Is Truth obso­lete? This ques­tion has had philoso­phers up in arms since it was first seri­ously posed, and is the prompt to which the last sev­eral decades of epis­te­mol­o­giz­ing can be traced. Nor can we find the answer on the lips of our philoso­phers. To look there, after all, would be to com­mit the same error as that of the Uni­ver­sity Pres­i­dent who, seek­ing guid­ance with regard to posi­tion cuts, inquires at the physics depart­ment as to the impor­tance of physics. In today’s econ­omy, to say noth­ing of his­tory, a man will color his words to secure his rank—to say noth­ing of his per­sonal beliefs; under threat­en­ing con­di­tions he behaves as a threat­ened ani­mal behaves. Yet rhetori­cians, by virtue of their lofty speech and pompous air, don­ning their human­ness in titles such as “Dr.”—can bet­ter con­ceal this prim­i­tive streak than most. Hid­den vicious­ness not with­stand­ing: the search for truth as phi­los­o­phy has ren­dered it, must be brought under a new light of crit­i­cal analy­sis that does not simul­ta­ne­ously refer to said Drs—for such, as argu­ments go, is how things get cir­cu­lar.

*

There is noth­ing so manip­u­la­tive, so sus­pect and unwor­thy of trust, as a rad­i­cal preser­va­tion­ist. Ever since Quine made his claim (which was noth­ing short of prophecy) that a pri­ori knowl­edge reeks of myth—philosophical cir­cles stopped dead in their tracks, forced to face the fact of impend­ing expi­ra­tion, only to resume in one rash, col­lec­tive attempt to jus­tify their being. Imag­ine by com­par­i­son a thwarted suitor who employs every tac­tic imag­in­able to woo the beloved into think­ing she could not live with­out him. I dare the reader to dis­prove my claim that such an unre­quited love let­ter is the essence of current philosophy.

*

A cross study:

For­lorn lover: No one loves you as I do.

Phi­los­o­phy: No psy­chol­o­gist, sci­en­tist, or lin­guist pos­sesses suf­fi­cient inter­est in Truth, qua Epis­te­mol­ogy, for us to jus­ti­fi­ably believe that they’d do the term justice.

For­lorn lover: I know you bet­ter than another ever will.

Phi­los­o­phy: No other field has the proper tools, the terms or con­di­tions or minds, to pur­sue the path to knowl­edge. In no way can they meet the demands of such an expedition.

For­lorn lover: We have his­tory. Lose me—and you’ll lose your­self entirely.

Phi­los­o­phy: Deac­ti­vate philosophy—and then your right to every con­tri­bu­tion we have hith­erto made to your cul­ture, your lit­er­a­ture, your edu­ca­tion. Are you sure you want to do this?

For­lorn lover: I’ll make you hap­pier than you’ve ever been. But be patient—I’m only human.

Phi­los­o­phy: The truth is at the tip of our tongues. We swear to god.

*

The suitor’s words are utterly per­sua­sive: biased—yet laced with sin­cer­ity. As the beloved finds her­self moved by the let­ter, the let­ter finds the reader recon­sid­er­ing: like­wise, mod­ern read­ers of phi­los­o­phy. In this dis­il­lu­sioned age which would kill for a rea­son to believe in true love, in the heart­felt pro­fes­sions of the child, the artist—how eas­ily we mis­take self inter­est for pas­sion, des­per­a­tion for sin­cer­ity, rhetoric for mean­ing. (Need I men­tion sex drive and the not dis­sim­i­lar schol­arly compulsion—so often mis­in­ter­preted as a “pas­sion” for learn­ing, when in fact it is void of even hon­est curios­ity.)

*

Regard­ing seduc­ers who fail to live up to the title. The Seducer, prop­erly known as, views each of his prospects as but means to his end; the art of seduc­tion, more­over, lies pre­cisely in this: a cool detach­ment, under the cover of long­ing, from a smor­gas­bord of replace­able sub­jects. A jack of all trades, he is far from “biased” and in this way less dan­ger­ous than the coun­ter­feit: the for­lorn lover, the dejected author, who will seg­re­gate his sub­ject, and pur­sue it—solely—to the death.

*

If the seducer, real or not, is just look­ing to get off—what pur­pose, for the Beloved, does he offer? Are all pre­ten­tious, neu­rotic book worms philoso­phers? They are surely not the minds that shall sat­isfy our one query. And to think—what sweet, strange, quiet would float back into the land if we, with our new­found answer, silenced the rest of them.

*

The prob­lem with insti­tu­tion­al­ized thought is that not one iota goes unin­fected by the system—the whim­pers and night ter­rors, the devo­tions and alle­giances, the fetishes and pol­i­tics that come, or at least go, with the ter­ri­tory. The Humes and Lockes and Niet­zsches of Phi­los­o­phy have all had some­thing or another to warn there against—namely, that the most orig­i­nal thought occurs, if it does, out­side the academy’s walls—as far off the radar as pos­si­ble. While in agree­ment with this claim, I would argue that it is sec­ondary to another: that the most crit­i­cal, and thereby, orig­i­nal thought, requires soli­tude and dis­tance so far as is nec­es­sary. Espi­onage is one pos­si­biltiy. The main prob­lem with this tac­tic is that the spy is all too often ren­dered guilty by asso­ci­a­tion, pseu­do­ny­mous and posthu­mous pub­lish­ing being the excep­tion to the rule. But inso­far as it is only aca­d­e­mics who’ve author­ity to speak “on behalf of the field” in the first place—we are back to the sta­tic loop with which this essay started, wherein the “they” in ques­tion has, and has always had, the floor.

*

Nei­ther Niet­zsche nor Locke had to deal with the fac­tor of tech­nol­ogy as we know it—and so well, it seems, to have deferred it to the Dead Horse cat­e­gory. This is not to say that “tech­nol­ogy” in itself has been sub­stan­tively addressed in any crit­i­cal sense, but instead has become so inex­tri­ca­ble with expres­sion that, like a tod­dler, it has “got­ten into every­thing.” The legit­imiza­tion of these old school “out­siders” hinged not on their access to elite modes of pub­lish­ing, but on their access to any venue what­so­ever. Niet­zsche and Locke, both sep­a­ratists in their own right, shared the com­mon first hur­tle of, simply, getting heard. In our times, sep­a­ratists, i.e. non-academics, share a com­mon first hur­tle that is uniquely their own: the avoid­ance of cor­rup­tion by their schol­arly con­tem­po­raries, the “learn­ing of the ropes” of this estrang­ing yet so-entangled cyberworld.

*

When the stan­dard of liv­ing hath dou­bled. We must sing for our sup­per and reject the hands that would feed—taking the pedes­trian way at the expense of prestige—of tenure—of audience—in short, of secu­rity. Nor are we ashamed to seek alter­na­tive modes of recog­ni­tion, to shine amid the rub­ble of post-modern deca­dence by exist­ing along­side the dumb and the dumbed-down web jour­nal. As arach­nids, we are Black Wid­ows amid Daddy Lon­glegs,  hav­ing yet to uncover the mean­ing of “vir­tual community.”

*

The trust between Suitor and Beloved has been sev­ered, and is more or less unsalvageable.

*

Now imag­ine, it shouldn’t be hard, that our rela­tion­ship serves the func­tion of life sup­port.

*

The rash despon­dency that now char­ac­ter­izes phi­los­o­phy is like that of an artist who fears aban­don­ment by her muse. The dif­fer­ence, being: the lat­ter depends not on her art for finan­cial sta­bil­ity, work­ing purely out of the pater­nal incli­na­tion to cre­ate. Her work is done for no one and for every­one: as with her philosophy.

*

Epis­te­mol­ogy: an organ like the appen­dix that is nei­ther prob­lem­atic nor use­ful in itself, but wherein a sin­gle, can­cer­ous cell can obvi­ate sur­vival. Such is the nature of our sys­tems: our democ­racy, our colleges.

*

We are taught in hushed tones by men who still cry about a wolf named Quine  that once threat­ened to destroy their a pri­ori. Epis­te­mol­o­gists have accepted Quine’s chal­lenge as their lot, their inher­i­tance, thus falling in line with all the other aca­d­e­mics, a line that seems never to end. In fact their very accep­tance is sym­bolic of the self uncer­tainty and slave-think “Uni­ver­si­ties” fos­ter. Phi­los­o­phy has as it were “reduced” itself to this stag­nant, mas­tur­ba­tive cycle—allowing old pre­sump­tions to deter­mine its course, grant­ing lin­eage lever­age over its every word. Our worth we let dimin­ish at Quine’s com­mand, and it is nearly impos­si­ble to over­es­ti­mate the fact that a sci­ence could pre­dict and then go on to invoke its destruc­tion. And as a body of dys­func­tional parts is immo­bile, the major­ity must have played some minor role, while the less instru­men­tal, the impo­tent, awaited the crash. Do you think they were aware it was “their own” who were man­ning the wheel? Head­ing straight for the alleged “a pri­ori,” the cliff’s brit­tle edge.

*

But what if some­one in this car­a­van chose another way—could he return to Cul­ture and present his case anew? Here is where the demon leans in and whis­pers: and who, pray tell, would believe you? One must aban­don the band­wagon of truth-seekers com­monly known as, of aca­d­e­mics and their path, hav­ing seen where it is lead­ing them, hav­ing tried to find ears among them who’d lis­ten, hav­ing plunged like an exile back into a world that may rightly deem him a murderer—a betrayer—a cow­ard. I’m not sold on these charges. What thinker, what artist, would self–inflict the loss of audi­ence and medium? Where, pray tell, is the motive? He who returns returns as the crime’s sole wit­ness to give an account of how the “acci­dent” happened—to plead, on the pathetic behalf of the oth­ers, insan­ity. This term is not to be inter­preted in the lit­eral, or clin­i­cal sense—but as “lack of a bet­ter word” for what we might call a sud­den lapse of rea­son. Think of them as magi­cians—low-grade magi­cians who suf­fer from demen­tia, reach­ing end­lessly back into the hat for the long-lost rabbit.

*

But who’s to diag­nose? Is redun­dancy indica­tive of disease—or habit’s dri­ving force? The philoso­pher believes he’s just serv­ing his func­tion: charm­ing light out of the dullest black hole, as one poet says. But what is cru­cial is that these thinkers couldn’t notice their error if they wanted to—a con­tin­u­ance, one might say, of the “recog­ni­tion capac­ity ” whereby infants can iden­tify the woman at their crib side as the woman who leaves and returns min­utes later with a bot­tle. The philoso­pher, like the infant, might be said to have illus­trated the “a pri­ori prin­ci­ple” of identity:

“A=A.”

“A piece wax, after melt­ing, is still the same piece of wax.”

“If it worked for the ancients, it will work again.”

“Prac­ti­cally pur­chased in every way, our a pri­ori is the same wild goose that took off last cen­tury. Or was that a bunny?”

But a pur­chase is not a con­tract; and that one buys into an idea does not make one’s com­mit­ment there to for­ever bind­ing. For while philoso­phers are the keep­ers of Truth, the mean­ing of this term still has yet to be deter­mined. Why it per­sists in deter­min­ing our iden­ti­ties is beyond this poet.

*

So much depends upon whether we can rede­fine “truth,” and con­se­quently, “philosopher.”

*

Descartes’ grand end, the means for which he’ll never know, is as fol­lows. Since none of our knowl­edge can be claimed a pri­ori, phi­los­o­phy may well be obso­lete. Ques­tions of “mean­ing,” Sir Quine goes onto say, would best be referred to the lin­guists, the psy­chol­o­gists, the sci­ences. Quine, a philoso­pher and math­e­mati­cian, was clearly not con­cerned with the future of his career which, for­tu­nate for him, included an escape route. But per­haps on these grounds we might say he has some­thing to offer. The Renais­sance man per­fects, if it’s all he per­fects, the dis­ci­pline of cast­ing off bias; labor­ing in myr­iad fields, he takes noth­ing too seri­ously. So say we go along with Quine, and take the a pri­ori for a relic of the past. Alright—what then?

*

To err is to inter­pret in a way that dis­agrees with uni­ver­sals, at which point the inter­pre­ta­tion does one of two things: det­o­nates, or blasts apart the think tank.

*

It is a prin­ci­ple of logic that sub­jects (like per­cep­tions and con­cepts) can­not in them­selves be true or false. “Ahead­ness” is no more true or false than “cliff” is in itself true or false. The cliff which I claim to “know some­thing about” is not the same cliff from whose edge I now dan­gle. Per­cep­tion occurs in advance of judgment—it is only when I move away from my per­cep­tion and onto the cog­ni­tive phase that I am “inter­pret­ing.” And so, if “truth” is nei­ther present in the sub­ject nor in the act of per­cep­tion, then it is only the con­struc­tion we call “propo­si­tions” that can pos­sess truth—propositions which meet the demands our def­i­n­i­tions place on them.  

*

Per­cep­tion is the source of most—if not all—of the knowl­edge we as humans pos­sess. Where we dif­fer from ani­mals is not on this con­di­tion, but what fol­lows there from. We are shown an open jam jar, and when asked what we see, reply: I see a jar, that it con­tains jam, and that it is open. Now if a wasp entered the scene, what would it see?—exactly what’s in front of it. It does not see that “the jar is closed, “is open,” “is empty,” “is any­thing.”

The wasp can see, in the sense of sense, the jar, the jam, and the lid. But it can­not make such judg­ments as “the jar is open” and “there is no jam miss­ing from the jar.” For such propo­si­tions go beyond the image—distinguishing it oth­ers, as “this, in par­tic­u­lar.” Inso­far as wasps pre­sum­ably do not pos­sess minds, they can­not “see this” or “per­ceive that”—but rather merely “see.” And here in lies the wasp’s shred of human­ity, man’s shred of animality.   

*

But the care­ful reader will note that I’ve now begged the question—namely: that one phase of the thought-process, per­cep­tion, is not unique to humans, but is char­ac­ter­is­tic of ani­mals as well; and that the mean­ing of “per­cep­tion” is in either case inter­change­able. I have made this pre­sump­tion, and have done so the basis of another: that the act of per­ceiv­ing occurs prior to inter­pre­ta­tion,  and thus prior to the for­ma­tion of beliefs. The very idea that these processes occur simul­ta­ne­ously is non­sense, com­pa­ra­ble to the notion of “love at first sight.” The lat­ter is sim­ply a slow-motion metaphor for the for­mer. I can­not “love” some­one I don’t yet “know,” can­not have as the object of my affec­tion a stranger, for I can­not direct a sen­ti­ment toward that with which I’m not famil­iar. Nor can I inter­pret a per­cep­tion I’ve not yet had. “Per­cep­tion” and “rea­son” thus appear to involve sep­a­rate sys­tems: the lat­ter of which is exclu­sive to humans, the former—to beings with senses, i.e., us and ani­mals.

*

The process with which phi­los­o­phy pri­mar­ily con­cerns itself is rea­son, tak­ing per­cep­tion into account inso­far as is nec­es­sary, rel­e­vant, use­ful. Sci­en­tists have far more to say about per­cep­tion strictly speak­ing, as a func­tion of the senses before propo­si­tions are made, where philosophy—as the sci­ence of “reason”—is utterly speechless.

*

If per­cep­tions can nei­ther be true nor false, then error lies else­where, namely: in reasoning.

*

I first per­ceive the jar, and then erro­neously judge that it is “full” when in fact it is “empty.” Because there is no liq­uid or other sub­stance in the jar, the uni­ver­sal con­di­tions for “full­ness” are not met by this jar, ren­der­ing my propo­si­tion false.

Philoso­phers say that truth val­ues are not rel­a­tive. It’s true that there’s a cliff up ahead if and only there’s a cliff up ahead. But these con­cepts are lin­guis­tic con­struc­tions, employed by rea­son only after per­cep­tion, after expe­ri­ence, or a pos­te­ri­ori.

*

In order to deter­mine the truth or fal­sity of a given propo­si­tion, we must refer back to the object of our perception—the object to which the propo­si­tion is already refer­ring, but is not iden­ti­cal to that which the propo­si­tion represents—for the jar “in the propo­si­tion” is no more than a name, a con­cept, a sym­bol, stand­ing in for the jar that was per­ceived. And attached to this “rep­re­sen­ta­tion,” this con­cep­tual “jar,” this men­tal “copy,” is the bag­gage of rea­son:  def­i­n­i­tion, cat­e­gory, class, genus—all of which fall short of rep­re­sent­ing the par­tic­u­lar object.

When asked “where the near­est restau­rant is,” we point to the clos­est build­ing wherein food is served for cost, per­haps by wait­ers and wait­resses, per­haps not, per­haps com­plete with booths and chairs and tables, per­haps not. The assump­tion is that by point­ing to this par­tic­u­lar build­ing we are point­ing to an object that loosely matches the cri­te­ria for “restaurant”—and thus fits the category—and thus is a restau­rant. The hun­gry tourist who takes our word should not, in other words, be disappointed.

*.

But what does this have to do with truth? Pre­cisely this: the con­cepts, classes, words, which con­sti­tute our propo­si­tions don’t fully rep­re­sent the things they name—not because they are lack­ing, per se—but by virtue of their sweep­ing gen­er­al­i­ties. It is not by exclu­sion that a term like “restau­rant” does not do jus­tice to the Ethiopian take-out, etc. etc.—but by over-inclusion. For “restau­rant” projects all sorts of poten­tial qual­i­ties onto the build­ing that do not relate or apply—attributes that, when included in the propo­si­tion, ren­der it false, and thus instead are left ambigu­ous. The claim that truth has some­thing to do with real­ity, viz. that “it is true that that wasp is angry if and only if that wasps is angry” is gib­ber­ish, pure non­sense. The wasp doesn’t know what it is, can­not show or tell or relay what it is; it can merely fall prey to our, albeit shifty, per­cep­tions and albeit incom­plete def­i­n­i­tions. Can a build­ing meet the man-made cri­te­ria for “restau­rant?” Let us assume, by I don’t know what leap of rea­son, that it can. Can a build­ing BE a restau­rant? Does every US cit­i­zen want to BE an American?

*

That propo­si­tions as strings of word-symbols can be “judged” says noth­ing what­so­ever about the objects such sym­bols rep­re­sent. Where­fore this idea of propo­si­tions which trans­late in real­ity? “Con­cepts” are not found in nature, and nei­ther can wasps nor humans nor philoso­phers per­ceive such things. Only with the aid of lan­guage can “truth” afford meaning—a lan­guage whose terms are the result of a col­lec­tive agree­ment. The major­ity decides “this is this; that is that.” And with the major­ity vote, after all, anything’s possible.