find it desirable not to be automata. But a kind of merely-reactionary traditionalism, as often has seized those noting the ailing environment of our present, does not successfully guide the development of new and better communication of truth. We live in an environment of lies. To escape it, we must realize an anti-environment of truth.
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