My article consists of four parts. Beginning with the comparative side of our symposium theme, I divide this into a temporal, historical comparison (Part I) and a geographical, spatial comparison (Part II). In Part III, I turn expressly to our Western handling of the truth issue, reserving Part IV for pulling these various strands together.
There was a time, lasting roughly up to the European Renaissance, when we were one in our view of truth, though, of course, we did not know that fact. Not only did we not know that we were one, which is to say, alike; we were barely aware that we were multiple—Indian, Chinese, Western, and so on—while sharing, in our notion of truth, a view that was essentially the same. What this original, shared view of truth was, I shall say in a moment, but let me make sure that the strategy for this first section of my article is clear. I am saying that the basic comparison, in this matter of truth, is not geographical or spatial, but temporal: we need to contrast an original, primordial time when our views of truth were virtually alike, with a later (let us call it modern) time in which they diverge. The essential point about our original, shared view of truth is that it gathered three things into its single corral: things, assertions, and persons; the last bridging the other two inasmuch as persons are those unique kinds of things that are capable of making assertions. In every civilization at its start, truth had this triple reference: to things, to statements, and to persons.
If this sounds surprising, I claim that fact as itself a support for my thesis. The surprise stems, I assume, from our assumption that only propositions are really true or false, so that in suggesting (as I just did) that these properties might also apply to persons and things, I must have been using the word loosely if not metaphorically, the way I would be using “crooked” if I applied it to a politician. I was not. I was not speaking metaphorically or even loosely; I was speaking universally. To lift from the pool of truth’s total, undifferentiated meaning a single referent—propositions—and develop its meaning in that direction is our Western contribution to the subject.1 Part III will be devoted to that contribution. Here our task is to see that it was a selective move. It involved, however unconsciously, a choice.
Let me back into my claim about truth’s original, threefold referent. Though as Western philosophers we tend now to restrict truth to propositions,2 if we widen our gaze to note the way the word functions in our language at large, we find clear signs that its earlier referent was much broader. In the category of truth as a property of things, we still speak of “true north” and “a true tone.” Were a carpenter to validate that a “tabletop is true,” we would understand that he meant that it is level. We speak of “true friendships,” or “a true university.” Statesmen tell us that “NATO must try to effect a true unity,” and for some time we have been apprised that “beauty is truth, truth beauty.” As for truth as a property of persons, we have Christ’s claim that he was the truth (“I am the way, the truth, and the life,” John 14:6) and that truth can be enacted (“He that doeth truth cometh to the light,” John 3:21). We refer to so-and-so as being “a true gentleman (statesman, friend, whatever)”; there is “true bravery” and “false modesty”; and since the rise of existentialism, authenticity has become a way of talking about being “true to oneself.”
These may be residues in our language. If so, they hark back to a time when truth had a wider referent than it has in Western philosophy today. Nietzsche noted that when “members of the Greek aristocracy [spoke] . . . of themselves as ‘the truthful’ . . . the word they used was esthlos, meaning one who is, who has true reality, who is true; [only] by a subjective turn [did] the true later become the truthful.”3 The Latin verus means true; it also means real, genuine, and authentic—properties that obviously are not restricted to statements. The same holds for the key terms in other civilizations. In Sanskrit satya doubles for both truth and reality, as the famous sat-cit-ānanda (being-awareness-bliss) discloses immediately. “Etymologically, the Chinese character chena in its original seal form denotes a loaded scale standing on a stool which implies full, real, solid, and therefore the meaning of true, as opposed to empty and unreal, i.e. chiab.”4 Arabic has three basic terms that deal with truth: ḥaqqa, which leans toward the truth of things; ṣadaqa, which points toward the truth of persons; and saḥḥa, which stresses the truth of statements. To elaborate only the first of these, ḥaqq denotes what is true in and of itself by dint of its metaphysical or cosmic status. This makes it supremely applicable to God: when Manṣūr al-Hallāj proclaimed in a moment of ecstasy “anā’l-Ḥaqq,” “I am the Truth,” he was crucified, it being taken for granted by those who heard him that in so saying he had claimed that he was Allāh. As Wilfred Smith points out:
Al-Ḥaqq is a name of God not merely as an attribute but as a denotation. Al-Ḥaqq Al-Ḥaqq: He is reality as such. Yet every other thing that is genuine is also ḥaqq and, some of the mystics went on to say, is therefore divine. Yet the word means reality first, and then God, for those who equate him with reality.5
To sum up this first section, originally truth was triple. Yet even then there were differences.
As far back as our historical eyes can see we find different emphases in peoples’ notions of truth. At first these differences were small, but as the civilizations worked out their distinctive identities—or discovered their respective destinies, however you wish to put the matter—the differences became more pronounced. If we confine ourselves to the three civilizations that are being considered in this symposium—East Asia (China and Japan), South Asia (India), and the West—we can risk the generalization that more than did either of the other two, India tied truth to things, East Asia to persons, and the West to statements.
“To the knower of Truth, all things have verily become the Self,” the Īśa Upaniṣad tells us. “What delusion, what sorrow can there be for him who realizes that oneness” (verse 7)? It is that oneness carried to its absolute, logical limit that gives India no alternative but to lodge truth primarily in things, for if “That One Thing”6 is truly the only thing that exists, everything else, persons and propositions included, must be māyā. These latter are real in the empirical order (vyāvahārika sattva), but in absolute existence (pāramārthika sattva) they do not figure at all. Professor K. L. Seshagiri makes this point explicitly in the “Dialogue on Truth” that appeared between him and Father Peter Riga in Philosophy East and West:
The Hindu view is . . . that truth is not an abstract, intellectual formulation or proposition. . . . Truth . . . is not that which is . . . understood by the intellect. It is prior to all knowledge. . . . Being [and] truth . . . are interchangeable. . . . Reasoning is posterior and secondary to the fundamental experience of being. (20, no. 4 [October, 1970]: 377, 379)
Buddhism’s substitution of a process vocabulary (verbs) for Hinduism’s nouns does not affect the point at issue: it, too, makes a state-of-affairs truth’s basic home, as Nāgārjuna’s twofold theory of truth (practical, conventional, world-ensconced saṃvṛtti-satya versus ultimate, highest paramārtha-satya) makes plain. “As long as ‘truth’ is regarded as an idea,” it is at best inferior truth that we are dealing with; at worst such truth “can destroy a person ‘like a snake wrongly grasped or magical knowledge incorrectly applied’ (Kārikās 24. 11). . . . ‘Emptiness’ should not be regarded as another ‘viewpoint.’ ”7 This basic Indian association of truth with being continues to the present. When Mahatma Gandhi turned satyāgraha into an international word which, among other things, was to play an important part in the Black Liberation movement in America, it was truth-force he was talking about. Truth as veridical concept and utterance were secondary.
My suggestion that East Asia lodges truth basically in persons should come as no surprise, given the social emphasis of its orientation as a whole. I assume that this social emphasis is generally recognized, but I shall cite several witnesses to it anyway, to bring it to our direct attention. The following characterizations all focus on China, but they could easily be extended to cover Japan as well:
Wei-ming Tu: “Étienne Balazs, the brilliant sinologist, once characterized all Chinese philosophy as preeminently social philosophy.”8
Arthur Waley: “All Chinese philosophy is essentially the study of how men can best be helped to live together in harmony and good order.”9
Fung Yu-Lan: “Chinese philosophy . . . is directly or indirectly concerned with government and ethics. . . . All [its branches] are connected with political thought in one way or another.”10
Wing-tsit Chan: “Chinese philosophers . . . have been interested primarily in ethical, social, and political problems.”11
How this social preoccupation affected the East Asian notion of truth can be briefly summarized as follows: To begin with a negative point, the Chinese language does not appear to have been devised with an eye for dealing with abstract, intangible entities; absence of definite grammatical rules in ancient China and the ambiguity of individual ideograms and pictograms make it awkward for it to do so.12 To cite but a single example, the closest Chinese comes to the Sanskrit sat and the English “being” or “existence” is yu, which basically means “to have” or “to possess.” Possession implies a possessor, of course, and as persons are the kinds of possessors we tend to think of first, the word yu gives a personal flavor to even metaphysics’ final generality and abstraction—I am thinking of Aristotle’s definition of metaphysics as the study of being qua being.
As we turn from the notion of being to the notion of truth itself, that flavor increases.13 I shall soon be arguing that our Western tendency has been to regard truth as the correspondence of an idea or utterance with an objective state of affairs which ideally could be captured on videotape. Using this criterion, Westerners have given Orientals bad marks for veracity. The following nineteenth-century missionary reports amount to outright condemnation:
More uneradicable than the sins of the flesh is the falsity of the Chinese; . . . their disregard of truth has perhaps done more to lower their character than any other fault.14
The ordinary speech of the Chinese is so full of insincerity . . . that it is very difficult to learn the truth in almost every case. In China it is literally true that a fact is the hardest thing in the world to get at.15
We would not expect Jacob Bronowski to be as biased as those missionaries were, but even he does not conceal his frustration:
Anyone who has worked in the East knows how hard it is there to get an answer to a question of fact. When I had to study the casualties from the atomic bombs in Japan at the end of the war, I was dogged and perplexed by this difficulty. . . . Whatever man one asks, [he] does not really understand what one wants to know. . . . At bottom he does not know the facts because they are not his language. These cultures of the East . . . lack the language and the very habit of fact.16
Pearl Buck knew East Asia well enough to see that it is different views of truth working against each other that give rise to criticisms like these. She writes,
We are often puzzled by the lack of what we consider truth-telling on the part of Asians. It seems at times impossible to get facts from Asian persons. The difference here is that [we have come] to consider truth as factual . . . whereas for the Asian truth is contained in an ethic. When we inquire of an Asian as to what may have happened in a specific incident, we grow impatient because we cannot get from him a clear and simple statement of fact. But for him . . . human feelings and intentions are more important than mere material fact.17
William Haas, whose neglected Destiny of the Mind in East and West I consider a minor classic in comparative philosophy, echoes Pearl Buck’s point, which is also my point here:
Facts are sacred to the Westerner; they are less so to the Oriental, who has always been more interested in the psychological and human aspects of phenomena. What to him is important, what, as a matter of fact, is real, is not the object in its supposed “objectivity,” but its significance for man. So in dealing with the Oriental there arise continually situations for which the Westerner finds himself wholly unprepared and for which he may propose all-too-simple interpretations. . . . The readiness with which the Oriental gives erroneous information instead of confessing his ignorance is motivated by reluctance to disappoint; this motive often makes him give an answer which he considers agreeable to the questioner. In such cases and many others the desire to please and to feel obliging has a tendency to make one ignore plain facts.18
There is not the slightest reason to suppose that virtue is unequally distributed around our globe. If Asians have seemed unreliable to Westerners, that is because we have judged them by our Western standards. We think their utterances should conform to objective facts; they think it more important that they be tuned to the sentiments of the persons their words will affect. In both civilizations there are referents to which utterances should be responsible; in both, there can be strong temptations not to honor those referents and to become, thereby, untruthful. The difference lies in the nature of the referents themselves.
In saying that East Asia adopted a basically personal view of truth we should not, of course, read “personal” in our Western, individualistic sense. “To thine own self be true” is strictly Western advice; its East Asian counterpart might read, “To the selves of others—all whom your words and actions will affect—be true.” This social rendering of “personal” gives the key Oriental virtue, “sincerity,” a twist that comes close to being the opposite of that which the word carries in the West. In the West sincerity bespeaks fidelity to one’s own, individually-arrived-at conscience and principles. In East Asia it involves bracketing these private preferences in favor of the outward-oriented social standards I have noted; to repeat, it involves optimizing the feelings of all interested parties, in accord with guidelines (we could go on to add) that have been impounded in ritualized customs (li). Bertrand Russell failed to see the difference between East Asian and Western meanings of truth, when he wrote in his essay on “The Chinese Character”: “Chinese life . . . is far more polite than anything to which we are accustomed. This, of course, interferes . . . with sincerity and truth in personal relations.”19
Even a sinologist as on top of the issues as Donald Munro bows to the Western definition of truth when he writes in the Preface to his Concept of Man in Early China: “What were important to the Chinese philosophers, where questions of truth and falsity were not, were the behavioral implications of the statement of belief in question.”20 Later in his book, he raises by implication the possibility of an alternative, Chinese definition of the word when he writes that “in China, truth and falsity in the Greek sense have rarely been important considerations” (p. 55, italics mine), but he does not go on to develop that alternative. What we need to see is that, as someone has put the matter, for Confucius the important thing was not to call a spade a spade (that is, make statements conform to impersonal realities), but rather to cheng ming; for example, make (primarily personal) realities conform to their (normative) names—to have a father speak as a “father” should speak, his words governed by the sensitivities a father should possess or be working to acquire.
To summarize: truth for China is personal in a dual or twofold sense. Outwardly it takes into consideration the feelings of the persons an act or utterance will affect (one thinks of the normality of white lies and keeping one’s mouth shut when appropriate). Meanwhile, inwardly it aligns the speaker to the self he ought to be; invoking a word dear to the correspondence theorists we can say that truth “adequates” its possessor to his normative self.21 The external and internal referents of the notion are tightly fused, of course, for it is primarily by identifying with the feelings of others (developing jen) that one becomes a chun tzu (the self one shoud be). If we are getting the feeling that the Chinese sense of truth opens onto her entire ethical system, this is as it should be, but I cannot exploit that virtue further here. There is space only to round off this section with a short, staccato coda. With truth as personally oriented as it was in East Asia, we should not be surprised to find ad hominem arguments counting for more there than they have in the West where they tend to be waived as logically irrelevant. As Henry Rosemont once put this point to me, if someone were to argue that the ideal form of marriage is monogamy while himself having three wives, the Chinese would consider this the best reason in the world not to take him seriously.
Against the background of these South Asian and East Asian notions of truth I proceed now to our Western vision.
I am not a Heideggerian, but I agree with Heidegger that the West’s view of truth has been, distinctively, correspondence. Of the three theories of truth the Western-oriented Encyclopedia of Philosophy lists in addition to correspondence—coherence, pragmatic, and performative—the last is too recent and episodic to warrant space in an overview article like this one. It burst on the scene in Strawson’s essay on “Truth” less than thirty years ago, and since he himself softened its original claim that to say that a statement is true is not to make a statement about a statement but to perform the act of agreeing with, accepting, or endorsing a statement—it seems to be receiving decreasing notice. I do not think it will last as more than a footnote. The pragmatic theory has more substance, but it is shaking down into an epistemological emphasis. It continues, in Quine, for example, as a broad reminder that theorizing over experience is fundamentally motivated and justified by conditions of efficacy and utility in servicing our aims and needs, but as a theory that claims to say what truth as such is, I would say of it, as the Encyclopedia of Philosophy says of the pragmatic movement in general, that it “cannot be said to be alive today” (VI, 435). For one thing, it never did succeed in doing justice to aesthetic and disinterested truth, as William James himself recognized by introducing his “mechanical wife”—would the fact that she serviced me flawlessly show that she loved me? Edwin Bevyn argues the deficiencies of the pragmatic theory conclusively, and as his objection is aimed at the coherence theory as well, I quote it at some length.
It may be that everything which has been said to show that the unsatisfactoriness of the correspondence theory of truth . . . holds good in regard to inanimate nature. But the moment one comes to the world of conscious Spirit, every theory of truth except the correspondence theory becomes absurd. If one thinks of the anxiety of the lover to know whether the person he aspires to win really loves him, it is precisely the question whether an idea in his mind, the image of the other person’s state of mind, really corresponds with fact existing independently of his mind which torments him. What would the lover say if we told him not to be so concerned about reality apart from his mind; it would be enough for him to act as if the person in question loved him? . . . Does she really—really, apart from anything I may think—care for me? What really are her thoughts in themselves, her way of regarding me in herself?—that is his insistent cry. My belief about another human spirit, about what that spirit now thinks or feels or has experienced in the past is essentially belief about a reality existing apart from my own mind. . . . The desire to know the truth in this sense is raised to its greatest intensity in love.22
As I said, Bevyn’s point is aimed as much against the coherence theory of truth as against the pragmatic, and it is this coherence theory which, in the West, has been the correspondence theory’s major rival. But rival only to the extent of constituting its loyal opposition, we may add, which obviates my needing to deal with it further here. Chronologically the coherence theory emerges only in modern philosophy, and even here it has been confined to such metaphysicians as Leibniz, Spinoza, Hegel, and Bradley (all rationalists and idealists in the West’s predominantly empiricist, realist tradition) and a few logical positivists (notably Neurath and Hempel) who have been attracted by its resemblance to theoretical physics and pure mathematics.
So I come out agreeing with Heidegger that the West has settled primarily into a correspondence theory of truth. In fixing on the way things are, this theory retains traces of the ontological emphasis India pushed to the hilt, while at the same time its concern for the way things appear to man aligns it to some extent with China’s humanistic interests. But now the differences.
Against India, correspondence exempts truth from concern with the ontological status of things in themselves—the question of their genuineness. It brings the question down to whether we see a bed, say, as it actually is; the ontological status of the bed—if that phrase has meaning; I shall return to this question as a separate issue. As for East Asia, though the correspondence theory sides with it (as I just said) in lodging truth in man, it does so with two restrictions—constrictions, I am tempted to say.
First, correspondence denies that truth pertains to persons in their entirety; it is imprecise, it holds, to speak of “true persons.” (In holding that it is appropriate to do so, the Chinese perspective overlaps India’s at this one point, in principle subscribing to a graded ontology of selfhood.) Rather than a predicate of selves, truth as defined by correspondence theorists is a predicate of parts of selves, their conceptual parts.
Second, these mental parts—I am using the phrase to cover images, ideas, propositions, statements, sentences, the entire corpus—are related (by the correspondence theory) to their referents passively. This elicited in the West the pragmatic theory of truth and notion of performative speech-acts as correctives, but these have neither unhorsed the correspondence theory nor (per impossible) been incorporated within it. The correspondence view does not say that thoughts must mirror things (the discredited ‘camera theory’ of naive realism), but however we conceive of “represent,” it should represent them accurately. This puts the referent in the driver’s seat; the job of true thought, we might say, is to settle down quietly in the seat beside it; that is, conform itself as fully as possible to the referent’s nature. The East Asian view is more dynamic; pragmatic elements are built right into it, for it holds an act or utterance to be true to the extent that it ‘gestalts’ (composes, resolves) the ingredients of a situation in a way that furthers a desired outcome—in China’s case, social harmony. Truth thus conceived is a kind of performative: it is speech or deed aimed at effecting an intended consequence.
Having devoted the first half of this section to agreeing with Heidegger that our Western view of truth is primarily that of correspondence, I shall devote its second half to disagreeing with him on when we settled into this position. I think we gravitated toward it more gradually than Heidegger would have us think. Heidegger sees the die as having been cast by Plato,23 whereas it seems to me unlikely that we would continue to sign our letters, “ ‘Yours truly,” speak of lovers as being “true to each other,” or refer to jurors as “twelve good men and true” if we had turned our backs on truth’s personal and ontological referents twenty-five hundred years ago. Right down through the Middle Ages, “goodness, truth and being are convertible.”24 As for Plato, I side with Paul Friedlander in his criticism of Heidegger’s handling of that fount of Western philosophy. Plato did not, as Heidegger claims, subordinate truth’s ontological to its epistemological referent. “Truth in Plato’s system,” Friedlander writes,
is always both: reality of being and correctness of apprehension and assertion. . . . Plato’s allegory of the cave [which Heidegger rightly focuses on] is characterized by the dual meaning of the hierarchical ascent: the ascent of being and the ascent of knowledge, both exactly related to each other.25
Nor was truth’s third, or personal, referent lacking in Plato:
As witness for these thoughts he chose Socrates, facing death for the sake of truth and reality. Thus, the dual meaning of the hierarchical ascent becomes three-fold if it is kept in mind that the allegory of unbidden and revealing truth is told by the truthful man.26
In sum, “in Plato . . . the ontological, the epistemological, and the existential . . . facets of the Greek alētheia . . . are intimately united.”27 If Plato had narrowed truth to its epistemological referent, as Heidegger claims, we would have to assume that the move escaped his pupil Aristotle, for to him too alētheia means, as in Plato, both the nature of the real and the nature of a true statement.28 Freidlander thinks that in passing to Aristotle, alētheia suffered some constriction- “the ‘existential’ aspect . . . represented in Plato through the figure of Socrates, has disappeared”29—but I do not see that even this is the case. For, as Thomas Kasulis points out in his contribution to this symposium, though correspondence theorists regularly take as their point of departure Aristotle’s assertion that “to say of what is that it is not, or what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true,”30 Aristotle himself “goes on to speak in two further ways about truth. In the lexiconical section of the Metaphysics (1024b), he analyzes three senses of ‘false’: false as thing, false as an account and false as a man” (“The Zen View of Truth,” first page). The last of these seems to correspond to what Friedlander calls the existential meaning of alētheia. In Aristotle’s description,
a false man is one who is ready at and fond of (false) accounts, not for any other reason but for their own sake, and one who is good at impressing such accounts on other people, just as we say things are false, which produce a false appearance.31
And again, in the Nicomachean Ethics: “The man who observes the mean [between ‘boastfulness’ and ‘false modesty’] is true both in word and in life because his character is such” (1127a).
Professor Kasulis notes that Thomas says this also,32 but this is not the place to go further into history. I hope that I have been clear. I do not deny that the seeds of our Western move—the extraction of truth from its original, threefold reference to lodge it in intellectual judgments that correspond with things outside themselves—can, with wisdom of hindsight, be found in Greek philosophy.33 But I want to insist that these seeds matured slowly. It seems to me that there is a huge and precise block of evidence for this point that is so clear as to amount, virtually, to proof; it is not often in philosophy that one comes upon evidence that is so palpable as to feel crisp, but in the present case the feel (for me, at least) pertains. Right “down to the late eighteenth century,” Arthur Lovejoy tells us,
most educated men were to accept without question the conception of the universe as a “Great Chain of Being,” composed of an immense, or . . . infinite, number of links ranging in hierarchical order from the meagerest kind of existents . . . through “every possible” grade up to the ens perfectissimum.34
And what was the gradient for these grades to which Lovejoy refers? Can it be doubted that in last resort it was ontological; does not the very name, “Great Chain of Being” make this claim clear? Given truth’s original involvement with ontology, I do not see how the word could have withdrawn its ontological claims as long as the Chain of Being held firm. Or to transpose the wording, I do not see how that chain could have remained what it was, had it not been possible—natural, even—to regard its higher links as more genuine and real; in a word, more true.
It was not Plato, it was modern science that caused the West to contract its notion of truth until in philosophy it is now thought to refer strictly and properly only to judgments (or statements, or propositions). For in science the notion of degrees of reality (and its correlate, degrees of ontological truth) are meaningless: a state-of-affairs is a state-of-affairs, and that is the end of the matter. And with the demise of ontological truth was it Eddington who proposed that “Reality” capitalized means nothing more than “reality followed by loud cheers”?—personal truth collapses as well. (In a last minute move, Kierkegaard tries to save it by proposing his notion of “subjective truth,” but we know how little this influenced subsequent philosophy.) For persons, too, are ontological in the sense that they are beings; they are built of substance. I do not see how one can do anything but trivialize the notion of a “true mensch” if one undercuts the possibility that there is more to him, as we say, than there is to most men—that he is more substantial.
I think that we have been onto important things in this symposium.
Little is more important about a culture, a century, a person, than its (or his) notion of truth. Pilate’s unanswered question, What is Truth? whether expressed or latent, haunts every civilization, and finally . . . every man.
That statement comes from Wilfred Cantwell Smith, whose essays on “Orientalism and Truth”35 and “A Human View of Truth”36 have influenced this article in major ways. As the title of the second essay suggests, Professor Smith is primarily concerned with the depersonalization of truth in the contemporary West:
Natural scientists deliberately and with success strive to construct impersonal statements, sentences whose meaning and whose truth are both independent of who makes them; and they see the truth of a statement as in large measure precisely a function of its impersonality. In the natural sciences this seems to do not only much good, but concomitantly little harm: elsewhere this is not clear. . . . There are some extremely important statements . . . whose meaning and whose truth depend, and properly depend, on the moral integrity of who makes them, and who hears them (statements such as “I refuse to fight in Vietnam”).
For a university or a civilization to set up impersonal propositions as the model of all propositions, and then to make these the primary locus of truth and falsity, is to exercise, wittingly or otherwise, a remarkably decisive option in one’s orientation to the world (“Orientalism and Truth,” p. 11).
It is indeed! And it is no less decisive to strip truth of its ontological reference, I would add, reducing thereby the Great Chain of Being to its single, ground-floor level. How far the West has gone down this road is shown by the fact that there are now Platonic scholars, presidents of the American Philosophical Association, no less, who can no longer comprehend how Plato could have been serious in arguing that there are things more real (and hence more true) than physical objects: Plato must have been linguistically confused.37
If, in broad outline at least, my paper is correct, its moral, I should think, is plain:
• No theory of truth works as well in the natural sciences as does our Western, correspondence theory.
• Only a profoundly personal theory of truth, such as was developed in East Asia, can do justice to man.
• Only a theory, like the Indian, that lodges truth in being, can be metaphysically adequate.
I feel that our Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy has a message here for the philosophical community at large. All three perspectives on truth are important. They need to be sounded as a common chord.
1. Confer the opening page of Eliot Deutsch’s On Truth: An Ontological Theory (Honolulu, Hawaii: The University Press of Hawaii, 1979): “In recent decades, especially under the impact of positivism, which led philosophers to make a sharp division between cognitive meaning . . . and emotive meaning . . . ‘truth’ has come more and more to be narrowly restricted to . . . propositions, with all other forms and usages of ‘truth’ taken to be metaphorical.”
Deutsch’s book appeared after my article was written and is constructive rather than historical in intent, but as its subtitle indicates, it shares the concern I register at the close of my article to return truth to its original ontological base. The statement I just quoted is followed by Deutsch’s contention that “this restriction of the application and narrowing of the meaning, of ‘truth’ [to the truth-value of propositions] is wrong and unfortunate: for it robs the concept of some of its richest possible meaning” (ibid.).
2. This seems self-evident to me, but to nail it down I shall add to Deutsch’s confirming opinion (cited in note 1) another one which can be taken as typical. Nicholas Rescher’s The Coherence Theory of Truth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973) opens by saying that “Philosophical theories in general deal exclusively with the truth of statements or propositions or, derivatively, such complexes thereof as accounts, narrations, and stories. Other uses of ‘true’ in ordinary language . . . are beside the point” (p. 1. Also Deutsch, On Truth, p. 121).
3. The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor Book, 1956), p. 163.
4. From Professor Siu-chi Huang’s paper, “Truth in the Chinese Tradition,” which formed a part of the Washington Symposium but which, for reasons of space, unfortunately could not be included among the papers herein.
5. “A Human View of Truth,” Studies in Religion/Sciences religieuses 1, no. 1(1971): 7.
6. From what has come to be called the Hymn to Creation in the Ṛg-Veda (X, 129) which goes on to say explicitly that “apart from it was nothing whatsoever.” R. T. H. Griffith (trans.), The Hymns of the Ṛg-veda, 2 vols. (Benares: F. L. Lazarus, 1920).
7. Frederick Streng, “Buddhist Doctrine of Two Truths as Religious Philosophy,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 1, no. 3 (November, 1971): 263.
8. Philosophy East and West 21, no. 1 (January, 1971): 79.
9. The Way and Its Power (New York: Grove Press. 1958), p. 64.
10. A Short History of Chinese Philosophy (New York: Collier-Macmillan, the Free Press, 1966), pp. 7, 9.
11. Charles Moore, ed., Essays in East-West Philosophy (Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1951), p. 163.
12. I do not think that this statement and the example that follows take issue with Henry Rosemont’s point that too much has been made of the constraints archaic written Chinese is alleged to have imposed on Chinese thinking, see his “On Representing Abstractions in Archaic Chinese,” Philosophy East and West 24, no. 1 (January, 1974): 71–88. In the end, people develop languages that enable them to do what they want to do, rather than being forced to do what their languages require.
13. One thinks of Confucius’ statement, “It is not truth which makes man great, but man that makes truth great.”
14. S. Wells Williams, The Middle Kingdom (New York: Scribner’s, 1882; revised edition, 1907), 1:834.
15. Both cited in Derke Bodde, China’s Cultural Tradition (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963), p. 8.
16. Science and Human Values (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), p. 43.
17. Friend to Friend (New York: John Day, 1958), pp. 121–122.
18. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946), pp. 127–128.
19. Selected Papers of Bertrand Russell (New York: Modern Library, 1927), p. 232. Japanese politicians find it difficult to persuade voters to be sincere in the Western sense of voting by principle instead of by giri, which means, roughly, obligation as arising from ninjo or human feelings. On the eve of a national election in the 1960s, a prominent law professor pleaded the virtues of principle in a newspaper article which was strategically titled, “Private Giri and Public Giri” (J. O. Gauntlett, “Undercurrents in Japanese Social Behaviour,” Journal, College of Literature 6 (1962): 15–16, Tokyo: Aoyama Gakuin University).
20. (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1969), p. ix, emphasis added.
21. I am adapting to China the standard medieval formulation of the correspondence theory, veritas est adequatio rei et intellectus (truth is the adequation of a thing and intellect).
22. Symbolism and Belief (New York: Macmillan Co., 1938), p. 300.
23. “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” trans. John Barlow, in ed. Henry Aiken and William Barrett, Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, vol. 3 (New York: Random House, 1962), pp. 251–270.
24. Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, vol. 2, part 2, p. 63. Copleston is describing St. Thomas’ position.
It is worth noting, though, that in the Platonic tradition ontological truth itself has a correspondence aspect where the created world is concerned. “Creatures have ontological truth in so far as they embody or exemplify [correspond to] the model in the divine mind” (ibid. 2, 1, p. 88, a propos St. Augustine.)
25. Plato: An Introduction (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1958), pp. 225, 227.
26. Ibid., p. 225.
27. Ibid., p. 229.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Metaphysics, 101b.
31. Metaphysics, 1025a.
32. Summa Theologica, Pt. 2–2 Z 109, Art. 3 Reply Obj. 3.
33. Why the West moved in this direction, lies beyond this article, as do the questions of why India and East Asia moved in their distinctive directions regarding truth. I have toyed with answers in my “Accents of the World’s Philosophies,” Philosophy East and West 7, nos. 1 and 2 (1957); “Accents of the World’s Religions,” in John Bowman, ed., Comparative Religion (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1972); “Valid Materialism: A Western Offering to Hocking’s ‘Civilization in the Singular,’ ” in Leroy Rouner, ed., Philosophy, Religion, and the Coming World Civilization (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966); “Tao Now: An Ecological Testament,” in Ian Barbour, ed., Earth Might Be Fair (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1972); and “Man’s Western Way: An Essay on Reason and the Given,” Philosophy East and West 22, no. 4 (October, 1972). I remain far from satisfied with my inroads on the problem, however.
34. The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), p. 59.
35. (Princeton University: Program in Near Eastern Studies, 1969), privately distributed.
36. Op. cit.
37. I am referring, may he forgive me, to a friend, Gregory Vlastos, and his 1965 Presidential Address to the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association. An elaboration of his earlier “Degrees of Reality in Plato,” appears in his Platonic Studies (Princeton, New Jersey: University Press, 1973). Take, he writes, “the ‘real’ bed in the Republic, which turns out to be not the one we sleep on. . . . How could a man who had so little patience with loose talk want to say in all seriousness an abstract Form is ‘more real’ than wood and glue?” (vii).
1. What is knowledge according to Theaetetus? Where does it reside? In sense-impressions? In perception? In judgment? Give reasons for your answer.
2. Analyze the different sorts of knowledge outlined in Theaetetus.
3. Evaluate the claim that knowledge is justified true judgment.
4. In Theaetetus, Socrates argues against the Protagrean thesis that man is the measure of all things. Do you find his arguments convincing?
5. Explain Meno’s puzzle about learning. What does it demonstrate? Why and how is learning possible?
6. Explain the process by which the boy slave arrives at the right answer. Does he have innate knowledge of geometry? Do you find Socrates’ answers convincing? Give reasons for your answer.
7. Explain the concept of innate ideas. Are these ideas a priori or are they implanted in us by God? Argue for your position.
8. What are the means of valid knowledge discussed in Indian philosophy?
9. What is perception? Discuss the distinction between indeterminate and determinate perception that Indian epistemologists make?
10. Discuss the main features of Dharmarāja’s account of cognition generated by words alone.
11. Compare and contrast the Nyāya and the Buddhist accounts of perception.
12. What is truth? How is it apprehended?
13. Discuss Al-Ghazāli’s conception of knowledge. He challenges the accuracy of the beliefs that are based on sense-perception and intellect. Do you find his arguments defensible? Explain clearly.
14. Discuss what Al-Ghazāli means by prophetic revelation? Do you consider prophetic revelation a reliable source of knowledge? If yes, why yes? If not, why, not?
15. Discuss the distinction that Al-Ghazāli makes among knowledge, immediate experience, and faith?
16. How do we know that someone is a prophet? Are Al-Ghazāli’s arguments persuasive? Explain clearly.
17. Descartes says, “I think therefore I am.” What arguments does Descartes give to substantiate his thesis? What are these arguments intended to demonstrate? Does he succeed in his efforts? Give reasons for your answer.
18. Both Descartes and Al-Ghazāli begin with doubt to reach certainty. Compare and contrast the two. Which one makes more sense and why?
19. Explain in your words the central issues that surround epistemology? Which issue do you find most fascinating? Why? Select one of the epistemological theories discussed in this section and analyze how this theory will answer the issue that you have selected.
20. Huston Smith in his article discusses truth from a global perspective that encompasses India, China, and the West. Which account do you find more persuasive and why?
21. Is knowledge a thing that one can possess? Discuss the issue from an Indian, a Chinese, or a Western perspective. Argue for the perspective that seems most plausible.
The Nyāya Theory of Knowledge, 2nd ed., by Satischandra Chatterjee (Calcutta: University of Calcutta Press, 1950) contains lucid discussions of each of the four valid means of true cognition and compares Nyāya theories to other Indian theories of knowledge. It gives a reliable exposition of the epistemological theories of Indian systems of thought.
Plato’s Theory of Knowledge by F.M. Cornford (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957) provides a translation of the Theaetetus with a running commentary.
Six Ways of Knowing by D.M. Datta (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1972) discusses Advaita Vedānta epistemology critically and compares it with that of other schools of Indian philosophy.
An Introduction to Śaṅkara’s Theory of Knowledge by N. K. Devaraja (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1962) is a good summary of the epistemological issues surrounding Śaṃkara’s philosophy.
Dharmarāja’s Vedānta Paribhāṣā translated by Swami Madhavananda (Calcutta: The Ramakrishna Mission, 1972) is a readable translation of the entire Vedānta Paribhāṣā.
Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen by Harry Frankfurt (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970) contains a careful examination of Descartes’s theory of knowledge found in the Meditations.
The Central Philosophy of Buddhism by T. R. V. Murti (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1960) gives a very good idea of the key points in Buddhism and its development. The book might be somewhat difficult for beginners.
Philosophy East and West, October 1980 (vol. 30, no. 4), contains very useful articles on truth by contemporary scholars from the Indian, Chinese, and Zen perspectives.
History of Indian Epistemology by Jwala Prasad (Delhi: Munshi Ram Manoharlal, 1958) introduces the students to the basic issues that surround Indian epistemology.
Methods of Knowledge by Swami Satprakashananda (Calcutta: Advaita Ashram, 1974) presents important issues surrounding Advaita epistemology in relation to that of other schools of Indian and Western thought.
Plato—the Man and His Ideas by A.E. Taylor (London: Methuen, 1963) gives a detailed analysis of Plato’s dialogues with an excellent commentary. This is a very useful book on Plato’s thoughts.
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Philosophy East and West 30, no. 4 (October, 1980). Copyright by The University Press of Hawaii.