Truth has always fascinated people and until very recently was the ideal on which the great and small of this world pinned their deepest hopes for all possible benefits, including happiness and power. Finally, we have always seen in her the path to freedom, first of all, internal freedom. “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free,” read the famous lines from the Gospel of John. But could it be otherwise, for this concept lies in the very foundation of thinking, and therefore in the foundation of ourselves as thinking beings. The activity of the mind then only has practical benefit and meaning under it, if we dare to expect that in the course of our efforts we will break through to the actual state of affairs, or at least to some working certainty - something reliable, and not just apparent, on that we could base our decisions, actions,our very existence. At the same time, truth has always been a problematic, vague, elusive, and perplexing phenomenon. During the existence of human civilization, three main interpretations of its nature have taken shape: realism, moderate constructivism and extreme constructivism.
Realism
The position of realism is the very first opinion that the mind comes to when it first encounters the problem of the relationship of knowledge to the external world. Realism considers consciousness as a mirror, which, when properly applied, is capable of accurately reflecting the existing objects of external reality independently of us, to comprehending objective reality as it is in itself. The oldest, Aristotelian formulation of this concept, repeated later by Thomas Aquinas, defines the criterion of truth as the correspondence of knowledge to its subject ("adaequatio rei et intellectus"). This optimistic and very naive belief in our ability to comprehend how everything really is, the absolute majority of mankind carried in their minds and hearts through history, including in the person of its greatest representatives, starting with Parmenides,Plato and Aristotle up to a number of philosophers of science of the XX century.
Moderate constructivism
However, the unsatisfactory, unrealistic nature of realism became noticeable almost immediately: it was contrasted with a critical antithesis in the form of constructivism. Xenophanes of Colophon around the 5th century BC. teaches that people create gods in their own likeness and exposes the dependence of knowledge, views on individual and sociocultural factors. Knowledge is not a neutral reflection of reality, but a construct, a product of creativity, in which many personal and transpersonal forces participate. In the middle of the 5th century. sophists, and behind them in the IV-III centuries. skeptics are no longer limited to pointing out the relativity of knowledge - they create a powerful argumentative base and a set of rhetorical strategies that were essentially unconquerable at that time, proving the constructive nature of knowledge, and sometimes the very impossibility of truth.
For example, moderate constructivists argue, consciousness is really a mirror capable of reflecting external reality. But why, then, the same objects are sometimes seen so differently by different people from different cultures, different eras, strata of society, different individual characteristics, and even at different periods of their own lives? This can only be explained by the fact that the reflection that forms on the surface of the mirror depends on its specific features, specific shapes and shades. Reality is not monolithic, not one and appears as multiple, therefore, knowledge always comes from a limited part of existence. As such, cognition is influenced by its limitations, and therefore perception from one point is always different from perception from another. Existence is promising:the results of cognitive activity depend on the developed as a result of the development of the apparatus of perception and thinking, as well as on all the individual and socio-cultural characteristics of the knower, the uniqueness of his position within reality.
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Thus, to one degree or another, knowledge is always a construct, a product of personal and socio-cultural creativity, since it arises on a surface that is necessarily subject to constant influences and deformations. Some mirrors reflect reality better, others worse, but none can escape their own limitations and none can contain it entirely.
The most influential and complete concept of moderate constructivism in recent history can be called Marxism, or rather, dialectical materialism. Friedrich Engels writes ("Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy"):
Extreme constructivism
Even in ancient Greece, radical sophists and skeptics began to carefully make the following observation. In our consciousness, they admitted, something is really happening, you cannot argue with it, but what grounds do we have to believe that this something is in any connection with objective reality, why do we believe that does it even exist? Realists and moderate constructivists argue that the criterion of truth is the correspondence between knowledge and its object. In doing so, they miss the self-evident fact: we do not, never had and never will have access to any objects other than the content of our own consciousness. When we declare the correspondence between knowledge and the object, we essentially assert the correspondence between one phenomenon of consciousness and another (after all, the object is also given to us only as a representation, as an internal idea).
In Lectures on Logic, Immanuel Kant writes:
Indeed, in a judgment evaluated as true or false, the connection is established not between the object and the idea, but between the idea and the idea, that is, in principle, phenomena of the same order. In other words, quoting Kant again, "the mind is able to create only reflections of its own objects, but not real things, that is, things as they could be in themselves cannot be cognized through these reflections and representations." Ancient Greek sophists and skeptics made the first major contribution to the development of this concept, and its current state was formalized by I. Kant and F. Nietzsche, after whose work nothing fundamental was said about this, including in the philosophy of postmodernism. Within the framework of extreme constructivism, truth in its classical understanding of subject-object correspondence seems completely impossible,an ancient illusion and delusion, for we cannot have any access to “reality as it is in itself”. But are other understandings of the truth possible?
Phenomenological constructivism
The arguments of extreme constructivism are impenetrable, and now this is understandable with even greater clarity than in the 19th century, or even more so in the Ancient world. Although many still wage a doomed battle with him, mostly out of conservatism and stubbornness, in the battle of interpretations of truth we have a clear winner. Truth as subject-object correspondence, even in the sense of moderate constructivism, is a self-contradictory anachronism, like the belief that the Earth is flat and rests on the backs of three whales.
And yet this victory does not please our hearts, for extreme constructivism, destroying the classical concepts of truth, apparently did not find a completely satisfactory substitute for them. Sometimes he leaves us with even bigger questions and problems than they were before. This is especially inevitable in situations when extreme constructivists (radical skeptics and sophists of the Ancient World, as well as some postmodern thinkers, especially adolescents) deny any truth and any criteria of reliability in general as impossible. At the same time, however, in spiritual simplicity, it is overlooked that such denial makes sense only if we consider it more reliable than its opposite. A position that denies truth as such denies itself, closing in on a vicious circle. Furthermore,it deprives the practice of its own existence, for it makes every decision in life, every preference for one over the other, completely groundless and arbitrary.
The first significant steps towards creating a new understanding of truth were taken by Kant and Nietzsche, and then continued by Husserl and Heidegger. In one of my early articles, I allowed myself to call this still emerging and emerging concept phenomenological constructivism. Its basis appears to be the difference between a phenomenon and a phenomenon. Phenomenon is an element of experience, knowledge that, to one degree or another, must reflect an “object”, “a thing-in-itself,” reality as such. This is how our experience has always been perceived and is still perceived - as a path to something "outside", as a representation of something, even if it is imperfect. A phenomenon, on the contrary, is experience, knowledge, seen not as a reflection of something, but in and of itself, as independent objects, not rooted in any otherworldly "true" realities.
Concentrate your attention on any material object, for example, on a book lying on the table. Classical theories teach that the book we perceive is a phenomenon - a distorted, limited image of something true that exists outside of us and independently of us. Our sensory perception of this object and our mental fabrications represent an attempt to grasp this true reality at least in basic terms. Unfortunately, this intuitive and so close to our spirit belief in the connection between the phenomenon and the "thing in itself" does not have the slightest foundation. Phenomenological constructivism calls for the elimination of this interfering double bottom, the ghost of "reality", as if looming behind the back of every object. The concept of truth should not be based on a mirage, an invisible and completely incomprehensible layer of reality outside of our experience,to which he must correspond, but on the very experience - that is, on the phenomenon.
The primary truth then is this phenomenon itself, its openness, everything that unfolds before us in a phenomenal field, and the criterion of truth is not the correspondence of knowledge to the object, but the correspondence of the phenomenon to the phenomenon, ultimately, knowledge to knowledge, about which Kant wrote two centuries ago, not who dared to go further along the path laid by him. Truth is everything that is directly manifested in the sphere of our experience, although its role and meaning may be incorrectly interpreted (as, for example, in the case of optical illusions). Secondary true can be complex ideas that have the character of inference, assumptions and generalizations and are always hypothetical - phenomena of the second level. Their ability is rooted in the ability of the mind to aggregate primary phenomena and, establishing connections between them, including causal ones, to formulate knowledge,beyond the immediate evidence. Since such knowledge is capable of being confirmed or refuted by the very orderly course of things, it dares to pretend to be a reflection of the phenomenal field. The criterion, the reliance on which allows you to support the conclusion, or to question it, is a check of its agreement with the already revered true (and showing themselves as such) connections within the phenomenal field at the moment of cognition.
These are the general touches of phenomenological constructivism, the truths of reason are not absolute in it, but represent a working interpretation of the connections between phenomena. This interpretation, devoid of support on any absolutes, is necessarily hypothetical, because its reliability rests only on the structure of the phenomenal field, and therefore can be both confirmed and refuted by our further experience. Modern science is more and more approaching a conscious understanding of the truth in just this way. Objectivity, as it was interpreted earlier, of course, in the light of what has been said is impossible, because knowledge appears not only relative, but also hypothetical. Truth and certainty are freed in phenomenological constructivism from mystifications and a touch of human arrogance, acquiring a much more modest status,to which only they had always the right.
© Oleg Tsendrovsky
