TEN YEARS AGO, OR LESS, THERE WAS MORE PUBLIC CONFIDENCE (IN OUR WESTERN CULTURE) THAT THERE WAS SUCH A THING AS ‘THE TRUTH’.

 

THAT IS, THERE HAS BEEN CONFIDENCE THAT THERE IS “TRUTH” AND THAT IT’S JUST A MATTER OF KEEPING AN OPEN MIND AND DOING SUFFICIENT ‘INVESTIGATIONS’ TO DISCOVER ‘THE TRUTH’.

 

OF COURSE, NIETZSCHE, AMONG OTHERS, INSISTED THAT THERE WAS NO SUCH THING AS ‘THE TRUTH’ AND I GET THE POINT, having been interested for a long while in Goedel’s Theorem of the INCOMPLETEMENT of all FINITE SYSTEMS OF PROPOSITIONS.

 

It only makes sense, being that we are included in a transforming relational continuum, there are no FIXED LOCAL AND EXPLICIT ‘NUGGETS OF TRUTH’.

 

Our personal experience is UNIQUE so that TRUTH is not the TRUTH that most people talk about.  We talk about ‘the TRUTH ABOUT WHAT IS GOING ON IN THE UKRAINE’.  The versions of TRUTH coming from RUSSIA and CHINA differ radically from the versions of TRUTH coming from the U.S. and NATO countries.

 

We are familiar, from knowledge of prior Wartime periods that many things that were presented as ‘the TRUTH’ were NOT THE TRUTH. And even with the passage of many years, it is not as if “THE TRUTH’ finally ‘floats to the surface’.

 

There is a problem with TRUTH as a GENERALIZATION since everyone is experience things uniquely.  If we want to get to something which approaches a ‘general truth’ it seems as if we have to bring many different accounts of experience into a collective confluence and capture the COHERENCIES in the confluence.

 

This is effectively what the indigenous aboriginal LEARNING CIRCLE is all about.

 

As for us WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS, we continue to employ the age-old WESTERN CULTURE method described by Lafontaine; i.e. “La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure”  (Reason (truth) of the most powerful is always the best’).

 

The LEARNING CIRCLE approach to the ‘truth’ is also suggested by Nietzsche;

 

There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival ‘knowing’; the more affects we are able to put into words about a thing, the more eyes, various eyes we are able to use for the same thing, the more complete will be our ‘concept’ of the thing, our ‘objectivity’.– Nietzsche

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