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“Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.”
André Gide
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I am always wary of those who come out blazing by speaking “the truth.” I believe rarely are things black & white. In fact. I believe truth is often contextual and often slippery to get a hold of.
Now. Let’s not confuse facts with truth. Lots of facts exist. And in a mutually exclusive environment someone can hold up a fact as a single-minded fragile truth. The difficulty is that everything is connected with everything and a single fact does not ever live in a world solo. It rubs elbows within a community of other facts. And as they rub against each other they create, well, truths. Truth is a combination of facts.
I would also suggest truth is often elusive. In that I mean if you care about truth and are a truth seeker you are always in the pursuit of truth as facts replace facts (as facts tend to do).
Now. I want to be careful. Yes. There is truth in the world. Even if some facts change all they do is change the shape of most truths, not make them ‘untruths.’ I do believe we sometimes forget that. Simply because a fact changes does not make the whole become irrelevant. It can, but most times it does not.
I believe rather than discussing truth, or a truth, as static we should refer to it in, well, progress terms. The pursuit of truth is one of progress.
Things may arc toward truth (assuming there is active involvement in the pursuit of), but that arc is not smooth nor does it actually move in one direction. Truth, itself, is uneven in that in its combination of facts those facts can reside in the past, present and future as well as within the truth itself and ‘with-out’ (correlative connectedness). Truth is, well, very often emergent. Therefore, we truth seekers deal with many wrong turns, stops (which look like dead ends but aren’t really), doom loops and a variety of backtracking trips. All in all, though, things continue moving toward Truth. Truth is often contextual, often situation-specific and often can take on a slightly different hue when viewed by different people.
Truth changes. Truth changes in some unexpected and unpredictable ways. Being blind, or remaining purposefully ignorant to that, shifting of truths can cost you, well, Truth itself.
Anyway.
I have been called optimistically cynical. I guess I question everything upfront (or maybe one would hope as I have become older I can judge what to question and what to accept upfront), but always believe great things can come of the pursuit of truth (rather than use the cynicism to drag me away from accepting a truth).
I would like to believe I am one of those people who are constantly seeking truth.
I would like to believe I collect facts and seek the coherence that shapes truths.
I would like to believe I am one of those people who sees truth as kaleidoscopes of colors rather than simplistic black & whites.
Well. I may not be, but it is certainly a good objective to try to attain. Maybe I am simply a truth seeker work-in-progress.
Well, even if you never find truth, I could argue that trying to achieve that objective is not the worst thing in the world. In fact. Maybe it is the only way to get to Truth.