Playing a gig in South Carolina this Saturday, we were all reminded that somebody, I don't even know the guys name, had predicted that come about 6 o'clock or so, (EST?) world go poof. Well, world didn't go poof - it never does.
Now I don't care that some religiously-minded octogenarian thought the world was ending. That's sort of what they do. But behind all the nonsense is something important - an idea of truth that needs to go away.
Truth is one of those big motherfuckers in philosophy. Starting with Plato and continuing far too long, people have thought that "truth" is something that is behind everything, outside of the day-to-day networkings of the world. This belief leads to such rhetorical boners as "really true" and "really real," meaning yes that thing over their looks like it's happening and understandable, but really we're all in the Matrix. This is the split between appearance and reality that branches of philosophy such as phenomenology have tried to do away with for years. They can't get rid of them because most people still think in terms like these.
I believe employing one simple principle helps to rid the world of a lot of metaphysical nonsense: your brain does not pick up a channel that my brain doesn't. There. Done.
So where does this leave us with a concept like "truth" which though annoying and problematic, is pretty necessary for day-to-day interactions. How about this - if a speech-act (talking) leads to results that you planned on them leading to then what you said was true. Basically, if the world is working for us, then we're saying true things.
Heidegger claimed that truth was about the interplay between the veiled and unveiled - between what the world showed and what remained hidden. The world is never giving you a complete picture - when one thing comes into focus, something else gets blurry. Also, nice as long as we remember Heidegger is talking about the world, not something behind the world. (I'll unpack Heidegger in more detail later. His notion of truth is really better than the analytic definition I'm using in the previous paragraph)
The major point here is that if you think something's behind everything you will start looking for that something. And then you'll end up some crazy guy with a calculator and a religious book, spending the end of your life drawing on posterboard with magic markers. Which is bad.
The internet hype surrounding this prediction caught me off guard. While most of attention was mocking this story as absurd, it concerned me that a significant collection of people believed it to be a legitimate possibility. A web site was even offering post-rapture pet care. I don't imagine the intention was satire.
ReplyDeleteI hope my talk about how we use the word "truth" responds, resonates to what you're saying. When I sat down and thought about it, end of the world guy - the thing I kept thinking was that "these people believe somebody has access to a truth that is behind experience." And that's what, in my opinion, we need to get rid of. I'm coming back around to the possibility of metaphysics because of a Graham Harman book that I'm reading - but his metaphysics is still all based on objects. He calls it object-oriented-ontology - or the pornographically sounding abbreviation "OOO." But he's a Heideggarian that's pointing out serious problems with Heidegger. I tell you what you might enjoy - google "Donald Davidson Richard Rorty" and you'll find about an hour long conversation that shows, in my opinion, the closest analytic, or well, post analytic philosophy will ever get to what I want to talk about. Also, while I'm throwing out recommendations - look at the painted Francis Bacon. Whoa. I'm going to write on him soon.
ReplyDelete