Unmaking Sense

Episode 9.25: Truth and Integrity; Integrity as a quest for wholeness that necessitates change.

What is integrity? Does it require consistency, coherence, changelessness; or can it involve, even require change; that we leave the mountain-top to pursue other, higher ambitions even if they will contradict what we have done, said and been before?

Episode 9.24: Progress is not a royal road, leading ever-upwards: to rise we must often first fall.

The mountain metaphor extended to other life-situations: that no matter how high we rise, the journey to the next achievement may - and usually does - require us first to climb down from the dizzy heights of our own fame and fortune, and begin again.

Episode 9.23: If truth evolves, how can we decide whether today’s truths are worth relinquishing?

The great dilemma of the conflict between today’s comfortable truths, often learned at great cost, and tomorrow’s, which may or may not be better but cannot be assessed unless and until we relinquish today’s.

Episode 9.22: That success defines truth explains why, as useful fiction, truth is not arbitrary.

Experiment as an arbiter of success and so as a definition of the best we can do right now that counters the notion that, as a useful fiction, truth becomes arbitrary, merely a matter of preference.

Episode 9.21: The difference between success as a pointer to truth and truth as defined by success.

A clarification of something potentially ambiguous about episode 9.20. Success does not disclose truth as a pointer to the eternal; success defines truth as temporarily the best we can do.

Episode 9.20: Truths as productive fictions; lies; intentions; foreseeability and responsibility.

If truths are productive fictions, are all truths really lies? The distinction between lies and fictions. Intention, foreseeability, responsibility and chains of events set in train by actions. Elizabeth Anscombe and Harry S. Truman.

Episode 9.19: Although our truths are chosen fictions, metaphysics promises us stronger foundations.

The attraction of metaphysics is that it promises to ground us in eternity, the laws of the universe, or a Supreme Being. But nothing exempts us for responsibly for the fictions we choose, nothing can, and nothing should.

Episode 9.18: Three core principles of truth as the most productive fiction available right now.

All truths are fictions, but not all fictions merit our allegiance as truths: the task of a culture, an education, a life is to discover which of the available fictions to endorse as truths; which to believe in; which to advocate; which to fight for; which to dissent from; which to oppose and fight against. All governed by our collective take on what it is to be human, and so what - which of the available fictions - it is best for us to believe.

Episode 9.17: Truth as the most productive of the available fictions; illustrations from science.

As an alternative to regarding truth as the best we can do right now, but not a a way that is a contradiction to it, we can also regard truth as the most productive of the available fictions. The more we think about the way we describe the world, even in science, the more we come to the conclusion that it is just one fiction after another. The question then being not whether something is or is not a fiction but whether and to what extent it is a useful fiction, where useful is to be construed in some way chosen by us.

Episode 9.16: The obsessional pursuit of something called “truth” destroys rather than frees us.

We reflect on Sophocles’ great “Oedipus Rex” and what it tells us about the obsessive, relentless pursuit of a truth that will destroy us.