[MD] a Zen truth

[MarshaV]

To get back on track…



Truth and Zen 
     by T. P. Kasulis, Chairman and Professor of Philosophy at Northland College, 
            Ashland, Wisconsin


Truth and Zen Buddhism—it is difficult to imagine a pair of more abstruse, yet fascinating, topics. Rather than discuss either one of the two, I will consider them both simultaneously in hopes that, like some schoolboy magician in a chemistry laboratory, I might mix together two murky, colored concoctions and thereby effect—abracadabra---a transparent, clear solution.

To begin our analysis of truth, we need the same general framework. Aristotle points us in a classical, though still relevant, direction. In an argument for the validity of the principle of the excluded middle, Aristotle makes the well-known definition:

To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true. Metaphysics, 101 lb

This definition sets down the general principle of correspondence and captures quite well the man-on-the-street view of truth. Aristotle, however, is not the man on the street (he may be peripatetic, but he is hardly pedestrian); if we wish a clearer picture of Aristotle’s view of truth, we must look more closely at what he says in other parts of his writings. In this regard, it is helpful to see how Aristotle defines “false” in the lexiconical section of the Metaphysics (1024b). For Aristotle, there are three kinds of falseness: false as a thing, false as an account, and false as a person. The second of this triad obviously relates directly to the preceding definition, but what of the other two? A thing (pragma) may be false in either of two ways. First, a false thing is a state of affairs that does not always pertain, for example, the commensurability of the diagonal of a square with its sides (which never pertains) and my sitting down (which is not always the case). Aristotle’s point is not very clear here. Perhaps for a state of affairs to be “true” in his proposed sense, it must be true in itself without reference to any particular configuration of reality at a given time. That is, Aristotle may have in mind states of affairs that can be known to be true on a priori grounds. Fortunately, for our purposes, the other sense of the falsehood of things is more important so we will not dwell on this point any further. The second way for a thing to be false is for it to appear to us to be other than what it is really. Thus, Aristotle gives the examples of dreams and sketches, things which actually exist (as dreams and sketches) but which lead us to believe they have an existence of a different sort. Thus, dreams are confused with sense perceptions and our perception of the sketch is confused with a perception of the thing the sketch portrays. The important point here is that the confusion is based in the thing’s appearance, not in our evaluation. Hence, we are here speaking of false things, not false judgments, according to Aristotle.

What of falsehood insofar as it applies to persons? A false person is one who likes to give false accounts for their own sake and who is skilled in convincing others of their truth. Persons, Aristotle comments, are false in one of the ways that things are false, namely, they “produce a false appearance.” In one sense, the truth of persons amounts to truth-telling or honesty, but again we would do well to view this in the larger Aristotelian context. For Aristotle, a person who knows true accounts, but delights in misleading others, is one who corrupts his own character. That is, false persons present not only accounts, but also themselves, falsely. Behind this standpoint is the classical position that what one knows cannot be separated from what one is: to distort willfully the truth of one’s own knowledge is to distort the truth of one’s own personhood.

In short, even though it may be correct that Aristotle is a straightforward correspondence theorist in his formal definition of truth, it is equally clear that Aristotle wants to say more about truth than can be encompassed by that definition. Why? Why is Aristotle not satisfied with just the truth of accounts? Is there some intimate and profound relationship among the three truths? I believe there is. Aristotle is not only interested in the definition of truth, he is also interested in the acquisition of truth. In contemporary philosophy as well, we are familiar with the distinction between theories of the meaning of truth and theories of the means to acquiring truth, so Aristotle’s concerns are not really foreign to us. We should not be too hasty with this comparison, however. In our framework, we may say the question of the meaning of truth is a metaphysical one, but the issue of the means to truth falls in the domain of epistemology. Aristotle differs in that his concern for the acquisition of truth is, at least in part, metaphysical as well as epistemological. That is to say, as a metaphysician, Aristotle feels compelled not only to define truth, but also to explain metaphysically how it is that the acquisition of truth is possible. In this respect, for true accounts to be possible, there must be true things and true persons as well. If things did not generally appear as they are and if persons were not generally honest with themselves and with others, there would be no touchstone for us in making judgments about what is. In other words, a stipulation for the correspondence between what-is-said and what-is is that what-is show itself as what-it-is and that what-is-said be a genuine expression of what-one-experiences. This is the fundamentally metaphysical connection among Aristotle’s three truths.

This Aristotelian account of the metaphysics of truth will be a useful guide in our discussion of the Ch’an and Zen tradition…   




http://www.thezensite.com/ZenEssays/Philosophical/Truth_and_Zen.html