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
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