The Role and Importance of Metaphorical Truth

1.    Creativity and Discontinuity

Forty years ago I wrote a Ph.D. thesis on the subject of creativity, taking as my starting point Kant’s description of genius in ‘The Critique of Judgement’, where he says that true genius does not just work out the possibilities inherent in an already existing language but creates a new language which makes it possible for us to say and think things we had not been able to say and think before: a proposition which has the further implication that, if this new language enables us to think things which were previously unthinkable, then it cannot, itself, be derived from the old way of thinking, thereby necessitating some form of discontinuous leap in its creation.

These leaps I called discursive discontinuities, borrowing the term from Michel Foucault, whose seminal work on this subject, ‘The Order of Things’, describes one of the most momentous discursive discontinuities in our history, as we made the transition from medieval thought, based on the central concepts of ‘sympathy’ and ‘antipathy’, to modern, scientific thought, based on the concept of ‘causality’, a transition which was so radical, in fact, that most people today cannot even imagine how the medieval mind worked.

A classic example I have often used to illustrate this is the fact that medieval herbalists believed that, because the flesh of the walnut resembles the human brain, while its shell resembles a human skull, taking powdered walnut as a medicine would alleviate headaches, the two objects, the flesh of the walnut and the human brain, having a sympathetic connection. What’s more, they believed this because they also believed that the resemblance between the two objects was a ‘sign’ placed on them by God to show us that this sympathetic connection existed, making it the primary task of the ‘natural philosopher’, therefore, to learn the language of these signs and thus gain power over nature.

Even more alien to our way of thinking is the idea that there could also be a sympathetic connection between the sign for something and the thing itself, signs in this context also including the ‘true’ names of things, such that if one knew the true name of something one would gain power over it simply by saying that name. What’s more, it was generally believed that the only thing that prevented us from exercising this power was the fact that the true names of things had been lost during the destruction of the Tower of Babel, when mankind’s original language had been fragmented and corrupted, stripping words of the sympathetic and, indeed, antipathetic power they once had: a belief which consequently led to the development of another field of medieval study, the principal aim of which was the reconstitution of this original, pre-Babel language, which would give those who mastered it power over nature through the utterance of words alone, as was thought to be the case, for instance, with respect to the word ‘abracadabra’.

Then, of course, there was the sympathetic relationship that was thought to exist between the macrocosm of the heavens and the microcosm of the earth and the individual human beings who inhabit it, whose lives were thought to be influenced by the positions of the planets both at the time of their birth and in the future, which could be predicted by casting future planetary charts in the form of horoscopes, upon which even physicians relied in selecting what they thought were likely to be the most efficacious treatments for their patients.

Today, of course, we not only wonder how people could have believed such patent absurdities – as they did for more than a thousand years – but how the world could have actually functioned under such a deluded belief system. Not only is it perfectly possible that people a thousand years from now will look back on our beliefs with the same incredulity, however, but the medieval world functioned, just as ours functions, precisely because those parts of any belief system that are deluded are simply bubbles of language which have no connection to the real world and which cannot therefore affect it, at least not positively.

That is not to say, of course, that they cannot negatively affect it, as when, for instance, a physician prescribes some medicine based on some bodily resemblance which then has an adverse effect. But most medieval ‘knowledge’, like much of our theoretical knowledge today, simply didn’t touch the world in which most people lived and went about their business, using whatever practical knowledge they needed without reference to such concepts as sympathy and antipathy. Being tokens in what was just an intellectual game, such ideas were thus mere distractions for people with enough time on their hands to indulge them: idle pastimes for the idle rich which the world could afford because, in an era in which hardly anything had changed for more than a thousand years, the world simply didn’t need any significant contribution from the practitioners of these arts.

That all changed, however, at the end of the 16^th and the beginning of the 17^th century, when global cooling led to shorter growing seasons and hence frequent famines throughout the world, particularly at more northern latitudes, which in turn led to mass migrations from the countryside to the cites, where endemic poverty gave rise to both revolutionary and religious wars, such that, by the second half of the 17^th century, what people wanted more than anything else was ‘order’, not just in their political systems but in their very representation of the world, itself, which the infinitely idiosyncratic and peculiar relationships of sympathy and antipathy simply could not provide.

What people wanted, indeed, was a world which not only behaved according to universal and immutable laws but was also logical and clear in its structure: two requirements which thus meant that the transition from the medieval to the modern mode of thinking actually had to proceed along two main fronts.

The first of these was a thorough reorganisation of the world into more orderly formations, the most obvious examples of which were the various taxonomic tables classifying the natural world which began to appear at the beginning of the 17^th century with the publication of the Pinax Theatri Bolanici by the Swiss Bauhin brothers in 1623. This was followed in 1682 by the Methodus Plantarum Nova, by the English naturalist John Ray, who classified around 18,000 plant species. The most successful taxonomy of the pre-Linnaean era, however, was that constructed by Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, whose Institutiones Rei Herbaria, published in 1700, emphasised the classification of genera, many of which were accepted by Linnaeus and are still in use today.

It was Carl Linnaeus, however, who made the big breakthrough, not only by simplifying the Latin naming convention that was then in use, but as a result of his choice of classification principles. For unlike de Tournefort and, indeed, others, who had largely based their classifications on often quite deceptive floral characteristics, Linnaeus famously based his on species’ reproductive systems, thereby seeming to anticipate Darwin's Origin of Species in that species which were close to each other on the taxonomic table were likely to have common ancestors, something which could not be the case, of course, if their reproductive systems were radically different. It also allowed him to apply the same classification principles to other parts of the natural world, eventually allowing others to bring every living thing under a common hierarchical umbrella.

If a large part of late 17^th century science was thus about bringing tabulated order to a chaotic world, much of the rest was about formulating the laws under which this world operated, which again made 17^th century science slightly different from the science we practice today, modern science being generally regarded as proceeding in three phases: the observation of a regularity or correlation; the formulation of a hypothesis which would explain this regularity or correlation; and the testing of this hypothesis by means of experimentation. Much of 17^th century science, however, more or less ended with the first phase.

That’s not to say, of course, that experimentation and the formulation of hypotheses did not take place. However, much of the experimentation was performed to confirm the regularity or correlation rather than to test any theory explaining it.

Take, for instance, Boyle’s Law, which was published in 1662 and states that pressure is inversely proportional to volume, such that the pressure of a gas decreases as the volume of the container in which it is held increases. This was demonstrated by using a closed ‘J’ shaped tube containing different amounts of mercury for each iteration of the experiment. The mercury was then used to force the air on the other side of the tube to contract, the multiple iterations revealing that the inverse relationship between the pressure exerted by the mercury and the volume of the air remained constant. At no point, however, did Boyle attempt to theoretically explain why this was the case. Indeed, it was not satisfactorily explained until James Clerk Maxwell addressed the issue two centuries later. For Boyle, it was enough that he had identified a universal law, this being what the 17^th century primarily demanded of its scientists.

What this also did, however, was contribute significantly to the mythology of science, which is to say those things which scientists like to believe about science which are not actually true. Because men like Robert Boyle, Robert Hook and Sir Isaac Newton were building this great edifice of universal laws, one of these beliefs, for instance, was that science was continuous and linear, a bit like building a house. You start with sound foundations and then build upwards, laying one brick on top of another in a process of slow and methodical accretion in which there are no gaps and no great leaps of imagination. As soon as one admits that one cannot really know that something is a universal law until one also knows why it is so, and accepts, therefore, that no science is complete without a theoretical explanation of its laws, one is forced to recognise that hypothetical speculation is an essential part of this process, and that far from being continuous and linear, it is very often discontinuous and cyclical, as described by Thomas Kuhn in the ‘Structure of Scientific Revolutions’.

Because scientific theories, as I have explained elsewhere, can never be proven – only disproven – what Kuhn describes, in fact, is a process in which it is actually the purpose of scientific theories to be shot down. I say this because, from the day they are introduced, they instantly come under scrutiny from other scientists looking to find flaws in them, not out malice or anything like that, but because this is how science actually works, not by the slow accumulation of building blocks, but by the critical examination of each block that is put forward. Even in the case of the most well accepted theories, as a consequence, exceptions to the theory are eventually discovered, with the result that, if the theory is to be maintained, subsidiary theories have to be introduced to explain why empirical observations do not always accord with what the main theory predicts. Over time, as these inconsistencies accumulate and more and more of these subsidiary theories are consequently required, the overall theory therefore becomes increasingly complicated until, eventually, someone comes along and says, ‘You know what, it would be a lot simpler if, instead of looking at it like that, we looked at it like this’, thereby introducing a new theory, which initially overcomes many of the old exceptions – which is why it is initially accepted – but which merely begins the process all over again.

Nor is this a mere theory. For as Thomas Kuhn points out, the history of science is littered with dozens of examples of these paradigm shifts, as he called them. In fact, one of the most well-known – that brought about by Nicholas Copernicus – happened so early on in the history of science that most people don’t actually see it as a revolutionary change within science at all, but as part of that larger transition from the medieval to the modern way of thinking described by Foucault: a misconception which is almost certainly due to the later persecution of Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei by the Roman Catholic Church as a result of their beliefs on this subject, along with the fact that the Catholic Church is regarded as the very epitome of medievalism while Galileo is regarded as one of the fathers of modern science, which the medieval church was trying to hold back. While these latter points may be valid, however, the science of astronomy was no less scientific before Copernicus’ revolutionary change in perspective than it was afterwards. In fact, the only thing that changed was the position of the observer, who had previously been located at the centre of the astronomical system but who was now relegated to a position on one of a number of planets orbiting that centre. Everything else – the instruments used to measure and chart the position of the planets, the Euclidian geometry used to calculate their future movements, etc. – remained exactly the same.

More to the point, the reasons why Copernicus chose to reposition the observer are precisely those that Thomas Kohn describes as typical in scientific revolutions. For until Copernicus changed the underlying model there were numerous discrepancies between the observed position of the planets and their predicted positions based on standard geometric calculations. Moreover, these discrepancies had been known about and explained away using various ad hoc theories for centuries. By changing the underlying model from one that was geocentric to one that was heliocentric, however, Copernicus discovered that most of the discrepancies simply disappeared, which should have convinced anyone with half a brain that he had to be right, or at least nearly so.

I say this because, although I wouldn’t expect another revolutionary paradigm shift any time soon, a lot has changed in Copernicus’ model since he published his Dē Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium in 1543, and even today it is not perfect, with new anomalies being continually discovered which then require further refinement of the model. To give the reader an idea of some of the changes that have taken place in the last 479 years, Copernicus, for instance, assumed that all the concentric orbits of the planets were in the same plane. But they are actually at slightly different angles to each other. What’s more, the angles constantly change, which is to say that the orbits wobble. Copernicus also assumed that the planets’ orbits were all the same shape and that they didn’t change. Due to the gravitational pull exerted by the planets on each other, however, their orbits are again constantly changing, sometimes being pulled further out such that they become more elliptical, sometimes being pulled further in such that they become almost circular. Copernicus also assumed that the sun was always at the centre of each planet’s orbit. As a further result of the gravitational pull exerted by the planets on each other, however, the sun is usually closer to one end of a planet’s elliptical orbit – the end  known as the perihelion – than the other – known as the aphelion – a fact which, in the case of the earth, has a massive cyclical effect upon our climate, which our politicians, still adhering to a very basic Copernican model of the solar system, fail to take into account when presuming to tackle climate change.

The real lesson to learn from this, however, is that all models and theories are human inventions created to represent an infinitely complex universe; they are not that universe itself, and are only ever,  therefore, a simplified reflection of it, with the result that whenever we are arrogant enough to think that we have its measure, the universe almost invariably teaches us the error of our ways.

An even better example of a paradigm shift with respect to how well it illustrates Kant’s proposition that genius does not just work through the possibilities  inherent in an existing language but creates a new language in which it is possible to think and say things we had not been able to think or say before, however, is Lavoisier’s naming of oxygen. I put it this way because, while most people believe that Lavoisier discovered oxygen, as I have explained elsewhere, that is not what he did at all. In fact, Joseph Priestly discovered oxygen and even taught Lavoisier how to isolate it. Priestly, however, called it dephlogisticated air. Lavoisier renamed it, just as he renamed hydrogen, as part of a wholesale transformation of the way in which he thought we should conceive of the material universe: a transformation which essentially consisted in the abandonment of what one might call transformational chemistry – which, having its roots in alchemy, had conceived of chemical changes as changes in the very nature of the substances being acted upon – and the adoption, instead, of what we may call synthetic chemistry, which conceive of chemical changes as the combination of different elements to form different substances, the most paradigmatic example of which is the combination of oxygen and hydrogen to form water, which lay at the heart of Lavoisier’s work.

What was truly transformational about this paradigm shift, however, was the world it opened up. For once the new paradigm began to be accepted, it naturally generated its own questions. How many of these new fundamental elements were there, for instance, and what were there differentiating characteristics? How were they structured and how did they combine with each other? Did their structure determine which other elements they could combine with and could their structure even be deduced from the combinations that already existed? Whether singly or in combinations, these questions then led to the development of such concepts as ‘atomic weight’ and ‘atomic number’, as well as the creation of the periodic table, the chemical equivalent of the taxonomic tables of natural history. They also led to our concepts of such things as molecules and subatomic particles and the forces which hold matter together. In short, what Lavoisier gave us was not just the kernel of a new language of chemistry, but the linguist space in which much of the language of all science was able to develop.

2.    The Limits of Creativity

At this point, therefore, I was fairly confident that I had enough historical evidence to support my thesis that all the really major developments in our various ways of thinking have been discontinuous, involving imaginative leaps rather than the steady accumulation of knowledge. I was also confident that I could extend this paradigm to the cover the arts, especially the visual arts and music, although, in both of these cases, that which precipitates the discontinuous change is, of course, different.

After all, neither a school of painting nor a particular musical form is susceptible to being undermined by the discovery of exceptions to their rules in the external world. In fact, in some cases, I suspect that what brings a particular form of music to an end is that its exponents eventually exhaust all the possibilities inherent within it, with the result that nothing really new can be produced and the form simply falls out of favour.

There are, however, cases in which an art form is clearly impacted and can, indeed, be brought to an end by external events, usually of a historical or cultural nature. In the 1970s, when I was writing this thesis, I was very fond, for example, of the English music of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries: music by composers such as George Butterworth, Fredrick Delius and, of course, Ralph Vaughan-Williams. Originating in the latter stages of Britain’s industrial era, but with titles such as ‘On Wenlock Edge’, ‘A Shropshire Lad’, and ‘The Lark Ascending’, it is music which not only evokes the English countryside and landscape, but is, as a result, quite unashamedly nostalgic, with long sustained chords which swell and then die away again as if lamenting the loss of an earlier, simpler age. With its soft, pastoral lyricism, however, alternating between joy and melancholy, it was a style of music which simply could not survive the first world war. After the carnage of the Somme, where George Butterworth was actually killed in the summer of 1916, no new English composer could ever write such music again.

Whatever the cause of a way of thinking or form of expression coming to an end, therefore – whether it be through the accumulation of exceptions to a theory eventually making that theory unworkable, or as a result of the possibilities inherent in a musical form simply becoming exhausted or going out of style – I was convinced that the underlying pattern was the same: a particular model or paradigm would be born, flourish for a while and then find itself replaced by something completely different. All that was left, therefore, was to understand a little more about the creative processes which brought new paradigms into being and determine what limitations, if any, these processes might have: two questions which I very quickly realised were closely related. For however momentous a change of paradigm might be in terms of its consequences, as illustrated by the examples of both Copernicus and Lavoisier, what those who bring these changes about actually do may well be very small.

Yes, the removal of the earth and its inhabitants from the centre of God’s creation had a profound effect on how we were now forced to think about ourselves; but it didn’t introduce any new concepts or involve the creation of any new methods or techniques. Yes, Copernicus had to generate hundreds of calculations to demonstrate that his new heliocentric model of the solar system more accurately predicted the position of the planets than the old geocentric model. But this was just the simple application of a branch of mathematics that had been known and understood since the 3^rd century BC.

Similarly, Lavoisier’s replacement of the old transformational paradigm in chemistry with the new synthetical paradigm may have opened up a whole new world of scientific possibilities, but the synthetical paradigm wasn’t, in itself, new. In fact, we use it every day in the kitchen whenever we take a set of ingredients and combine them to produce a different recipe. Even the idea that there is a set of fundamental elements which are the building blocks of this synthesis wasn’t new. The concept of the atom was first introduced by the Greek philosopher, Democritus, in the 4^th century BC. It was then taken up by Epicurus, whose empiricist philosophy was strongly championed by Robert Boyle, thereby making the concept of the atom known to the modern world.

Even that massive transformation in the way in which we think which marked the transition from the medieval to the modern era during the 16^th and 17^th centuries didn’t actually introduce anything new. After all, the concept of causality, which replaced the concepts of sympathy and antipathy as the primary form of connection between objects in the physical universe, is not only central to our everyday lives, but is also what Kant called a category of thought, which is to say part of the way in which our minds work, such that the proposition that ‘everything that happens has a cause’ is not just a law of nature but a characteristic of any world of which we could conceive.

For those who have not read Kant and need a little help with this most fundamental of Kantian concepts, imagine, if you will, a world in which things just pop into existence, ex nihilo, without anyone or anything causing this to happen. By definition, we would call such events miracles, being beyond our comprehension, not because the universe doesn’t produce things  ex nihilo – we could never know whether it did or not – but because we could never make sense of it. Our brains simply don’t work that way.

The problem, of course, is that our brains also rebel against this. The idea that reality is not the way it is because it is reality, but because it is the way in which our minds both perceive it and conceive of it is too much for most people to take, especially those with a down-to-earth, common sense approach to life. It is also why, of all the paradigm shifts and intellectual revolutions that have occurred during our history, that wrought by Kant in philosophy is not only the least understood but has almost certainly gained the least traction. Even within philosophy itself, in fact, it is still not widely or fully accepted. Indeed, one gets the impression that most people don’t even want to entertain it. For the idea that everything in the universe about which we are most certain – from the fundamental laws of logic and the axioms of mathematics to our concepts and, indeed, perceptions of space and time – are not derived from the universe, itself, but emanate from ourselves, and that the universe, as it exists in itself, may not therefore be quite as we imagine it, is so mind-boggling that, if you think about it for long enough, it can almost send you mad. I know because I have been there.

In the context of this essay, it is somewhat fortunate, therefore, that I do not actually have to convince the reader of the soundness of Kant’s arguments, at least not in the way I felt obliged to do so in the context my thesis itself. For while I am myself convinced that our inability to think outside our basic programming or operating system – as one might think of Kant’s categories of thought – determines the limits of our creativity, making it just as impossible for us to formulate a scientific theory which posits the creation of objects ex nihilo as it would be to create a musical form without a temporal dimension, there is actually a much simpler argument which more or less leads us to the same conclusion. For as illustrated by the examples of Copernicus and Lavoisier above – and, indeed, every other discursive discontinuity I have ever come across – human creativity is less of a leap into the unknown than a kind of a sideways shuffle. For when an existing paradigm ceases to work for us, we no more create something out of nothing than does the phenomenal universe. What we do is look into our intellectual toolbox to see if there is some other concept we already have that we could apply in this situation. Indeed, it’s why new paradigms are so often expressed – at least initially – in the form of metaphors, which takes an idea previously applied in one context and applies it, not literally but analogously, to another.

Indeed, had I explored this idea more fully at the time, I now realise that my characterisation of creativity would not only have been more complete but would have also helped me understand much that has eluded me over the last forty-odd years. It is therefore with some regret that I now recognise that I took the wrong path, especially as I did so because I became fixated on something else: something that was just as important and from which I also gained a lot, but which I probably wouldn’t have gone anywhere near had it not been for a chance encounter with a certain Dr. Dan Dennett and his damn wasp.

3.    Dan Dennett and his Tropistic Wasp

Dan Dennett is an American philosopher who was touring Britain at that time to promote a new book, a copy of which I am fairly sure I bought in the days or weeks following our meeting but which I cannot find on any of my book shelves, which not only means that I either lost it or leant it to someone who never gave it back, but that I cannot give you a more precise reference. Not that it actually matters, in that the passage to which I shall refer shortly so shocked me when I first encountered it that it is indelibly engrained in my memory.

It happened at one of the regular meetings of my university’s Philosophy Society, which took place around a dozen times a year and usually involved a paper given by a guest speaker, followed by an open debate among those attending, after which members of the philosophy department, including postgraduate students, would take the guest speaker out to dinner. The evening on which Dan Dennett came to give a reading from his new book, however, was one of the few occasions on which I actually declined the dinner invitation, having completely lost my appetite, both for food and the company of my colleagues. For within about five or ten minutes of Dr. Dennett beginning his talk, I knew that I had a problem, one which is probably best illustrated by recounting Dr. Dennett’s own description of the behaviour of a particular wasp.

Because I no longer have a copy of the book, I cannot tell you which species of wasp it actually was, only that it was not one which nested in colonies. I know this because each female of the species excavated her own nest in which to lay her eggs, after which she would go out hunting for grasshoppers or locusts, which she would sting and paralyse, but not kill, so that they would remain alive and fresh in order to provide food for her offspring during their larval stage. She would then bring the paralysed grasshopper or locust back to the nest and leave it on the threshold while she first checked inside to ensure that everything was as it should be. Satisfied that all was well, she would then come outside again, retrieve her prey and drag it into the nest.

What entomologists discovered, however, was that if, during the time the mother spent checking the nest, they moved the paralysed locust a few inches away from the entrance, on coming back outside, she would drag her prey back to the entrance once more before going back inside to check the nest again. If, while she was inside, they then moved the paralysed locust once again, on coming back outside, she would repeat the process once more. And, as long they kept moving the locust, she would go on doing this indefinitely, time after time, trapped inside her own programming.

Given that I had already accepted that we, too, are limited by our programming, I therefore immediately recognised the implications this had for my own work. In fact, Dr. Dennett spelt it out for me during his talk. For his argument was that, while our programming may be more sophisticated than that of the wasp, given that all living creatures are finite organisms, determined in their behaviour by their neurophysiology, we are all, therefore, more or less tropistic in  the same way as the wasp, the difference being one of degree, not of kind. And it was in this latter point that my real difficulty lay. For if I accepted that the difference was only one of degree, such that, fundamentally, our thoughts and behaviour are still fully determined, then, in any real or meaningful sense, discursive discontinuities cannot exist and any capacity for creativity we might have is far more circumscribed than I had previously allowed. If, on the other hand, I tried to argue that the difference was actually qualitative, rather than merely quantitative, I would then have to specify in what this difference lay? And I strongly doubted that arguing that, unlike wasps, human beings have souls was going to get me awarded a Ph.D. in philosophy. In theology perhaps, but not philosophy.

I was thus caught on the horns of a dilemma, unable to win either way, unless, of course, I could think of a third option. As a result, I spent the next six months or so scouring through our collective intellectual toolbox to see what other concept we had that might serve my purpose. It was Dan Dennett’s description of the wasp, itself, however, that actually gave me the clue I needed. For when I heard him describe the way in which entomologists revealed the wasp’s tropism, I, like most of his audience, instantly underwent a change in perception. Up until then, I had viewed the wasp’s behaviour as that of a mother making provision for her offspring. The way in which she went about this was a little gruesome; but this didn’t make it any less maternal. Then, however, as she repeats herself over and over again, one’s perception changes. This isn’t a mother looking after her children any more; this is a robot. Indeed, she actually ceases to be a ‘she’ and becomes an ‘it’: a change in kind if ever there was one.

Of course, Dan Dennett would argue that this change in our perception is just that: a change in perception rather than a change in the nature of the object, and it is our fault, therefore, if we had previously been projecting some kind of anthropomorphic interpretation on to this object’s behaviour. This, however, misses the point. For even if, up until the moment of revelation, we had been wrongly interpreting the wasp’s behaviour as that of a mother looking after her unborn offspring, it is the wasp, itself, which reveals to us its true nature. What’s more, this change in our perception is both involuntary and instantaneous, strongly suggesting, therefore, that the distinction we draw between those living beings that are like us and those that are not is not the result of a process of reasoning. We don’t think about it, weigh the evidence and then decide that one living being belongs in category A while another belongs in category B. It is rather something we actually perceive in the object. And what we perceive in the case of a human mother looking after her child, or indeed a canine mother looking after her litter, is that there is someone there, what Martin Heidegger called Dasein, whereas what we perceive in the case of the tropistic wasp, or indeed any automaton, is that it is merely a machine inhabited by no one.

Nor are the implications of this change of perception limited to the moment of perception itself. For when we apprehend another as Dasein – as ‘someone there’ – implicit in this apprehension is the recognition, not just that they can see us – an ability which an automaton may also possess – but that they will reciprocally apprehend us as Dasein. For apprehending others as Dasein is an attribute of Dasein: something which only Dasein can do and which, being Dasein, we therefore must do if we, ourselves, want to be apprehended as Dasein by others, as we most certainly do.

Indeed, not being apprehended as Dasein by others whom we apprehend as Dasein stirs in us the most powerful of emotions. A good example of this is when someone allows or, indeed, forces ideology to supersede or override perception in order to see others as  racially inferior and thus not quite human. So objectionable is this that, as I have explained elsewhere, being looked down on in this way can often generate a hatred so bitter and all-consuming that it can actually destroy the lives of those who succumb to it. What’s more, because the other does not regard the object of their disdain as Dasein, they render themselves not-Dasein, with the result that we no longer regard them as Dasein, thereby creating a vicious circle of mutual denial which can easily lead to violence.

Of course it may doubted that all this does flow just from our failure to reciprocally apprehend of others as Dasein, with the result that one may suspect that other factors are involved. To demonstrate that this is not the case, however, contrast the above response with how we react when another does not apprehend us as Dasein, not for ideological reasons, but because the other is not, itself, Dasein, and is therefore incapable of apprehending us as such. A good example of this is the way we feel when watching sci-fi films in which the enemies of the human protagonists are robots or automata, to which our typical response is not hatred but fear. This is because our apprehension of another as not being able to apprehend us as Dasein, has the further implication that they will not therefore be constrained in their behaviour towards us in the way in which others whom we do apprehend as Dasein would be.

This is because the apprehension of another as Dasein has yet further implications for us, not the least of which is how we are constrained to treat them. For knowing that another is able to see us in the same way we see them instantly raises the question as to how we want to be seen, the answer to which, of course, is ‘favourably’. This then leads us to examine our behaviour and look at ourselves in the same way that others see us, with the result that acting well towards others and winning their approbation becomes a major issue for us. It is not just that we do not want to be seen as acting dishonestly or with moral disregard for others, it is rather that we do not want to actually be someone who acts in this way, with the further consequence that we actually get angry with ourselves if we do something shameful or otherwise let ourselves down even when we are on our own.

With all of these implications, both emotional and moral, flowing from our perception of others as either belonging to the category of Dasein or not as the case may be, the idea that the distinction between the two, along with our ability to make this distinction, should merely be a matter of degree, rather than a fundamental difference in kind, which this distinction itself expresses, thus seems almost laughable. What made me even more certain of this when writing it, however, was the realisation that both the modification of our behaviour as a result of our apprehension of others as Dasein and our shift to a new paradigm when we realise that we have been thinking about something in the wrong way are based upon a common foundation. For they both rely on an extraordinary ability we have to stand back from ourselves and view ourselves critically. And it is precisely this, or rather the consciousness on which it is based, that the tropistic wasp so clearly lacks and which causes us to say of it that there is no one there.

4.    Our Incorrigible Misconception of the Nature of Truth

In fact, so excited was I by this discovery and the fact that I was also fairly certain that no one had ever put these two things – creativity and morality – together before, that I even changed the title of the thesis to reflect this coupling, certain as I also was that this would prove to be my clinching argument.

Not, of course, that it actually turned out that way, not least because, given this latest twist in my already meandering philosophical journey, I don’t think that any of the three examiners at my viva voce were completely sure what it was I was trying to prove, let alone whether I’d actually proved it. They certainly didn’t think that I had proved the thesis which I had originally set out to prove: that all major creative developments involve the creation of a new language in which to express them. Indeed, one of the examiners thought that my dissertation, in itself, proved the opposite. For by bringing together the ideas of Kant, Foucault, Kuhn and Heidegger in a way he thought was interesting, original and hence creative, what I’d actually demonstrated in his view was that, while revolutionary changes in direction may occasionally occur in both the sciences and the arts, creativity is more often than not a matter of synthesis.

Even more importantly, none of the examiners thought that I had actually proved Dan Dennett wrong. For while we may regard those who possess consciousness as belonging to a different order of being, and while this consciousness may be the basis of our critical self-awareness, both with respect to creative problem solving and our behaviour towards others, it is nevertheless just another layer of programming laid down in the synaptic pathways of our brains.

In fact, at one point in the discussion, when it was becoming fairly obvious that I was losing the argument, I really thought they were going to fail me, with the result that it actually came as something of a relief when, in his summary, the chairman of the panel said that, for all their criticisms, the panel felt that, all in all, the work I had produced was a highly commendable effort to reconcile the irreconcilable, by which he meant, of course, these two completely different ways we have of perceiving ourselves: one from the inside, from which perspective we experience ourselves as thinking, feeling, daydreaming etc.; the other from the outside, from which less privileged perspective all we see is the firing of neurons within our brains, giving us two different descriptions of what we believe to be one and the same thing but which have absolutely nothing in common.

Much as I was relieved to be given this somewhat backhanded compliment, however, I don’t think I ever thought that reconciling these two different descriptions of ourselves was what I was actually trying to do. After all, what would such a reconciliation even look like? Nor was I trying to do what Kant did, which was to simply place these two phenomena in two separate phenomenal worlds, both of which are at least partly constructs of our own minds. After all, had I wanted to do this, I could have just slapped a copy of Kant’s collected works on the table and said, ‘There’s your answer!’ The problem, however, was that while I was fairly sure that what I was trying to say was far less fundamental and far-reaching than Kant, its precise articulation remained stubbornly out of reach.

In fact, over the intervening years, my sense of failure at not having made a more coherent and convincing contribution to the intellectual space in which I have lived for most of my life on the one occasion I was given the chance to do so has kept me coming back to this subject time and time again and has even prompted me to include some aspects of it in some of the more recent pieces I have written for this blog. Much to my surprise, moreover, this doggedness may have finally borne some fruit. For in one or two of my more recent essays I have begun to sense the dawning of a question I now feel I should have asked all those years ago, both in my thesis itself and of my examiners, and which, inchoate though it still is, might yet yield the answer which has eluded me for so long.

Stated as plainly as possible, this question is: ‘Why, of the two ways we have of perceiving ourselves, do we think that one is more real than the other?’ For it is this belief, of course, that is at the heart of Dan Dennett’s reductionist materialism: that what we experience as thinking, feeling, daydreaming etc., is just our way of internally perceiving what is going on, but that what is really going on is the firing of neurons. But why do we believe this?

Part of the answer, of course, is that we not only think of our experience of ourselves as subjective but as essentially unknowable by others. No one else, for instance, can feel the pain I am currently experiencing in my left knee or know how bad it is. With the right equipment, however, anyone could observe both the inflammation in and around the joint and the effect this inflammation is having on my pain receptors. Whereas my pain is just my body’s way of letting me know that there is something wrong with my knee, it is these latter observations of what is actually going on that we therefore regard as the objective truth.

Not only does this grossly misrepresent the language in which we express and share our experiences, however – a subject to which I shall return later – but it also fails to recognise that our everyday use of the term ‘objective truth’, or indeed just ‘truth’, is a little misleading. This is because most people believe that it is always and only used to mean a state of correspondence between a statement about the world and a state within the world. If I say, for instance, that, among other pieces of furniture in my living room, there is one sofa and one armchair, and you go into my living room and see that it contains exactly one sofa and one armchair, you will probably conclude, therefore, that what I said was true, in that my statement corresponds to what is actually the case.

The problem with this correspondence model of truth, however, is that we are not often in a position to make this kind of comparison and when we are, as in the above example, the question at issue is usually fairly trivial. More complex questions of truth are not usually quite as susceptible to being determined in this way.

Take, for instance, a trial in a court of law, where establishing the truth would seem to play a crucial role in determining the right outcome for the case. However, it is not quite as simple as that, not least because, if a case has come to trial, it is unlikely that anyone actually saw the accused commit the crime. And even if there is a witness, unless he or she actually filmed the offence being committed, the jury still cannot see for themselves the correspondence between the witness’ statement and what actually happened, with the result that the criterion of truth most often applied to witness statements is that of credibility.

Of course, there may also be physical evidence, such as fingerprints, which represent another form of correspondence: not the correspondence that exists between a statement and a state in the world, but rather a correspondence between things. Even in the case of fingerprints, however, the matching of which is highly reliable, there may be a perfectly innocent explanation as to why the accused’s ‘dabs’ should have been found at the crime scene. The result is that, while juries are asked to form an opinion as to the truth of the matter, the model of truth they apply, whether they recognise this or not, is not correspondence but consistency, in that what they decide is which version of events – that presented by the prosecution or that offered by the defence – they think is most consistent with all the available evidence.

And the same is true with respect to science. For although we mostly think of science as being based on empirical evidence in the form of observations and measurements etc., the collecting of this data, as I observed earlier, is only one part of the scientific process, and is often the most trivial part. The more difficult part is the formulation of a theory to explain the data. And the model of truth we employ in this regard is again that of consistency, especially when dealing with competing theories, when, as in a court of law, the question we have to ask ourselves is again which theory is most consistent with all the available evidence.

When applied within science, however, this consistency paradigm of truth is not confined merely to the relationship between a theory and the data which may or may not support it. For any new theory we formulate must also be consistent with every other scientific theory we hold to be true, with the result that unification theories, such as James Clark Maxwell’s classical theory of electromagnetic radiation, which was the first to describe electricity, magnetism and light as different manifestations of the same phenomenon, are usually regarded as being among science’s highest achievements.

It is also why the 17^th century view of science as a gradually accreted edifice is at least partly correct. For science does build upon itself. It is just that most of the building blocks are not immutable laws, but far less trustworthy theories, which, in some cases, are held to be true, at least in part, because they are consistent with some other theory which is held to be true and which may or may not be any more firmly grounded. Either way, this then creates a dependency. For if a theory is held to be true largely because it is consistent with another theory that is held to be true, should that other theory be proven false, the first theory will also be brought into question, as will any technologies based on it.

Take, for example, the technologies which allow others to directly observe my injured knee – X-ray machines in the case of the knee itself; MRI scanners in the case of my central nervous system – both of which depend on various scientific theories, both to explain how the technologies, themselves, work, and to explain why we should believe their outputs to be true representations of my various body parts. If any of these underlying theories were proven false, therefore, this would then raise the question as to how sure we would be that the images obtained using these technologies were still valid.

Of course, some may argue that this couldn’t happen for the simple reason that, if the underlying theories were false, then the technologies wouldn’t work. The fallacy of this argument quickly becomes apparent, however, if one considers that the same reasoning was almost certainly applied to the theories behind medieval medicine, which must have worked some of the time – or, at least, given that impression – or physicians would never have been paid or employed in the first place. The fact that a technology works – or at least seems to work – does not therefore prove that the theory upon which it is supposedly based is true.

Even more importantly, however, the theoretical basis of the technology, whether it has been proven false or not, also raises the question as to which paradigm of truth we should apply to the technology’s outputs, in this case X-ray images. For far from allowing others to ‘directly observe my injured knee’, as I stated above – which would have made the relationship between the X-ray and my knee one of correspondence – the interpretation of the slightly darker area around the joint as an area of inflammation is actually based on a huge amount of theoretical knowledge, covering such matters as the way in which subatomic particles are emitted by certain radioactive elements, how they behave when passing through materials of different density, and the effect they have upon materials that are photosensitive. A radiologist does not need to personally possess all this knowledge to interpret the dark area on the image as an area of inflammation, but he will have been taught at some point that this is the best interpretation consistent with everything we know about human physiology and theoretical physics.

Thus, we come back to consistency. Consistency in this case, however, is not the consistency of a statement with the evidence, or the consistency of one theory with another, but the consistency of a statement – that this dark area indicates an area of inflammation – with all the relevant theoretical knowledge. And it is for this reason that none of the theories underlying X-ray and MRI technologies are likely to be proven false any time soon: not because the technologies work, but because the theories themselves are part of a unified belief system which, for the most part, is internally consistent, such that, even if we were to discover that one or more of the theories was found to have more exceptions to it than is generally regarded as acceptable, we would still not reject it. We would either formulate additional, subsidiary theories to explain the anomalies and exceptions or – if this proved impossible – we would simply leave it as an outstanding problem to be solved in future, in the way in which the anomalous orbit of the planet Mercury – which does not behave in accordance with Newton’s theory of gravity – was simply left for hundreds of years until Einstein came along with a new theory, based on a different paradigm, to fix the problem. Except he didn’t. For the orbit of the planet Mercury does not conform to Einstein’s theory either.

In fact, according to the philosopher of science, Paul Feyerabend, science is so riddled with such unresolved discrepancies that many of its most fundamental theories should have been discarded years ago. The problem, however, is not just that no one has yet come along with new paradigms which would eliminate the anomalies, but that any new paradigm is likely to be inconsistent with the rest of our unified scientific belief system, with the result that it could cause the whole system to collapse in the same way that the medieval belief system collapsed: something which, having invested so much in it, we simply could not allow. So, imperfect and full of holes as the system is, we keep on shoring it up, using work-arounds and patches to get as close to the empirical evidence as we possibly can while pretending that nothing is wrong. 

5.    Recognitional & Metaphorical Truth

My purpose in examining the nature of scientific truth in this way, however, was not merely to disabuse the reader of the naïve belief most of us have that our scientific description of the universe, including my left knee, corresponds to the way the universe is in itself, but also to compare the model of truth upon which science actually rests, i.e. consistency, with the model of truth we implicitly apply to statements about our personal experience. For that we do, indeed, apply a model of truth to such statements is clear from the fact that, all things being equal, we tend to believe people when they tell us that they have a pain in their left knee.

Sometimes, of course, this is based on external evidence. If we ask someone what’s wrong when we see them wincing every time they get up out of a chair and they tell us that they have hurt their knee, assuming that they have no reason to lie, we generally take this to be a statement of the truth, in that it is consistent with what we have been witnessing. In this instance, therefore, we are again applying the consistency paradigm of truth.

However, there is another paradigm we use in this context which one might call the ‘recognitional’ paradigm of truth. In this instance, the injured person says that he keeps getting a ‘sharp’ pain to the inside front of his knee, especially when he puts any lateral weight on it. You recognise his description of the pain as something you too have experienced in the past and so you respond by saying: ‘Yes, I’ve experienced that too. Even if you don’t remember, you’ve probably twisted your knee at some point, straining the lateral collateral ligament. My doctor told me to simply keep the knee as straight as possible for a while, until the inflammation receded’.

If this strikes a chord, it is because we use this recognitional paradigm of truth all the time when talking about our experiences, from physical sensations to a whole range of emotions: something we are only able to do, however, as a result of two conditions being fulfilled.

The first of these is that we all have the same experiences. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t have a common experiential language or, indeed, an experiential language at all. For languages only develop when people have things in common to talk about. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t know what the words spoken by another referred to. Suppose, for instance, that there are people who do not feel pain. You tell one of them that you have a pain in your left knee and he says: ‘Pain, what’s that?’ The mere fact that, except in very exceptional circumstance, this doesn’t happen and that people are able to share and talk about their experiences implies, therefore, that we do all have the same experiences.

The second condition, however, is a little more tricky, not because it hasn’t been met – because we know that it has, otherwise we would not have a common experiential language – but because it is a lot more difficult to explain how this is so. This is because the second condition is that we have a way of developing this experiential language that ensures that everyone uses the same words to refer to the same experiences.

Not, of course, that this is particularly unusual. For it is a necessary condition of any language that everyone uses the same words to refer to the same things. If they didn’t, communication would fail and the language would breakdown. This is why most languages are self-regulating or auto-corrective. If I go into a greengrocer’s shop with the intention of buying four oranges, for instance, but ask for five apples, the chances are that what I intended to communicate will not have been conveyed, a fact which will quickly become apparent when the greengrocer starts putting five apples into a bag. ‘No,’ I say, ‘I want apples’, pointing at a pile of oranges. ‘Those?’ the greengrocer asks, to which I nod my assent. ‘Those aren’t apples,’ he goes on, ‘those are oranges’. ‘Ah,’ I say, thanking him for correcting my mistake, which not only enables communication between us to occur but actually maintains the integrity of the language.

The problem in the case of our experiential language, however, is that it can neither be created nor auto-corrected through ostensive definition, which is to say by pointing. In addition to us all sharing the same experiences, in teaching and learning our experiential language, therefore, we also rely on two further factors which turn this otherwise impossible task into what is merely a life-long journey, the first of which is the often overlooked but crucial fact that we don’t just communicate in words. We say as much through our behaviour and our facial and bodily expressions as we do through language. What’s more, most of us are fairly good at reading each other in this respect. We see someone wrinkle their nose at a bad smell and because we smell the same thing and have the same response we know exactly what they are experiencing. We may even shake our heads at each other in agreement. The problem, however, is how to turn this into language. For while this may not be particularly difficult with respect to smells – we can simply hold our noses and say ‘Pooh’ – it is a lot more difficult to mime anxiety or grief. 

In fact, even today, when we already have a fully developed language of the emotions in place, we are not very good at learning it. Few people attain proficiency while many remain almost wholly inarticulate in this regard. The reason for this is that attaining proficiency is determined by three main factors: an interest in understanding ourselves, which partly arises as a result of having already attained some level of self-understanding; a willingness to be honest with ourselves rather than hide behind clichés and superficial answers; and the existence of an already proficient linguistic community which will not only correct us when we make mistakes using the language, but will encourage us both to be honest with ourselves and continue upon our life-long journey towards self-knowledge.

In fact, along with having the same experiences and being able to communicate non-verbally, having someone who is already proficient in the language to help us express ourselves is the third key factor in enabling us to learn the language at all: a requirement that is so obviously circular that it thus raises the question as to how the language developed in the first place, before this linguistic community was formed.

The answer, of course, is that both the language and the linguistic community must have evolved together over time, starting from what was probably a very low base, which may, indeed, have consisted in little more than holding our noses and saying ‘Pooh!’ By pressing the limits of this language, however, it seems that we were somehow able to develop it into something much more expressive and sophisticated. The question is how? How did we do this? Or rather, how do we do this? For if the language evolved over time, the chances are that it is still evolving and that,  whether or not we are explicitly aware of it, we have all probably had some experience of it. Indeed, it is probably quite commonplace.

Imagine, for instance, that you are in a situation in which you want to say something but you are not quite sure what it is. You try saying it in a number of different ways but none of them seem quite right. What’s more, the person you are talking to clearly doesn’t understand what you are trying to tell him either. He looks at you with a totally blank expression, which makes you feel even more frustrated. In fact, you are almost on the point of giving up when you decide to give it one last try. ‘Look,’ you say, ‘think of it like this…’ and, in that moment, not only do you, yourself, feel that you may have finally nailed it, but you start to see a flicker of recognition on the other person’s face. ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘I’d never thought about it before, but now that you put it like that, I think I know what you mean!’

Because this experience really is quite commonplace, it is easy to overlook its significance. But it is actually quite extraordinary. For by pressing the limits of what we are currently able to say, we not only manage to say – and hence think – something we had not been able to say or think before, but we are able to get someone else to think something they had not been able to think before. In fact, it is only when we get someone else to ‘see’ what it is we are trying to say that we actually know that it makes sense and that we are not totally crazy.

If gaining the recognition of another is thus a condition of this kind of linguistic development – in that, without this recognition, there would be no communication and the development would be stillborn – it is also a condition of the truth of what is being said or, at least, of its coherence or sensibleness, in that, if it did not make sense, the other would not recognise it. Thus, in part, what we have here is another example of the recognitional paradigm of truth. Unlike my earlier example, however, in which, based on our common experiential language, we merely recognised the truth of someone’s else description of a pain we too have experienced, this new example has an additional dimension. For in the previous example, we were effectively matching descriptions: the other’s description of his pain compared to the description we would have given if asked to describe our pain. As in the case of both correspondence and consistency, therefore, truth, under this application of the recognitional paradigm, is a relationship: not this time between a statement about the world and a state in the world, but between two statements. In this new example, however, the hearer of what we are trying to say would not have been able to state what this was until he recognised it. He is not, therefore, comparing statements. What he is actually doing is participating in a creative act, which is not a relationship at all but an event.

In a short essay entitled ‘On the Essence of Truth’, Martin Heidegger, in fact, specifically describes truth in this sense as something that happens between two or more people, one of whom is a speaker or writer who is struggling to say something which is at the limit of what he is able to express, while the other or others are readers or listeners who have not thought about this area of human experience before, and for whom it is therefore entirely new, but who, on hearing what the speaker has to say about it, recognise both the experience itself and the truth of what they are being told, thereby bringing this truth into the realm of their shared language and making it possible for them to talk about it.

While this would therefore seem to perfectly accord with what Kant said about genius, what it is also important to note about Heidegger’s description, however, is that while ‘On the Essence of Truth’ was originally published in a collection of four essays which are largely focused on the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin – a poet who is generally recognised as one of the great geniuses of German Romanticism – the creation of truth as an aspect of this communal development of the language is not confined merely to those rare utterances of genius we all recognise as such. For, if it was so, language would take so long to develop that it would be static most of the time and its discontinuous leaps would certainly not be commonplace. More to the point, for language to develop in this way, the whole linguistic community has to be more or less in accord, as it is, for instance, whenever an audience laughs in unison at a comedian’s joke while telling each other that it’s so true. Indeed, laughter is one of the most common ways we have of expressing the pleasure we take in this kind of recognition, even if the truth the joke reveals is so embarrassing that it causes us to hide our faces behind our hands, thereby both acknowledging it to be true while simultaneously attempting to deny our acknowledgement.

Not, of course, that this explains how any of this happens. Nor does it explain why it continues to happen rather than the language becoming fixed and stable. Is it because the world we inhabit is continually changing, thereby exposing us to new experiences for which we have to find new forms of expression? Or is it because language, itself, eventually becomes tired and hackneyed and has to be refreshed? Or is it, perhaps, a little of both, as T.S. Eliot seems to suggest in the following passage from ‘Four Quartets’, in which, on the subject of writing poetry, he writes that every new attempt…

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer

By strength and submission, has already been discovered

Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope

To emulate—but there is no competition—

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

What I have always found remarkable about this passage is the sheer level of gloom Eliot seems to have derived from writing poetry, which is in marked contrast to the level of joy Heidegger clearly derived from reading Hölderlin. Not, of course, that this is entirely surprising. For it may simply be a reflection of the essential difference between reading and writing, in that readers are highly unlikely to feel anguish or despair simply because they fail to understand a particular passage in a poem by a favourite poet, especially if they are reading it for the first time. Nor is their failure to understand one passage likely to spoil the pleasure they get from reading other passages where they and the poet are more on the same wave length. For a writer struggling to articulate that which remains stubbornly out of reach, however, there is always the fear that his meagre efforts may fail to convey what he is trying to say, thereby leaving his audience perplexed or even questioning his sanity.

In the context of the current essay, what is also quite remarkable about this passage is the way in which it implicitly differentiates between experiential truths – in this case the experience of trying to write something which continually eludes one’s grasp – and the truths of science, for instance. For whereas scientific truths only have to be discovered once and are then available to everyone for all time, the business of articulating what it like to be a human being has to be repeated in every generation, not only because writers of previous generations may no longer speak to us, their concerns not being ours, but because it is only by trying to articulate these truths ourselves that we truly come to possess them.

The most remarkable thing about this passage, however, is not something Eliot actually says, but something he does. For while it may not be immediately apparent – it being deceptively simple – in talking about trying to get the better of words in order say something we had not been able to say before, and describing this as ‘a raid on the inarticulate’, he actually shows us how we do it. This is because our primary use of the word ‘inarticulate’ is as an adjective. We say that someone is inarticulate when they are not good at putting things into words. By placing a definite article in front of it, however, and talking about ‘the inarticulate’, Eliot turns it into a noun, which, in conjunction with the word ‘raid’, actually becomes the name of a place, in that only places, lands or realms can be raided. What’s more, by simply removing the negative prefix ‘in’, the word ‘inarticulate’ implicitly refers to its opposite, thereby implying the existence of two realms: the realm of all the things that can be said and the realm of all the things that can’t, an opposition which inevitably leads us to imagine our raid upon the latter as a raid upon some foreign land from which we steal some inarticulable treasure, which we then bring back into the realm of the articulate so that we may then speak of it.

Simply by placing a definite article in front of what is primarily an adjective, Eliot thus creates an immensely powerful metaphor: one, moreover, which perfectly expresses what he was trying to convey because we, for our part, instantly ‘get it’, even without my heavy-handed exposition. Indeed, my main purpose in providing this exposition was not because I thought it was needed in order to get others to understand what Eliot is saying, but rather in order to reveal how he actually achieves this little act of creative genius: not by creating something out of nothing, but by pressings the existing language into new service in a way very similar to that which Lavoisier employed when he took existing concepts out of our intellectual toolbox and repurposed them to provide him with a new way of talking and thinking about the basic building blocks of the material universe.

6.    The Dangers Inherent in an Overly Restrictive Definition of Truth

Although I hope that I have thus given at least some credence to Heidegger’s definition of truth as something that happens which brings truth into being, what I am not suggesting, of course, is that we use this definition to replace our existing paradigms of truth, i.e. correspondence and consistency. Even less am I suggesting that truth is in any sense personal, as some people seem to suggest when they talk about ‘their’ truth. Indeed, the idea that one could have a personal truth makes about as much sense as the idea that one could have a private language, not least because talking about truth as an event, as I also hope I have made clear, is really just another way of talking about the development of language within a linguistic community, which only happens, of course, when it works, when a writer uses language to say something new which his audience then recognises as the truth, making the audience the arbiters of both the truth and this new linguistic development.

My point is rather the very simple one that there is more than one valid paradigm of truth and that we need to understand which paradigm we are using in any given context in order to ensure that we are using it appropriately. If I am building a bridge, for instance, I want my design engineer to use engineering principles which have proven themselves sound over hundreds of years rather than a clever metaphor, no matter how apposite the metaphor may be. If I want to know what it’s like to be a human being, however, I’d much rather listen to a poet or comedian than to a neurophysiologist. The problem is that throughout most of our history, not only have we failed to distinguish between different paradigms of truth, but have often, as a consequence, applied the wrong paradigm in the wrong context.

A perfect example of this, to which I referred earlier, is the Roman Catholic Church’s denial of the empirical and mathematical evidence supporting Copernicus’ heliocentric model of the solar system, and its insistence, instead, on what might be regarded as the metaphorical truth of humanity’s centrality in God’s creation, something to which I shall return shortly.

Having literally removed ourselves from the centre of the universe, however, we then proceeded to remove ourselves morally from the universe altogether by denying the truth of that which makes us unique – our consciousness, creativity and moral awareness – insisting instead that, in reality, we are fundamentally no different from Dan Dennett’s tropistic wasp. By dehumanising ourselves in this way and depicting ourselves as mere biological robots, like millions of other species, we thus no longer saw ourselves as Dasein and could consequently behave towards ourselves without moral restraint, with the result that, during the 20^th century, we were able to murder more than a hundred million people in concentration camps around the world.

Nor is this the limit to the violence we have wrought upon ourselves by insisting that there is only one kind of truth. For by building modern culture on the reductionist materialism to which this inevitably gave rise, we have undermined and, in many cases, completely forgotten the metaphorical truths we had accumulated in our long history of myth-making and story-telling, in which the values and collective wisdom of our historical culture were distilled. This culture, which combined the classical mythology of the Greco-Roman world, the prescriptive morality of Judaism and the redemptive promise of Christianity, along with a whole panoply of pagan myths, has gradually been eroded not just because, by believing that there is only one kind of truth, we no longer believe that metaphorical truths are actually true, but because, in order to defend itself against this inexorable trend, Christianity, which was at the core of this culture, foolishly decided to go along with it by denying that its own truths were actually metaphorical.

In order to see the truth of this, as well as to understand both its contradictory nature and self-destructive consequences, consider once again the Judaeo-Christian account of creation, in which the fashioning of human beings in God’s own image and our endowment with consciousness was the culmination of God’s labours, making us quite clearly the centre of His entire project, which, for the pre-Copernican mind, must have been a fairly terrifying thought. For while it placed mankind in a position of importance, to be the only living beings with self-awareness while also being the focus of God’s attention would have given anybody the heebie-jeebies, especially as being the only creatures able to make judgments about how we behave, rather than simply acting on instinct, the pressure on us to behave well would have been overwhelming.

Looked at in this light, the Judaeo-Christian creation myth is thus not really about creation at all; it’s about us and our relationship to the creator and hence His creation, with all the responsibility for its stewardship which this entails. Indeed, had the Irish comedian Dave Allen ever told this joke, he’d have had us all simultaneously laughing and weeping at the absolutely intolerable position in which God placed us. And it is in this, indeed, that the truth of the story lies. What’s more, it may even have been why some members of the Roman Catholic Church chose to oppose the Copernican revolution in the 16^th century. For if they really understood the story’s implications, which I am fairly sure that some of them did, they would have known that as a side effect of removing human beings from the centre of the universe and placing us on the third planet orbiting our sun, Copernicus was also telling us that we were not that important, that what we did didn’t really matter that much, and that we could therefore do more or less whatever we liked.

Although some churchmen would have understood this, however, I am also fairly certain that this was not the actual reason why the Church opposed Copernicus’ heliocentric model. For had this been the reason, they surely would have known that insisting that the Judaeo-Christian creation myth was literally true – in the face of all empirical and mathematical evidence to the contrary – was about the worse strategy they could have employed. A far better option, indeed, would have been to have congratulated Copernicus on correctly locating the earth in relation to the sun and the other planets, but to have maintained that the fundamental truth contained in the ancient Hebrew texts, that God created the earth as a home for those he created in his own image, remained unchanged. In this way, they would have conceded the literal truth to Copernicus while maintaining the metaphorical truth of the biblical text. The very fact that they insisted that the story was literally true, therefore, strongly suggests that they did not make this distinction. And if they did not make this distinction, it is almost certainly because they only had one paradigm of the truth, with the result that while it may have been the metaphorical truth of the story they wanted to maintain, it was its literal truth they were forced to defend.

Indeed, one might even describe this as Christianity’s great paradox: that a religion based on a collection of canonical texts, most of which are made up of stories, parables, poems, prophesies and songs, almost none of which can be regarded as literally true, nevertheless found itself forced to argue that that is what they actually were. For in a world in which there was only one paradigm of truth, to not claim that the Bible was true in this sense would have been to concede utter defeat. As the scientific discoveries of the post-medieval era gradually chipped away at what literal truth the Church could still cling to, however, it merely condemned itself to a gradual decline, with the further sorry consequence that that vast store of metaphorical truth upon which churchmen of all denominations have crafted sermons for hundreds of years, helping to guide their congregations through the vicissitudes of life, has also been steadily expunged from our collective unconscious, to be replaced in large part, one suspects, by the metaphorical emptiness of Hollywood, with its constant outpouring of dystopian fantasies and end-of-the-world disasters, all of them portending our incipient demise.

Nor is even this the end of the destructiveness which our to failure to recognise metaphorical truth and our consequent embrace of reductionist materialism continues to wreak upon us. For with nothing to live for beyond the material benefits which our hugely successful scientific culture has admittedly brought us, our nihilism is once again taking us to the brink of nuclear annihilation, the consequence of which may not just be that all consciousness is removed from the earth, such that no one will ever again contemplate its magnificent beauty, but that all consciousness is removed from the universe. For while, on the basis of the Drake Equation, scientists speculate that there may be billions of planets capable of supporting sentient life forms in our galaxy alone, as I have argued elsewhere, one only has to tweak the parameters of this equation a little to turn those billions into just one, especially when one considers just how extraordinary our consciousness is. For as we can see all around us here on earth, not all life forms need to develop consciousness in order to thrive. In fact, there are millions of successful species that have not evolved beyond the level of Dan Dennett’s wasp and only one that has evolved to be like us: us. And what is true with respect to the earth might also be true with respect to the universe, with result that if, as a consequence of our lack of reverence for ourselves, we end up destroying ourselves, we may not simply be removing consciousness from the earth, we may, in fact, be removing it from all existence.

But what of God? you ask. He would still be there to look down upon his creation, even without the continued existence of those for whom He created it, or at least He would be if God, Himself, of course, were not also a metaphor: one which we created, not just so that we would not be alone in the universe, the only conscious beings, but to express the limits of our knowledge and understanding. For we know that we do not know how or why the universe was created and that, for us, such things are essentially unknowable. Believing, however, that someone must know, we posit His existence. In doing so, however, we also know that any being so fundamentally different from us that He knows the answers to these questions must also be essentially unknowable, with the result that God both fills the void beyond our knowledge and makes it all the more stark.

Preferring not to face this void, we therefore pretend that it is not there, that Kant was wrong and there are no limits to our knowledge and understanding. And to prove it, we have consequently rebuilt the universe on the basis of what we do know and understand and tell ourselves that this is all there is, that our scientific reconstruction is the only truth. In our ignorance, arrogance and folly, however, we include ourselves as part of this universe and thus deny what we are and what is so unique and precious about us.