Truth versus Trueness

Originally posted by vistesd
(1) I agree that all experience is participatory. All our efforts to conceptualize, represent, describe are in some way self-referential, as well as perspectival.

(2) Re your red shirts and eggs—are you a direct realist?

(3) Everything that can be said about the motivations of being a heretic can be said about the motivations of those who think of t ...[text shortened]... n.com/board/showthread.php?threadid=70233 . I think what I said there is on point here as well.

(2) Re your red shirts and eggs—are you a direct realist?

No, I am not a naive realist. I am, however, what is called a 'critical realist'.


(3) Everything that can be said about the motivations of being a heretic can be said about the motivations of those who think of themselves as orthodox.

Not really.

That, however, was a tongue-in-cheek comment. Whether or not I enjoy being a heretic in certain contexts has naught to do with the honesty of that hereseism.

Okay. Just pointing out something worth thinking about.


I am not (yet anyway) challenging one’s ability to make propositional statements, that may be epistemically justifiable, about the phenomenal nature of the experience itself—I am challenging the ability to such statements about the preconceptual “noumenal” ground.

And I challenge that such preconceptual "noumenal" grounds exist in the first place. By definition, we cannot know anything about them (or they wouldn't be noumenal) -- why suppose they exist at all?


(5) The experience of the divine, or the divine ground, or the mystery ... — that “experience” is either (a) non-conceptual, at the pre-conceptual level of awareness; or (b) experience through a conceptual screen at the get-go.

I posit a third option -- a preconceptual experience that can be precised in concepts that (while not providing the experiental knowledge nor capturing entirely the essence of that experienced) are, nevertheless, "true" in the sense of corresponding to reality.

Originally posted by lucifershammer
There are any number of matters where such intersubjective verification is impossible (e.g. "I am feeling sad" ).

EDIT: Btw, I think intersubjective verification is possible with spiritual experiences. One can look at spiritual writings (distinct from religious texts) from different religious traditions to see common threads.

It would be surprising if there weren’t common threads, given the shared grammar of our human consciousness.

The differences are over the conceptual representations of the experience—e.g. Christ versus Krishna—posed as propositional truths.

That is if I (or someone else that I choose to believe) has an experience of communion with the ineffable ground that my mind (immediately or later), out of its urge to put that experience into representionally coherent terms, translates into dancing Shiva with incense, I may well confuse that translation with the experience itself—and begin to declare that Shiva is the one “true” god, or the like. I may certainly be able to find community with people who have translated their experience into similar terms, and we can conclude that we have the one “true” religion.

Closer to home, my own experience has led me to the conclusion of non-dualism. That becomes a propositional truth-claim. I think I can provide (as others have) consistent justificatory reasoning to that claim. But, foundationally, all of that is built on a non-conceptual experience freighted with subjectivity, inescapable self-reference and perspectivism. Therefore, I do not think that I am justified in asserting the content of that claim as epistemic knowledge.

Nor do I think the dualist-theist has any more epistemic justification than I do in that regard.

That is why the language problem is a knottier one for me than for someone who takes their representational translation of the spiritual experience in a manner that I think is analogous to a position of direct-realism. In religious terms, when the (mental) representational icon is taken for the “thing-in-itself,” it runs the danger of becoming an idol. And idolatry really is my hobgoblin.

And the test of an icon, for me, is not how “truthfully” it describes the transcendent ground, but its aesthetic coherence and ability to evoke/elicit spiritual response (i.e., conscious communion with that ground); and I think there may be value in a kind of therapeo, but I haven’t fleshed that out yet.

Originally posted by lucifershammer
[b](2) Re your red shirts and eggs—are you a direct realist?

No, I am not a naive realist. I am, however, what is called a 'critical realist'.


(3) Everything that can be said about the motivations of being a heretic can be said about the motivations of those who think of themselves as orthodox.

Not really.

That, however, of that experienced) are, nevertheless, "true" in the sense of corresponding to reality.

[/b]Okay. Just pointing out something worth thinking about.

As was I.

And I challenge that such preconceptual "noumenal" grounds exist in the first place. By definition, we cannot know anything about them (or they wouldn't be noumenal) -- why suppose they exist at all?

I don’t suppose. You are describing my old position, perhaps. Epistemically, we may not be able to know anything about such ground. Why should “ineffable” be synonymous with “non-real” (I tend to use “exist” in a a narrow way)?

I posit a third option -- a preconceptual experience that can be precised in concepts that (while not providing the experiential knowledge nor capturing entirely the essence of that experienced) are, nevertheless, "true" in the sense of corresponding to reality.

I don’t know what you mean by “true” in the sense of corresponding to reality. What do you mean by correspond? As I noted, my mental representations of reality allow me to navigate in the world; one might say that they are “pragmatically true” in that sense. I don’t know that such representations—nor second-level concepts derived from them—can be said to “precise” the underlying reality objectively.

EDIT: I am not dismissing your third option; I need to understand it a bit more.

Originally posted by vistesd
I don’t suppose.

(We dance around in a ring & suppose
The secret sits in the center and knows)

--not warming up to write a book are you?

Originally posted by Bosse de Nage
(We dance around in a ring & suppose
The secret sits in the center and knows)

--not warming up to write a book are you?

Nice. Blake?

I recall from somewhere a koanic saying about the circle whose circumference is nowhere, and whose center is everywhere...

Originally posted by vistesd
(1) I agree that all experience is participatory. All our efforts to conceptualize, represent, describe are in some way self-referential, as well as perspectival.

(2) Re your red shirts and eggs—are you a direct realist?

(3) Everything that can be said about the motivations of being a heretic can be said about the motivations of those who think of t ...[text shortened]... n.com/board/showthread.php?threadid=70233 . I think what I said there is on point here as well.

How about instances where what is spiritually perceived is impossible to accurately express using the array of conceptual/representational content which one has to bring to bear? One may attempt to describe what has been intuitively grasped, but its interpretation by a third party can only miss the mark.

In order for spiritual experiences to be verified there must be a reference point from which the interpreter is able to interpret from. That is, the interpreter must be acquainted with the same 'spirit' in which the person who is relating the religious experience is in, or has been in, in order to accurately appreciate what is being described. I can think of no other way to verify religious experiences.

The Spirit of Truth, biblically speaking, is the spirit in which believers walk and in which the bible came to be. We verify our experiences according to the spirit of the word; if it magnifies the rich depth of meaning hidden in the word, the intuition which we have received is from the same spirit, whereas if it does not magnify the word, then it is of a different spirit. The apostle Paul speaks about this process of interpretation in 1 Corinthians 2:12-15 here:

"Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man."

I'm not saying that religious experiences are to be interpreted using the texts as a reference point, but the spirit which inspired the texts as a reference point. That is, a "natural man" (he who has not received the Spirit of Truth) cannot accurately appreciate what is Holy Ghost taught even with the use of scripture, because the reference point must be spiritual not intellectual. Intuition is preeminent.

Originally posted by vistesd
Okay. Just pointing out something worth thinking about.

As was I.

And I challenge that such preconceptual "noumenal" grounds exist in the first place. By definition, we cannot know anything about them (or they wouldn't be noumenal) -- why suppose they exist at all?

I don’t suppose. You are describing my old position, perhaps. Epi ...[text shortened]... vely.

EDIT: I am not dismissing your third option; I need to understand it a bit more.[/b]

LATE EDIT:

LH, the epistemological question with regard to your third option would seem to be, not whether such conceptual representations are precise—as I understand you—but whether or not we can know that they are.

I want to stress again that part of my non-dualism is non-separability. If I cannot properly separate the “I” from the mystical experience, then all I can try to describe is the experience.

Theological critical realism seems to require a dualistic view: Martin Buber’s I-Thou comes to mind. The polar opposite is the unio mystica. I am trying to articulate what I think may be a dialectical synthesis of sorts—trying such terms as participation, interpenetration, communion. Because once we begin to speak, I think we may be subject to a kind of pragmatic dualism based on the effort to conceptualize itself; and based, in fact, on the nature of our self-referential consciousness.

It seems impossible to me, one the one hand, to speak as if the waves on the ocean are non-existent; and, on the other hand, to assert that they have a separate reality. (Recognizing the inherent failure of any analogy to capture the whole, which by definition has no proper analogy.)

Originally posted by vistesd
Nice. Blake?

I recall from somewhere a koanic saying about the circle whose circumference is nowhere, and whose center is everywhere...

No it's uh *cough* Robert Frost. 🙂

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere. Pascal, Pensées (1670)

BTY completely off topic (maybe not)--http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Spicer.html (Jack Spicer's Holy Grail)

Originally posted by epiphinehas
How about instances where what is spiritually perceived is impossible to accurately express using the array of conceptual/representational content which one has to bring to bear? One may attempt to describe what has been intuitively grasped, but its interpretation by a third party can only miss the mark.

In order for spiritual experiences to be verif ...[text shortened]... ecause the reference point must be spiritual not intellectual. Intuition is preeminent.

Tricky ground here. But I think you have named the question well: verification (I would add verification by the first-party, the one having the experience, as well as those to whom she might try to communicate it).

As a non-dualist, I have to have a different understanding of Holy Spirit (which goes back to our very first debate), if I want to use that term. How far my view could be defended Biblically, I don’t know, but I doubt that it can be in any conventional doctrinal sense.

At the moment, I would have to say something like:

(1) To use my well-worn metaphor: the spirit of the ocean cannot but reside in the waves, whether those conscious waves realize that or not.

(2) Therefore, such spirit is—to use whodey’s term (which is not to imply any agreement by him at all with anything that I am saying!)—is mingled into the experience as well.

(3) Which means that the spirit does not provide me with the conceptual or representational content, or it’s proper interpretation (also conceptual) in the way that I might, say, hand you a glass of water. That content is also subject to my participation—I am mingled into it.

Now, to use my initial attempt at an alternative use of the word “true,” and adding in LH’s comment about “common thread,” I tentatively think that there can be some verification of its “trueness”—but not of its status as “the truth,” with regard to that conceptual content. In other words, I think that an experience of [insert favorite religious/ spiritual word here], that is translated by our conceptual consciousness (perhaps almost immediately and non-volitionally) into Vishnu by one person and the risen Jesus Christ by another, can be a “true” spiritual experience in both cases, without either one of them representing “the truth” in a non-subjective propositional sense.

That is why, ultimately, I have to “sit a bit easy” with regard to various religious expressions—even, as I say, with my own propositional claim of non-dualism (which I think you pointed out to me once before).

What I hope people will realize is that it is not necessarily more “pleasurable” or “recreational” or “easier” to “wander the spiritual countryside” (as LH once put it, adding something about my muttering to myself about “maps and the territory” ), than to find a home in some orthodoxy (not using that word in any pejorative sense). It would also be arrogance on my part to assert that being a spiritual “nomad” is somehow more valid or spiritually “courageous” or some such tripe, than living within and engaging the boundaries of a particular religious home. (And I have probably been guilty of at least thinking such things in the past—until I realize how much I have learned from powerful spiritual figures who have dug deep spiritual wells, so to speak, within a particular orthodoxy.) The wrestling is the wrestling, wherever you do it, not necessarily less strenuous in the cloister than in the marketplace or in the town or in the desert—as long as one tries to keep honest about it.

Originally posted by Bosse de Nage
No it's uh *cough* Robert Frost. 🙂

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere. Pascal, Pensées (1670)

BTY completely off topic (maybe not)--http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Spicer.html (Jack Spicer's Holy Grail)

Ooops. 😳

Thanks for Pascal too.

I will likely not be able to listen to audio, though, in any satisfactory way: internet connection here is dismally slow (partly, I think, due to ther phone lines out here in the boondocks).

Originally posted by vistesd
Ooops. 😳

Thanks for Pascal too.

I will likely not be able to listen to audio, though, in any satisfactory way: internet connection here is dismally slow (partly, I think, due to ther phone lines out here in the boondocks).

Good ole Bob.

Pascal's a haunting feller. Never forgot that notion myself (Odilon Redon sprung a memorable drawing from it too).

My connection is 64k, I download them (streaming breaks up). I'm kind od boondocksed myself.

Originally posted by vistesd
Something that Blakbuzzard said about truth versus facticity triggered this—

I am somewhat skeptical about applying the word “truth” to religious/spiritual propositions, at least in terms of a truth that one can epistemologically confirm.

By this statement, I am really not talking about violating the logical rule that A and ~A cannot both be true at th ...[text shortened]... the barriers of particular truth-claims, in order to share the “trueness” that lies behind them.

I think this trueness quality is what Ghandi was refering to when he said (something like this)" I does not matter to me whether someone found the bones of Jesus and proved beyond doubt that the ressurection never happened because the Gospel of Christ would still be true for me"

Originally posted by vistesd
Tricky ground here. But I think you have named the question well: verification (I would add verification by the first-party, the one having the experience, as well as those to whom she might try to communicate it).

As a non-dualist, I have to have a different understanding of Holy Spirit (which goes back to our very first debate), if I want to use that ...[text shortened]... in the marketplace or in the town or in the desert—as long as one tries to keep honest about it.

Now, to use my initial attempt at an alternative use of the word “true,” and adding in LH’s comment about “common thread,” I tentatively think that there can be some verification of its “trueness”—but not of its status as “the truth,” with regard to that conceptual content.

'Trueness' implies there is a standard 'absolute truth' which the trueness in question either alludes to or imperfectly mirrors. But how can you verify even the trueness of something without having an intuitive familiarity with the absolute truth which that trueness alludes to or imperfectly mirrors?

Biblically speaking, the absolute truth is the Spirit of Truth himself, and it is himself which the words he imparts to spiritual men are meant to convey. That is, the word of God is not simply meant to impart 'trueness', but more significantly to set one in contact with the 'absolute truth' itself (himself). Thus Christ says, "The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life" (John 6:63).

However, it is quite another thing to intellectually posit a sufficiently nebulous 'absolute truth' (e.g. the ground of all being), and interpret from that concept all that is proclaimed as a revelation of God (i.e. anything from the biblical texts). At least in the Holy Bible's case, the one key to verifying its trueness is contained within the pages of the bible itself; that is, an encounter with God himself in the spirit of the text.

"For the word of God is alive and powerful. It is sharper than the sharpest two-edged sword, cutting between soul and spirit, between joint and marrow. It exposes our innermost thoughts and desires. Nothing in all creation is hidden from God. Everything is naked and exposed before his eyes, and he is the one to whom we are accountable" (Hebrews 4:12-13).

Arguing in some kind of conventional philosophical/religious discourse over ineffability is starting to seem like a mire of contradictoriness.

I have explained to the best of my ability why I think the _____________ is ultimately ineffable. Why evocative (as opposed to descriptive) symbolic and metaphorical language (zen koans, poems, allegory, story, etc.) seems to me the only appropriate speech—which principle I am violating myself in this discussion. Etc., etc. I do not think that I have done it well; there seem to have been teachers in all the main traditions who have claimed that it cannot be done well.

I think it’s a failed project—because all we can talk about are the representations of what is non-conceptual. It’s rather like reading books that are all about books, that are all about... Now, if someone can provide a straightforward presentation of an epistemological argument for why one representation (or conceptual truth-claim) about the non-conceptual divine ground is epistemologically more valid, in some objective sense, than another, I’ll listen. What epistemological grounds might one have, for example, to consider the conceptual representations of Advaita Vedanta to be “more accurate” than those of Lao Tzu, or vice versa, or Christian Trinitarianism or Islamic monotheism... (Maybe LH can do it with his “third option”.)

There seems to be clearly no lack of attempt in the history of religion and spiritual philosophy, with no clear resolution among intelligent people of good faith. (One can always assert bad faith, of course, or ignorance or stupidity on the part of anyone who disagrees.) This despite “common threads.”

Hence, I think that some measure of epistemic skepticism with regard to conflicting conceptual “truth claims” is warranted. That does not necessarily invalidate them on other grounds, as I have tried to express.

EDIT to KM: yes, I think that is something like it.

EDIT to Epiphenehas: that familiarity may well be best found within you.

Originally posted by vistesd
Something that Blakbuzzard said about truth versus facticity triggered this—

I am somewhat skeptical about applying the word “truth” to religious/spiritual propositions, at least in terms of a truth that one can epistemologically confirm.

By this statement, I am really not talking about violating the logical rule that A and ~A cannot both be true at th ...[text shortened]... the barriers of particular truth-claims, in order to share the “trueness” that lies behind them.

Help me with this if you will. The bible says that God created everything. How is it that one needs to epistemologically, or otherwise, prove it is true?

There's a saying that some believers use that goes, "If God said it, I believe it, and that settles it." My problem with that is, that it makes no difference whether "I" believe it or not in order for it to be true.

It seems it's a consequence of the belief in God that truth be objective.

Anyway, if I'm way off topic....