The Nature of Truth: Eastern, Western, and Relative Perspectives

Introduction: The Problem of Truth

We exist in an age marked by intense opposition to assertive truth. Truth is supposed to be either a "bond" or an "individual encounter." It is compared to opinion, discernment, and viewpoint—on the scale of a person, family, faction, city, country, civilization, and humankind. The doctrines of viewpoint are identical across every social range, but their comparative particulars vary due to differences in perspective, discernment, and outlook. Truth is mainly subject to alteration on the narrow personal level of concrete truth, less so on the intermediate city-range of perception, and least of all on the wide spectrum of humankind with its universally complex values.

Truth makes for variety; ideas make for concord; values make for unanimity. Only one among these may be apparent at any given instant, relative to one's viewpoint. A harmonizing alternation between the values of a trinity of truth exists. This contains a trinity of viewpoints that alternates between broad, medium, and narrow arrays of truth. When one array of viewpoint is concentrated upon, the remaining viewpoints are eclipsed, taking with them their truths. Because of this, three individuals might perceive the same reality in entirely different ways. Each might express a separate truth, and each might refute the truth claimed by the others. Only a flexible viewpoint—one that moves between broad, medium, and narrow arrays—permits a view of the entire trinity of truth (Craig, 111).

In order to recognize the whole truth, one's flexible viewpoint must transform so as to visualize the complete as a unity of diversity. The chief component is a unanimity corresponding to the trivial, exhaustive component of multiplicity. An incomplete relative truth changes; whereas the complete absolute truth does not. To visualize the entire spectrum of truth, one must be a versatile person capable of making harmonizing shifts across broad, medium, and narrow arrays of viewpoint. This renders such a person proficient in theology, philosophy, and science—or in spiritual, rational, and sensory truths, which are instinctive, logical, and empirical respectively.

The challenge lies in the manner of approaching Ultimate Truth. It is valuable to acquire our operational knowledge of the universe from logical techniques and from inductive reasoning—that is an established pathway to knowledge. That pathway cannot, however, arrive at Eternity. Eternal entities can only be discovered. We arrive at Ultimate Truth through deductive methods and through understanding in a completely different dimension of existence. The functioning of the universe is one thing; the significance of the universe is an entirely separate matter. We delve into the importance of entities by considering where they fit into the discovered Truth (Schmitt, 35).

Absolute and Relative Truth

We do not arrive at Truth by evaluating everything we study. We accept Truth as discovered and determine how it speaks to everything we study. The disparities between Western and Eastern philosophy are discernible. Eastern philosophy has gradually been "discovered" by the West, while the trajectory of Western thinking and philosophy has been critically analyzed by contemporary and postmodern philosophers as defective at its center. German philosopher Martin Heidegger arrived at the conclusion that "Western philosophy is a massive fault" (Barrett, 11).

The way in which Western thinking was established, the path of its progress, and its invasion of all aspects of life in the Western world has been and continues to be questioned on all fronts by prominent critics and philosophers. Western philosophical traditions and the manner in which they shaped Western societies has been explained at length in Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In that work, he offers an appraisal of certain facets of Western thought that resulted from a crucial contest for the human mind (Pirsig, 381). What emerged was a severing of the mind from matter and of observation from understanding. Beyond tracing the history of philosophy against the backdrop of Western thought, Pirsig offers a reinvention of the exact idea that was obscured behind the "debris of declining Athens" and Rome—an idea hidden beneath the new triumvirate of Western man: Rationale, Intellect, and Wisdom (Pirsig, 391).

Pirsig quotes Thoreau, in letters, as saying: "One would not achieve anything, but would have to bear losses for something" (Pirsig, 387). This applies with direct relevance to Western development. While comprehending the universe through dialectical truths, humanity lost the capacity to understand how it can be a part of the universe rather than its adversary (Pirsig, 387). Nevertheless, what Pirsig expresses is not merely one way of envisioning the universe—he treats it as the only way. Though Pirsig does not state it explicitly, this notion is the crux of the settlement between Eastern and Western philosophy, and its consequences are observable in every feature of living. The concept that the natural world can be divided rationally into organized structures has its origins essentially in the West. This entails that a system of ideas exists to explain the world and the universe—a "structure of concepts" that describes a hierarchy, subdivided further into a system of separations and distinctions (Pirsig, 97).

Western Philosophy and the Legacy of Dualism

Pirsig affirms that this was a "fundamental structure for all Western knowledge" (Pirsig, 97). William Barrett states that Western traditions of thought actually emanate from two cultural milieus—Hebrew and Greek—both of which are "deeply dualistic in character" (Barrett, 9). This means they "segment reality into two portions," setting one part against the other (Barrett, ix). The Hebrews achieved this on the basis of morals, segregating God from Creation, flesh from spirit, and right from wrong. The Greeks were divided along philosophical and intellectual lines, and it was Plato who effectively founded Western philosophy (Barrett, 9).

To understand this impact, one must step briefly back in history. In the fourth century BC, Greece witnessed the rise of the Sophists, who—no longer preoccupied with cosmology—concentrated their thinking on humans as self-knowing beings, their knowledge, and their principles. Their point, as Pirsig notes, was "not any one particular truth, but the development of humans" (Pirsig, 383). Cognitive relativism affirms the relativity of truth. Because of the close relationship between truth and concepts like rationality and knowledge, cognitive relativism is frequently taken to include the relativity of rationality and knowledge as well.

The framework to which truth is relativized is generally understood to be a theoretical scheme—either the theoretical design of a complete culture or historical era, or a more narrowly conceived hypothetical structure belonging to a particular group, such as quantum physicists or Southern Baptists. Cognitive relativism, like many other forms of relativism, is frequently held to have been coined by the early Sophists, chiefly Protagoras, who began his work Truth with the famous declaration: "Man is the measure of all things—of things that are, that they are; of things that are not, that they are not." The Sophists, in rejecting the idea that human nature was transcendentally established, halted at the urgency of the sensory and practical notion of man. Their education revolved around the concept of arete, meaning "excellence" in Greek, though it is now often interpreted as "virtue" (Davson-Galle, 76).

With the possible exception of the Sophists, few philosophers in the Western tradition endorsed any form of cognitive relativism until quite recently. Many assumed that there is some standpoint—for example, that of God—from which our judgments are definitively true or false. During the nineteenth century, this assumption was sharply challenged by a small number of significant thinkers, most notably Nietzsche and William James. During the twentieth century, a relativistic view of truth—though it still provokes hostile reactions from anti-relativists—gained considerably more adherents and became nearly commonplace in several philosophical circles. Relativistic visions of truth gained momentum from or were articulated in the writings of widely read twentieth-century thinkers such as the later Quine, Foucault, Winch, Derrida, and others (Davson-Galle, 76).

Socrates contradicted the Sophist idea of relativism with the argument that complete knowledge was universal and essential to human thinking. Plato viewed Truth as the highest Ideal, and since Knowledge was a tenet of Truth, it could not be gradually undermined by the Sophists' contention that "everything is relative." Plato upheld the autonomy of Truth and Knowledge and the supremacy of Truth over arete. Plato alone envisioned the necessity of the Good, but in order to reconcile it with his own idea of Truth, he took the teaching of the Sophists and attempted to convert it into an Idea—an incontestable, distinct entity called "Good." The philosophy of Plato embodied Truth, and like Phaedrus, revealed that the Good and the Truth "were engaged in a massive fight for the future mind of humanity" (Pirsig, 381).

This conflict established the future of Western thinking. Aristotle relegated the Good to "a part of ethics," Truth prevailed in the struggle, and thus the Western mode of thought was established (Pirsig, 390). The divergence between Eastern and Western thinking is currently highly prominent. Western thought rests on a rational, structured scheme of categories—named, differentiated, and characterized by a comprehensive knowledge of Truth. Eastern thinking differs greatly from this model, though it is not entirely unlike the Sophists' style of thought.

Conclusion: Toward a Fuller Understanding of Truth

The growth of contradictory findings across many fields of inquiry only deepens this hard truth. It is frequently observed that scientists from different cultures sometimes make interpretations in their experiments that diverge from one another and at times even challenge each other. A well-known instance is that of Gregor Mendel, who intentionally selected certain varieties of pea plants for his genetic experiments when he should have selected them randomly in order to eliminate bias (Craig, 114). As many scientists from different cultures may reach different conclusions from a common experiment—with some more convincing than others, yet neither entirely wrong—one can see how errors in methodology contribute to divergent truths across different cultural and scientific contexts. In a related case involving errors in methodology in a test on corn genetics, the results obtained differed considerably from the hypothesis. It is possible that the results were genuine and would have challenged the prevailing theory, but methodological error may have been responsible for the discrepancy. Thus, one can observe how mistakes in methodology lead to divergent truths across different cultural and scientific settings.