This course centers on the concept of truth in Western philosophy, covering the epistemological perspectives of Plato and Aristotle and the interpretations of post-modern philosophers.

Why is it still philosophy? What is truth?

The question of truth is a fundamental human question, and therefore a fundamental question of philosophy. In a sense, the very reason for philosophy’s existence is the problem of truth. The purpose of this lesson is to address how traditional philosophy has identified what truth is, but first, a discussion of why humans seek truth will help us understand the problem of truth. There are many reasons why humans seek truth, but the first is that humans are finite beings, and the second is that humans are mortal. Being finite means that humans are not complete beings in and of themselves, and therefore cannot fully possess truth itself. As Aristotle says, we may be engaged in an exercise of consciousness in order to know the complete truth. Also, because we are mortal beings, our anxiety about mortality leads to a disdain for the changing and a longing for the eternal. What is eternal? This is a question that has been asked since humans began to live conscious lives in both the East and the West.

Plato’s view of truth

The first philosopher in Western philosophy to provide a systematic answer to the question of truth was Plato (470 B.C.). Plato believed that truth cannot be changing or relative, because it cannot be something that varies with time and circumstance and is interpreted differently by different people. He believed that these universal truths could not belong to the changing sensory world, but must transcend the sensory world. In conclusion, for Plato, truth is an image (idea). Forms are true objective realities, eternal beings, essential archetypes of things that are apprehended by the mind rather than the senses. A beautiful person is an imitation of universal beauty (Form). Forms are separate from things and exist in the mind of the One (God), and their relation to things is explained in terms of the Form being the essential cause of things, and things being imitations or imitations of the One (teilhaben). Plato also saw a hierarchy among the Forms. For example, there is a hierarchy among the forms of roses, with the general form of the rose as the higher form of the individual rose, and the universal form of the flower as the higher form of the rose. According to Plato’s logic, forms cannot be perceived through the senses, and perceiving sensory objects is not true knowledge, but only knowledge of illusions. The human condition of being able to perceive forms is justified through reason in the soul, which Plato argues is the Phronesis of the soul. At the heart of the Phaedo is the pre-existence of the soul, which holds that the capacity for human beings to recognize forms resides in the soul, which exists in the mind of a person before entering the body, and is therefore aware of forms. However, when the soul enters the body, it forgets the Forms, believes the sensible to be true, and is captivated by the sensible. Therefore, the core of Plato’s epistemology is to recall the Forms that were forgotten when the soul entered the body, and this recalling of the Forms is the purpose of education.

Aristotle’s Critique and Development

Aristotle (384 B.C.), Plato’s pupil and the founder of the logic-centered orientation of Western philosophy, develops his own philosophy by criticizing his teacher’s theory of forms. Aristotle’s critique centers on two points: first, that eternally stationary forms cannot explain things in motion; second, that forms cannot explain material, sensory things because they are immaterial. Third, according to Plato’s account, things are said to be formless, but this presupposes a relation between things and forms, which is a contradiction in terms, as it is not possible to have a relation between things and forms, which are entirely different things. Aristotle responds to this criticism by describing substance as a combination of form and substance, and overcomes this contradiction to develop his epistemology. Aristotle was the first genius to discover that the way humans perceive the world is through the medium of language, and his logic played an important role in shaping the direction of Western thought, which centered on argumentation. Unlike Plato, who grasped the abstract nature of the Forms, but relegated perception to the reflection or imitation of the Ideas by materializing the Forms as Ideas, Aristotle used logic as a tool for understanding the world. He believed that concepts are the common properties of entities and that these concepts can be used to define entities. He also saw deductive reasoning as being based on concepts that enable judgment, but his epistemology was limited in that there was no way to guarantee that the premises of deductive reasoning would always be true. This led him to turn to metaphysics. In the end, he saw truth as related to intellectual intuition and transcending language.

Differences with modern empiricism

Post-modern British empiricists retreated from Aristotle’s judgment of cognition in that they failed to recognize that cognition is mediated by language. They saw the source of cognition as experience, which is given to us as simple ideas through our sense organs. Their understanding was a step backward in our understanding of human cognition in several ways. First, it overlooked the fact that perception is linguistically mediated; second, it was authoritarian in that it implied that ideas could not in principle be distorted by experience. Third, it substituted the idea of an object for what actually exists objectively. Later, by Kant, the object itself was substituted for the representation of the individual variety of objects. In this sense, experience was transformed by the empiricists into sensory perception, and the human capacity for experience was reduced to the passive reception of the sense organs.
Locke separated the properties that belong to an entity into first and second natures, the first being those that belong to the object itself, and the second being the powers that generate ideas in our minds that do not correspond to the object. This led to the rustic idea that all qualities belonged purely to entities, and with Hume, impressions were transformed into internal subjective states.

Kant and the limits of perception

It was Kant who, like Aristotle, understood perception as a judgmental structure. Kant replaced ideas with concepts, but inserted imaginative representations to unite emotion and intellect. Kant argued that concepts, as categories of judgment, cannot be applied directly to the objects themselves, and that universal perception is achieved by a priori forms of subjectivity. Kant justified universal perception by limiting human cognition to phenomena. However, he acknowledged the limitation of insufficient and incomplete cognition, which cannot recognize material objects.

Hegel’s absolute epistemology

Dissatisfied with Kant’s limitation of cognition, Hegel sought to overcome the incompleteness of cognition by denying a strict separation between the cognizable and the uncognizable. Hegel argued that if concepts are generative, then the perception of phenomena in the empirical world can be a complete perception. Hegel argued that the absolute spirit transforms the empirical world into the mental and logical, absolutizing the concepts formed through world experience, and that perception through these absolute concepts is also absolute and complete perception.

Mutuality and intersubjectivity of subject and object

Adorno and Habermas criticize the logic of philosophy of consciousness for justifying universal awareness through a strict separation of subject and object. Adorno sees the logic of sameness in the philosophy of consciousness as implicating exclusivity and violence, and argues that this logic of sameness does not merely reside in theories of cognition, but dominates real-world social relations. Habermas affirms Adorno’s analysis, but argues that in order to overcome the logic of sameness in philosophy of consciousness, we must shift to a paradigm of communication based on intersubjectivity. Criticizing the logic of subject-object sameness, Habermas argues that a non-exclusive rationality between subjects operates in the intersubjective act of communication. Adorno, on the other hand, emphasizes the mutuality of subject and object, and argues for intersubjectivity.

The primacy of language use and the incompleteness of perception

Adorno criticizes that when the use of language is restricted to epistemology, it inevitably leads to reductionism. He argues that demonstrating the imperfection of recognizing sameness through language is what makes room for the experience of the new. Habermas, on the other hand, advocates a shift away from an epistemology-centered use of language to a pragmatics-centered use of language, invoking plausibility arguments to justify the universality of truth. However, Habermas’s theory of communication is based on a classificatory rationality that places the criterion of truth in agreement through dialogue and excludes nonidentical, non-conceptual things that cannot be categorized as concepts.

The dual nature of language and the dialectical nature of philosophy

Unlike Habermas, Adorno emphasizes the dual nature of language, arguing that perception is imperfect because it is shaped by experience. Philosophy is constantly confronted with Aporie through this imperfection of perception, and this Aporie dialectically forces philosophy to think. Thus, philosophy seeks to express what cannot be defined in language, which pushes it beyond the limits of argumentative thought. Philosophy seeks the experience of true truth in this paradoxical situation, and in the process, dialectical thinking becomes inevitable.