Can one know "the truth"?

[Kyriakos]

I had reason to recall a phrase by Kafka, which i particularly regard as a great sentence. It was written near his final period (he died in 1924, 41 years old). The phrase follows.

You cannot see the truth, unless you are a lie; you cannot see the truth if you are part of it.

I like the pattern the above sentence forms. In my view it primarily means that you cannot be of the same type of 'object' as the one(s) which you can observe due to your own type. So (to echoe Anaxagoras) you cannot claim that consciousness and the mental world is of the same type as any phenomenon which can be observed through it. It would, finally, follow from the above that even if man can in one way ultimately examine all phenomena independent of his actual mental world, he cannot examine in the same way his own mental world.
To return to Kafka, some 2400 years later, it would seem that he thought you could not at the same time be observing a truth and sense it as one distinct continuum, while you yourself would be linked to that continuum. A bit like one who cannot see the room behind a door, but this is also why he still is located in the corridor outside the door, while nothing after that limit would have this distinctive quality.

So, in your view, can one know the truth?

 

[Synobun]

Nothing is true, everything is permitted. One develops a much more expansive way of viewing the world and developing technology/concepts when they stop thinking everything fits into a small little box that contains the elusive "truth".

 

[Kyriakos]

Nothing is true, everything is permitted. One develops a much more expansive way of viewing the world and developing technology/concepts when they stop thinking everything fits into a small little box that contains the elusive "truth".

Well, if nothing is true, neither is your claim that nothing is true.

 

[Synobun]

Well, if nothing is true, neither is your claim that nothing is true.

I don't know what you're trying to prove here.

 

[Borachio]

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Keats

 

[Tahuti]

We have to assume everything as true, unless we know for sure it is false.

 

[Borachio]

I'm pretty sure that's not true. There's a myriad of counter examples that spring to mind.

edit: Hmm. The examples I've thought of so far don't work. Give me a moment.

You don't know for sure that you won't survive your own death - as in the whole after-life deal. Do you assume it's true?

 

[Tahuti]

Well, there is not really truth in a meaningful sense. But everything that cannot be proven false is a "maybe".

 

[Kyriakos]

Yes, other notables have also likened truth to beauty (both as a metaphor, or a form), eg Flaubert and Dostoevsky.

@Synsensa: I noted that it cannot logically be correct that "nothing is true". If you take that as a rhetorical claim, it is untrue cause if true it would mean its own statement is untrue (Aristotle). If you take it as an allusion to a calculation then it also is untrue, cause there are many claims you can name as true due to them following from a system where they are true. Eg: 2,3,5,7,11 etc are prime numbers, and this is true. 2piR also is the true calculation of the largest periphery of a disc formed by a radius of R (ie the circumferance of the corresponding circle). And so on.

 

[Kyriakos]

We have to assume everything as true, unless we know for sure it is false.

Largely agree, but then again sometimes we have to assume something is false, despite not being able to see why it is supposed to be false. For example an infant will be told not to stick his finger inside an electric socket. The infant may ask why, but won't be able to understand about electricity, so ultimately he will just view the socket as a "false" in regards to his safety, despite not knowing why this has to be so.

 

[timtofly]

Originally Posted by Franz Kafka
You cannot see the truth, unless you are a lie; you cannot see the truth if you are part of it.

Would that also not work in reverse? You cannot see the lie, unless you are a truth; you cannot see the lie, if you are part of it. It would seem that each one can be blinded by their own personal beliefs, but perhaps an outside help is necessary. I am not sure that getting it from other humans is going to work, but I am sure they are going to push their own belief systems, until their minds are changed by outside pressures and there is conformity to the will of the majority.

 

[Kyriakos]

Would that also not work in reverse? You cannot see the lie, unless you are a truth; you cannot see the lie, if you are part of it. It would seem that each one can be blinded by their own personal beliefs, but perhaps an outside help is necessary. I am not sure that getting it from other humans is going to work, but I am sure they are going to push their own belief systems, until their minds are changed by outside pressures and there is conformity to the will of the majority.

I think it does work in reverse too, yes Maybe the main meaning here is that you are set in one way, and can see what is set in the opposite way. The closer it is to you the more it becomes either taken as obvious, or not different at all (?).
Not sure if that always has to be so. But it is so if (for example) a line can have a vast amount of different rotations in regards to an axis (from 0 degrees to almost 360 degrees) but its parts can exist either in the positive or the negative part of the cartesian system of the axis?
Then again you can have imaginary numbers.

 

[Lord of Elves]

Epistemology -- that is, the study of knowing -- says you cannot know anything. Of course, you cannot even know this, so your options are very limited in terms of absolute truth.

 

[Kyriakos]

Epistemology -- that is, the study of knowing -- says you cannot know anything. Of course, you cannot even know this, so your options are very limited in terms of absolute truth.

That you cannot 'know' anything is an old view (mostly correct in my opinion) which gave birth to the many branches of what later on got known as Idealism (a term originating from "the world of Ideas", by Plato). Idealism can expand up to solipsism, but it can also be supporting that we can advance ourselves by observing the systems we form, we just can never break through the barrier between us and anything we observe, so nothing is "known" as its "real" identity but only through an anthropomorphic system.

 

[Synobun]

@Synsensa: I noted that it cannot logically be correct that "nothing is true". If you take that as a rhetorical claim, it is untrue cause if true it would mean its own statement is untrue (Aristotle). If you take it as an allusion to a calculation then it also is untrue, cause there are many claims you can name as true due to them following from a system where they are true. Eg: 2,3,5,7,11 etc are prime numbers, and this is true. 2piR also is the true calculation of the largest periphery of a disc formed by a radius of R (ie the circumferance of the corresponding circle). And so on.

If we're going into paradoxical territory then yeah, sure. Just like how if God made the universe, what made God? What made the one that made God? What made the one that made the one that made God? We could forever go along this path but it'll quickly lead nowhere. The statement "nothing is true, everything is permitted" is not meant to be an absolute.

Only a Sith would deal with absolutes.

 

[Borachio]

It's a simple enough paradoxical statement.

One way of dealing with paradoxical statements is to make sure they're not self-referential.

So that "no statement is true" becomes "this is the only statement that is true".

 

[Ayatollah So]

In my view it primarily means that you cannot be of the same type of 'object' as the one(s) which you can observe due to your own type.

That's the reverse of the more common view, which says you have to be the same 'type of object' as anything you claim to know. Idealism often seems to be motivated by that opposite-to-Kafka principle.

Not that I buy that either. People know all kinds of stuff that those principles would deny. It's much more sensible to just deny the principles.

 

[Adjuvant]

To me, there is absolute reality, or "noumenon", and is likely very tied to god.

All we have is subjective reality, or "phenomenon" which are observations via imperfect understanding, and which may be common by shared systems of measurement.

Are some "phenomenon closer to value of noumenon"? I suppose, if god willed it, but there would be no way to articulate it with no method of comparison, so by default, the answer is "not that we could know".

Now, there's a difference for the sake of practical application. Should we stare at something long enough to never act because of indecisiveness of reality, we're subject entirely to the environment, and well, that's just not how we are. We shape things, we manifest.

So, pursuant to everything that has come before, molded and labeled in such fashion, what the more "astute" person is, generally speaking, the one more "attached" to this seemingly "static curtain" we've all made, from all our subjective realities. Yes, I find that position very "possible", however, ultimately, "boring".

 

[Kyriakos]

That's the reverse of the more common view, which says you have to be the same 'type of object' as anything you claim to know. Idealism often seems to be motivated by that opposite-to-Kafka principle.

Not that I buy that either. People know all kinds of stuff that those principles would deny. It's much more sensible to just deny the principles.

That would have been correct, had Kafka not clearly mentioned an entirely mental phenomenon (truth), which in turn makes the debate about being able to know that be of a different kind than the debate of knowing anything which is external to the person/thinker/world of thought
So both idealism and the sentiment in Kafka's sentence are co-existent; they just refer to different planes. The first most often refers to anything outside the world of ideas. The latter refers to a formation entirely inside the world of ideas. A bit like saying:
a) if you are X then you cannot see anything non-X without forming an equation of X as it. (Idealism).

b) if you are X then you cannot see what the equation you formed means by itself, cause you are part of it and removing yourself would make the equation stop being; despite it being formed by you it is inevitable that you'll be viewing it in terms of X or its product Y. (follows, in my view, from Kafka's sentence).

Both the above statements seem very easy to co-exist, in this parallelism.

 

[Adjuvant]

I think you're invested in a bit of a word game, actually. You're placing an indeterminate value on "truth" and then snapping back and forth to a "truth value" which is, supposedly, apparent.

I don't believe it is apparent.

Just as in the "static curtain" reference in my post above, everything we see and understand is based by our flawed, limited perspective. It's never the "whole story" and therefore inherently "a lie". Just as it's covered with every dream, every sense of love, every human triumph, it's equally adorned by every catastrophe, every hallucination, every bad acid trip, and every prejudice. When I ask you, "What is real?", you point at that curtain and you say, "That. That is what is real.".

I think Kafka realized this. I think he really wanted to say, "There is a truth out there, and we are not part of it.". Now we have people postulating, "But what if we were?". Well, we're not. While we're definitely part of "something going on", we'll likely never be quite aware of its true nature because of this truth we've fashioned for ourselves.