Sunday, June 5, 2011

Truth As Sinew

The strain to understand and to enter into truth and reality hangs as heavy as the weight of our very bodies. These truths maintain themselves in our lives as moral imperatives, as indelible narratives for which all utterances imply, lead back. But what is so scientific, so honest and objective about our deepest moral, cultural and emotional needs. Historically we have always needed a truth more than we have ever possessed truth, entering into the tragic and humorous hindsight of human, fragmentary "progression." Look to the harbingers of truth, the formulations of social bodies to professionally deal with knowledge, and the efficacy of their modern day institutions.

At one point, take up the domain of the human mind and its many emotions, the irrefutable truth of the etiology of malformation in the psyche was the excess and deficiency of humors (i.e. fluids) in the body. Now we talk about such world views riddled with snickers at the expense of the Ancient Greeks. The snickers ring with a certain subconscious self-doubt because the history of the eventual development of the science psychology is as needful of careful editing and dismissal as Church history. Each historical period enters into a radically different world view, an ideology that distinguishes itself from a previous period; this is the stuttering, stop-starting of historical force that allows for a history, where a fluid progression would be impossible if history is to be a real, evocative force. Fundamental contradiction is the historical norm in nearly all science, where for example Newtonian physics and the Theory of Relativity absolutely tear asunder, creating two isolated, historically disparate ideologies. These are not born from each other, but rather, like the neuroscience of psychology today and its Freudian libidinal theory precursor, one ideology becomes inert while another ideology is suddenly, without warning blooming, unfurling the gears of a history.

Each ideology looks back with a wrongheaded notion that it is in some way indebted or related to what came before them, and that it is somehow greater or the torch-bearer of something that came before. Each new ideology thinks itself to be finally at the gates of truth, and it is a foolish Christian sentiment. Each ideology is in the end times, in the time of some great revelation, where the true essence of things has finally arrived and with it the end of history. Yet, this meta-historical narrative continues to repeat itself as one giant, endlessly-toothed gear. We look back and ask how they had possibly gotten it so wrong, and how they had been so far from the truth. While self-assured, we wait in the end times, finally steps away from the truth. But we never once ask, that perhaps there was no truth before us that we had built on, and our new formulating truths are of a nature nothing like what we conceive of in the notion of a historical progression. Truth seems to serve towards the totality of the ideology, the sinew that brings together the senseless, formless nonsense of everything into a meaningful reality. We need the truth to comprehend before we even arrive at the possibility for truth. Truth resides like a blade in the hand, not as a shimmering mirage on the edge of our quiet desert; and blades can lie in their indiscrimnate cutting, the furried pace of blood-gorged fingers. Might lies be primary to allow for a cobweb of intricatly connected truths? And when that first lie, or truth as you might call it, dies as it always does, what new lie must be thrust back into the gullet of the transgression to start the game of ideology and truth all again.