Dethroning the Truth

 

Any number of restaurants and cafes claim to serve the “World’s Best Coffee,” but we can all agree that this judgment about the ‘best coffee’ is completely subjective. Indian coffee House at College Street? Coffee House at Central Avenue? Barista ? Jadavpur university’s canteen-coffee? Mrs. Magpie—the most insta-friendlyCafe? StarBucks?  Sienna Café with delicious coffee ? And our favourite Wise Owl ?  Paris Café—with French elegance, or the neighborhood shop around the corner and last but not the least our own kitchen-coffee? It is all a matter of personal preference. The tiny cute and colourful café, the brewed flavoured coffee, the cosy space to bring book or laptop in a comfortable ambience is tempting enough to ditch office or college instantly for an instant coffee. A hit meeting place for intellectuals, artists and students. 

But it is hard to grasp the truth about the coffee, where consumer’s truth is concerned.  There is so much biasness and hidden drives that it has become increasingly difficult to know where to place your trust. Companies and brands have sold their truth–– “Buy our product because this is the best’’. Marketers run repetitive ads across all platforms. As a result, they are seen so frequently that people become familiar with them, consequently lead them to buy their product. But today, this notion has a profound impact on search for the “best cup of coffee in town”. This may have a subjective answer based on other people’s reviews and ratings. So truth has become the majority of the citizen’s subjective view.

The problem is how can there be assurance about the word ‘best’ when the human mind perceives, distorts and …manipulates what it wants to see, hear or decipher. The doubt continues to haunt: is there really a fact or so-called really best? Perhaps its truth might involve an agreement of a report by a majority of viewers of the facts and realities in question, but that too is difficult to concede. For heaven’s sake!! When there is no such agreement between heart and head of an individual at two different moments what can be said about two reports of two human beings? The great saying that ‘one cannot step twice into the same river’ reminds one that no two moments are same, no two leaves of a tree are same, and no two drops of water are same. Try to do that and one will become the prey of fallibility and corrigibility. Ironically such a big difference among two different moments and one looks for consensus !! unanimous decision ??

 

Sometimes when my host ask me –what do you want to have ––cold or hot? tea or coffee? with milk or without milk? with sugar or without sugar ?  I get annoyed and say ‘anything will do’. And I love the usual phrase ‘Anything will do’. The host gets bewildered and looks for the possible meaning of the expression ‘anything will do’. It may be a casual and random pick from whatever host has in her possession …. But sometimes I prefer to say ‘Everything will do’.  ‘Everything’ is more daunting, because it takes the focus away from your choice– that empowering, motivational seed vanishes from your choice. Again the host is bewildered. She is allowed to bring hot and cold-together, sugar and without sugar-together, tea and coffee-together …Oh ! Oh!.. No..No…One can make out the logical as well as empirical contradiction here intuitively.

 

 On the similar vein when one says ‘Nothing is true’, one figures out that the foundation is very fragile….radical skeptics will do so. But when one says ‘Everything is true’ the expression seems to be sinister. To say that everything is true implies everything is permitted, which again boils down to this that we are the architects of our actions, and that we must live with their consequences, whether glorious or tragic. ‘Anything’ implies choice within the limit. The host is free to serve whatever she has at her disposal. But ‘everything’ leaves her to swim in the vast ocean of alternatives.

 

A straight ruler appears bent when half-submerged in a glass of water. The logical ‘principle of non-contradiction’ ensures that the contradictory propositions ‘the ruler is straight’ and ‘the ruler is not straight’ cannot both be true at the same time, and in principle observation should settle case.  But in practice, Perception in this case cannot settle the issue.  The observable truth would seem to change as the ruler that enters the water. Optical effects resulting from refraction of light explain why the ruler appears bent but, really, are straight. Now let me ask you have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror and imagined that there is a complete different world on the other side of the glass with another version of your––virtual world? Your left hand/left eye do not match with left hand/eye, it has now become right Your right hand gloves or may be shoe of right foot cannot be lodged in the left hand  or left foot too, but are not they of the same size?

 

Wait my friends!! one knows that the “Earth rotates” is a natural phenomenon, but as a social beings one says: “Look, the sun is going down”. The truth, in an objective sense, is that we live on a planet which spins on its axis and it orbits the Sun. So in fact what one should say is “Look, the earth is spinning away from the Sun and will soon obstruct our view of it.” This may seem a pedantic point. Truth, even in science, is therefore highly contextual. What truth is varies not so much with different people, but rather with the narrative they are living by. So the story about the truth become our own story. It is a fact that our decisions about personal life-style are based on practical form of tentative knowledge rather than through an exhaustive search for truth. We cut short our budget according to our capability, capacities and choice. I can make you understand about my truth but never can make it my own. The closest we can say is this that truth is inter-subjective. Doctor can understand my pain and suffering but can never feel my pain. Pain is personal and  suffering is subjective. What is tolerable to me is terrible to you. In fact, we also cannot feel others’ pain, only can understand it, that is why the word ‘sympathy is robbed of its character and replaced by ‘empathy’.

 

I have indeed always been amazed at how far one is willing to be co-conspirators to the vast amount of so-called lies, dishonesty and deception which continuously goes on in the air. One is supposed to approach so-called truth independently and free from particular observations but, weirdly, taking away the account of the observer seems to be another blunder. The danger of taking away the observer from the domain of perception!!! The net result which is delegated is– the dethroning of truth, Perception will no longer be p-e-r-c-e-p-t-i-o-n.

 

The Global Financial Crisis, the corona pandemic, the bursting of clouds in Uttarakhand, and the war in Iraq, are familiar stories of gross deception (?) from the past and present decade. The Holocaust is another baffling case of a horrendous genocide that was permitted to take place across the continent which seemed completely oblivious to reality. And yet even today we find people who deny such an atrocity having taken place, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. The arrest of Karl Adolf Eichmann and finally executed, is another story of truth. 

 

Today one is trapped into a life overshadowed by fear, suspicion and cynicism, since this would keep one in a state of continuous tension. The expression ‘a Big Dipper up there in the sky’ by Hilary Putnam allows one to increase one’s ability to solve anomalies that beset the previous paradigm of absolute truth. Though the questions about truth cannot be left unspoken and it is worse to meet with discontent and worries. It seems amusing to say that the statement ‘fire is hot’ does not cause your brain to melt because you know that the statement is true, i.e. ‘that fire is hot’. But if one have never touched an open flame (please don’t), could not it be possible that everyone saying ‘fire is hot’ simply made one believes it? In short, “yes”. .

 

My Friends !!! some of you must have watched Shakespearean Play and read Sherlock Holmes, my favourite too. The classification of a work as fiction or non-fiction may depend heavily on weighing up of various standard and contra-standard features. The  description runs as follows: “It was the end of November, and Holmes and I sat, upon a raw and foggy night, on either side of a blazing fire in our sitting-room in Baker Street’ (The Hound of the Baskervilles: ch. 15) is not true at any real context of utterance since there is no Sherlock Holmes, and no Dr. Watson to utter the sentence. More generally, sentences that proposes to describe the world depicted in a work of fiction are often false (or at least not true) since they mis-describe the world as it actually is. For example “Holmes was a detective living at 221B Baker Street, London”, this statement sounds true, whereas a statement like “Holmes was a politician fighting election from Delhi” sounds false. “Othello was jealous”– uttered in a context that contains the actual world as its parameter, is not true since “Othello” refers to nothing there. But the very same statement is true in a fictional context that contains the fictional world of Othello as its world parameter, for in that world “Othello” refers to the jealous Venetian soldier of Shakespeare’s play. When we were in Venice, we were looking for the Verona city, famous for Romeo-Juliet story.  A 14^th century residence with a tiny balcony overlooking is courtyard is said the “Juliet’s House”. We were overwhelmed to see that place. Some works of fiction describe scenarios that are impossible both metaphysically and logically. But for many, impossible worlds, however, are like difficult pills to consume. For us, it was superb something we achieve.!!

So at the end of the day one can say ‘we do make facts, but not like, say, a baker makes bread, or a sculptor makes a statue’ (Nelson Goodman). Yes, we make facts any time, we can construct, via works of art, of music, of poetry, or of science. It has severe implications for truth in science. ‘Truth,’ he wrote, ‘far from being a solemn and severe master, is a docile and obedient servant. The scientist who supposes that he is single-mindedly dedicated to the search for truth deceives himself”… He as much diktats as much as discovers the laws. We construct truth by clustering objects according to a particular shape and giving them a name which may be called fact as such, but there is no fact as such. We do this all the time, for example, with stars and constellations.

 

Yesterday I brought a new TV and I was confused where to put it or where should it be kept so that all the members can watch it comfortably. I explore several options and finally it is kept in a particular place. A small adjustment of the item suddenly changes the so-called facts of the drawing room. Do we not always alter the face of the room in order to look differently? Exactly!!! With available ingredients do we not cook differently?

 

It is not the single thread but overlapping of many fibres that constitute the truth of a cloth. Similarly, Scientific truths are the supple and vigorous outcome of a plurality of scientific perspectives that, over the time, have meshed with one another in their (tacit, implicit and often survival-adaptive) normative pledge to produce scientific knowledge for us as humankind, which comes down to this that there is no truth, per se — just choice. It comes with multiple faces. That is why, truth is in fact the best safeguard for tolerant, open and democratic societies.

 

Yesterday there was an argument among the students in the canteen regarding some political issue and lo! friends, it turned into a street fight. It was interesting to see that the fighters finally plunge into subjectivity. What a beautiful discovery of truth!!! It is true that our desire to seek truth of events happening all around, asserting a certain insurmountable mystery of the events pushes us to go ahead.

And so I was the witness of a large road-show during election and I stood on my balcony looking down on the road but there was no privileged standpoint from where I could catch the glimpse of the show.  From different angles I tried to grasp the view still I remained dissatisfied. The only alternative remained for me to throw myself into the flux of crowd, so that I could avail the "big picture" of the universe, larger cosmic order vis-à-vis road-show. I felt sorry that I could not stand above the flow of life and claim to make sense of it from within that is the existential truth.  And there my friends!!! I perceive what kind of “impenetrable darkness” I am confronted with, how incapable am I to know the truth? Friends!!! we live in an unsettling shadowy world which is not always transparent to us, and whose rationality is not always easy to perceive…. We are suspended somewhere in an indeterminate region which "always hovers over a bottomless depth."  How to cope with such fuzzy yet a mysterious world? How to engage and represent this opaque world ….Somewhat paradoxically suggests that we cannot always find the answers we are looking for, regardless of how hard they seem, how louder they are. Lifting ours head and calling, ‘Is there anybody there?’ like the Traveller of the poem,   ‘knocking on the moonlit door’. And the traveller realized how the silence gradually spreads all over the still house, when the plunging hoofs were gone. Yes, my friends !! Truth has that shadowiness which falls through that echoing.

 

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