ku # 571 ~ the final solution
Wednesday, April 8, 2009 at 09:45AM 
Death, decay, & renewal • click to embiggenWe could dance on the head of a pin until hell freezes over regarding the notion of truth. As much as I enjoy dancing, all good things must end (for now). But, before moving on, I'd like to offer one final thought with emphasis on "final".
When confronted with the idea that there are no absolutes in life, one of my first responses is to raise the specter of an absolute that has yet to be disputed - you, me, we are all going to die. It's not only true, it's also very real. Count on it. Do your best to delay it, but, you can plan on it.
IMO, once you accept and embrace that fact, it's rather amazing the number of truths and absolutes that can flow from that reality. So, while philosophers, academics, theorists, and ballroom pinhead dancers endlessly and somewhat tediously debate the arcane and obtuse finer points of "truth" and "reality" (somewhat like the photographic lunatic fringe) at dinner parties and on the road to academic tenure, I tend to want to actually live life.
A life that is based on a number of truths about what it means to be human and an acceptance of the reality I face everyday upon emerging from my nocturnal dream state.
Reader Comments (5)
I never really thought about it until now, but a buddy of mine opened a studio back in the early 70's in Poughkeepsie across the street from Vassar College. The decore was all black and white and the name of the studio, "Truth Studio".
I'd be interested to hear what absolutes you can derived from the knowledge that we'll die. I'm not sure that you can. Even Descartes' "I think, therefore I am." is pretty heavily disputed!
I'll throw into the mix that there are a lot of serious--i.e. non-lunatic--biologists, psychiatrists, and computer scientists who think that the definition of death might need to change in the future, once things like this come to their logical conclusion of modeling the human brain and one's memory on a computer. So your absolute may need to be a heavily qualified statement if science continues its current march.
There are absolutes like: I want to watch the Penguins game at 3 today; there is a nifty new piece of photo/computer/stereo equipment that I think will really work for me; I won't rake, and things along that line.
Ah, right - the non-absolute vague absolutes :-)
At the risk of being pedantic...
'We are all going to die' is an excellent example of the many meanings of 'true.' The only reason you can make this statement and have confidence in its truth is that we have observed throughout history that thus far people only live a finite amount of time. It is an inference. Inductive truth is peculiar though because it presupposes that events in the future will happen the same way they did in the past. As Seinberg points out this is not always a safe assumption. Their is enough reading on this subject, especially on how it applies to scientific knowledge, to last a lifetime. Hell, there is enough from David Hume alone.
Compare this kind of truth to a deductive truth like: B always follows A, and C always follows B, therefore C always follows A. The conclusion is not just a difference in magnitude of truth from 'we are all going to die'—it is a different kind of truth. Indisputable in a different kind of way.
So when someone says 'this is true' you can't take it to mean one thing without a lot of contextual information, above are at least two different ways to interpret it.
And then there are the vague 'truths' we talk about when we talk about art and culture, which again are different in kind. When someone says something like what I read earlier this week: 'Mahler's Ninth Symphony embodies the truth of what it means to be human,' or 'what is true is most often beautiful' it stretches the word so far as to be almost meaningless in the context of absolute truth. Artspeak.
I suspect none of this is very useful for making art, but if we are going talk about making art, why traffic in vague, amorphous ideas when we can at least try to speak with precision and clear the waters rather than muddy them.