The Spirit of Truth

Truth in Transformation

Do we live in a “post-truth” era? In an era in which objective truth no longer exists, in which any given claim can be substantiated and in which it is no longer possible to tell falsehood and truth apart? Time magazine published an issue asking the question, “Is God dead? Is Truth dead?” Or is this only the case for politics, only in an America run by President Donald Trump?

The body of truth is peace, the body of falsehood is war. Nationalist power politics as pursued by President Putin in Russia, President Trump in the USA, and General Secretary Xi Jinping in China is no longer interested in truth. They wage war under the guise of peace, a hybrid form of war with economic sanctions and cyber wars, fake news, and lies. They believe in the “survival of the fittest” and deem their nation the “fittest.” For this reason, bilateral deals only make sense when you’re the stronger party.

The truth is always the first victim of any war. I myself have already experienced this: The Nazi era from 1933 to 1945 was “a pack of lies.” Everything was geared to World War II. The high national debt was geared to looting in the course of the war. The war began in 1939 with a “fake fact”: Polish soldiers supposedly attacked a German radio station in Gleiwitz, Upper Silesia. For Hitler, this was the casus belli against Poland. In reality, the agents had been SS soldiers in Polish uniforms. The bodies they left behind were concentration camp prisoners. Before the Second Iraq War, Colin Powell had to plead for the American war lie in front of the UN Security Council, and the falsehood was manifest in his face. War is the Father of Falsehood. In battle, truth is suspended. Whatever serves one’s own interest is allowed. On the domestic front, we are always facing the next election campaign; with regard to foreign affairs, we are always facing a struggle for power. It’s as if politicians had read John Austin’s book How to Do Things with Words, but they misunderstood it.

But politics is not everything: In democracies, there are independent courts, in front of which one is obliged to speak the truth under oath. There are universities and the objective truths of the sciences. There are honest politicians who say what they do and do what they say. Truth creates trust and trust creates peace, and without peace, life is not possible.

The fight of truth against falsehood is a matter of life and death. It is the struggle for the survival of humankind.

Objectivity Is Truth: Science

The academic community is a “truth-seeking community,” as John Polkinghorne of Cambridge accurately formulated. Scientific truth can be objectively ascertained. The experiment is repeatable and can thus be substantiated. A scientific theory heuristically aims at the next, better theory. Here, the old definition of objective truth is valid: “adaequatio rei et intellectus.” Every contradiction is detected as a mistake. False figures are disclosed. If you cheat at your dissertation, your PhD will be revoked, as multiple well-known German politicians have had to learn the hard way.

Scientific knowledge is part of the scientific-technical civilization which has established itself worldwide. However, its objective is not only the knowledge of truth, but also the power of humankind over nature. Four-hundred years ago, when this form of rationality was being developed in Europe, Francis Bacon proclaimed, “Knowledge is power.” Natural sciences are “power hungry.”

From Francis Bacon to Immanuel Kant, scientific experiments were compared to torture, designed to force nature to reveal her secrets. This comparison characterizes natural sciences not only as “power-hungry,” but also as violent. As the natural sciences historically progressed towards ever-new “discoveries,” Western empires made their “conquests” of the world. We can easily observe how quickly “knowledge as perception of truth” transmuted to “knowledge as power.” In 1945, seven years after the first documented nuclear fission by Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn in 1938, atomic bombs were already being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Every ten years, our scientific knowledge doubles, but we have no power over this power. Our research instinct and competition force us to progress. We are damned to progress! Western sciences have “outpaced” Asian teachings of wisdom, which linked knowledge to wisdom. We need a humane and ecological wisdom in order to deal with our immense knowledge in a way that is conducive to life, in order to not optimize humans in a “transhuman” way and to not make the earth uninhabitable. Ethics committees are fostering such knowledge of how we are to deal with our immense knowledge if it is to serve the cause of peace.

Recently I read, “Düsseldorf University is offering vocational training.” This casts the university as a trade school. This economization of science separates teaching from research. When I was a student seventy years ago, students participated in the research of their teachers. Today, teachers have to acquire “third-party funds” and postpone their research to their sabbatical. Students are no longer “academic citizens” who pursue their studies on their own terms. The Bologna Process has them rushing to get a move on, or collect credit points.

Seven weeks before Easter 2019, the Evangelical Church in Germany surprisingly advocated fasting during Lent with the words, “Let’s be honest—seven weeks without lying.” This gave rise to debate—also in Tübingen. Psychologists assert that, on average, people lie up to nine times a day. But what constitutes a lie? I assume it means that someone knows the truth and yet states an untruth, because they assume it to be more useful to them. This we call a “lie,” because we do not consider this to be good, but bad. We impose the moral standards “good and bad” on the statements of a person. Lying is “bad,” speaking the truth is “good.” This is valid among people under normal circumstances or in times of peace. People who speak the truth are in accord with themselves and in peace with their fellow humans. Under abnormal circumstances and in times of dictatorship, lies often become “good,” if it means saving other people. I am thinking of the time of the persecution of Jews by the Nazi dictatorship in Germany. Back then, saying the truth concerning Jews in hiding meant death, and lying saved lives. “Truth and falsehood” cannot be judged in abstract terms, but rather must be considered in concrete life situations.

Subjectivity Is Truth: Humanity

As far as I can remember, Kierkegaard said this against Hegel. Here, I mean character development, that is honesty and integrity, in short: being in accord with oneself; being oneself; “becoming one’s own person.” That includes not lying, but rather speaking the truth. A German figure of speech states: “He who lies once will not be believed, even if he speaks the truth”—a bit like “Once a liar, always a liar.” Speech lacks integrity when it attempts to mask its true intention, when there is a contradiction between what is being said and what is intended. When this happens, speech no longer aspires to communication, but rather aims to take advantage of the other person or gain power over others. And so we check whether statements actually say what they mean or if they are aiming at dominating the other.

In its subjective sense, truth is the correspondence of intention and statement. Subjectively speaking, truth is the equivalence of word and deed. These correlations are deeply rooted in a person’s relationship to themself. Whoever is in accord with themself is not prone to lie to themself or to others. Whoever accepts themself because they know themself to be accepted gains self-confidence. Whoever does not know themself, whoever is in conflict with themself, is mistrusted by others. Subjectivity is the truth: Always be in accord with yourself.

Truth creates trust. This also concerns How To Do Things with Words. Children have an innate basic trust. Adults have to develop a realistic sense of trust. Blind trust must become seeing trust. This requires mistrust: “Be careful whom you trust.” Terms we like to use today to denote trustworthiness such as “transparency” or “predictability” are objectifications which do not do the human and personal dimensions of trust and responsibility justice. Computers too are transparent and predictable. But they cannot be held responsible for their actions.

Trust creates freedom. We understand trust to be an atmosphere of life without which human life is not possible. Human life cannot merely be lived in the way that animal life is, but rather it must be affirmed, embraced, and loved, for it can also be refused, rejected, and hated. A human life that is refused, rejected, and hated takes ill and dies. This is not only valid in the case of children who are made street children or child soldiers. This is also the reality of adults: Trust is the habitat of freedom. Where other people trust me, I can come out of my shell and develop freely. Where I encounter mistrust and rejection, I feel cornered, withdraw, or become aggressive. In familiar, trust environments I feel free, whereas a strange environment will make me cautious.

The basis for all trust is promise. Friedrich Nietzsche asserted that the human being is “the creature that is able to make promises,” and, as any child will be happy to tell you, must also keep them. If I keep my promises, then I become trustworthy for others and get the reputation of being “reliable.” By means of the promises I make I define myself in my ambiguity and become unambiguous. In faithfulness to one’s promises, a human gains continuity throughout time, because one is reminded of oneself when one is reminded of one’s promises. By means of one’s promises, a person gains identity. Whoever breaks their promises loses themselves. Whoever keeps their promises remains true to themselves. Whoever doesn’t heed their promises becomes a fraud and eventually no longer knows themselves.

We indicate the biographical identity of a person by using their name. By means of my name, I identify myself with the person I was in my past, and I anticipate the person I will be in my future. My name makes me approachable. I use my name to sign my contracts and vouch for my responsibilities. Social cohabitation of free persons is always an intricate network of promises and reliabilities. Reliability and faithfulness are the hallmarks of the truth of persons. In this sense, “subjectivity” is truth.

This truth is, however, not only jeopardized by deceit and falsehood, but also by political and economic control. It seems that Lenin was to be proved right as far as modern societies are concerned: “Trust is good—control is better.” Our desire for security—after the terror “9/11 in New York” and in other places—has blown up the apparatuses of control to vertiginous extents. In the course of this process, the question “Who controls the controllers?” is forgotten or is not asked in the first place. Karl Marx perceived this dilemma of the surveillance state and was not able to offer an answer. It dates back to the Latin satirist Juvenal: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodies?” In socialist dictatorships, the answer was “Controllers control the controllers.” That is why the state security services expanded without limit, as the East German Stasi files attest. Like a cancerous growth, the security service spread in each city, in each village, in each factory and each family, and it did not give rise to security, but rather to general mistrust: Never say the truth, but rather only say what the party wants to hear you say. This destroyed not only trust in that state, but also the self-confidence of the people.

The total surveillance state is the police state, dictatorship, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. No “subject” of such “authority” speaks the truth, but rather only expresses what the authority wants to hear. And so production figures are tampered with in order to report the progress demanded. This was the downfall not only of the GDR. Recently, large companies have also introduced electronic means of surveillance in order to control their employees. The scandals we have seen in Germany illustrate that this “control of efficiency” destroys the working atmosphere of a company in the long term. The real “human capital” of companies is the trust of their employees. Only trust creates interest, co-responsibility, and voluntary collaboration. This human interaction can never be replaced by computers. Who controls digital instruments of surveillance such as Google and Facebook? The data which are collected everywhere—also called big data—are obviously less and less fit to protect, but rather sold or stolen and used without our consent. A “surveillance mafia” has emerged, doing “successful business with our data,” as Pär Ström says in his book titled “Die Überwachungsmafia: Das gute Geschäft mit unseren Daten” (Munich: Hanser Verlag, 2005). We are being digitally monitored, and not only monitored, but also manipulated.

Without trust, control cannot work, but can we trust the controllers? Without freedom, there is no need for security, but which security guarantees our freedom, and personal subjectivity as truth?

The surveillance state is based on an extremely pessimistic anthropology: “Man is wolf to man” (homo homini lupus). This is why people require the strong hand of the state. The surveillance state becomes the “Leviathan”: the voracious super-wolf, since it consists of humans. Dictatorships are the rule of wolves controlled by no one because they control everything.

The Spirit of Truth: Divinity

Let us start with the famous quotation of Lessing concerning the two hands of God:

If God were to hold all Truth concealed in his right hand, and in his left only the steady and diligent drive for Truth, albeit with the proviso that I would always and forever err in the process, and to offer me the choice, I would with all humility take the left hand, and say: “Father, I will take this one—the pure Truth is but for You alone!” (Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Eine Duplik (Braunschweig: Buchhandlung des Fürstlichen Waisenhauses, 1778), 11)

When he spoke of the “steady and diligent drive for Truth,” Lessing was not only referring to the secret that “binds the world’s innermost core together,” but also the subjective truth in humans’ interaction with each other: Here, truth is the correspondence of head and heart, of promise and faithfulness, of intention and statement, of trust and peace. The “drive for Truth” means the passion for peace, as peace is the condition for Truth, and war is the Father of Lies.

Peace is not only the absence of violence, but also the presence of justice. Without justice, there can be no sustainable peace. In the context of human cohabitation, the “drive for Truth” is much more difficult than in the context of the objective truth of natural sciences. Many people resign and muddle through by means of white lies or silence. And yet everyone longs for truthfulness and integrity. In South Africa, Bishop Desmond Tutu set up the “Truth and Reconciliation Commissions” when the white apartheid regime fell. These were spaces where the concealed and suppressed truths came to light. This contributed to peace in South Africa. I wish something similar had taken place in the course of the political transition from socialist dictatorship to democracy in Eastern European states.

Now let us take a look at the right hand of God: “Pure Truth” and “all Truth” is in God’s right hand, as Lessing put it. If the pure, full Truth did not exist, there would be no drive for Truth within the human being. If there were no hope to find the pure, full Truth, we would not set out on the quest. The pure full Truth is not manifested by anything else, but rather in and of itself. That is why it is anchored in God: “Father … the pure Truth is but for You alone.” Either it is concealed to humans in the same way God is, or it is God’s self-revelation to humans. “Veritas est index sui et falsi” is an old dictum. Pure, full Truth reveals and gives proof of itself. We can “dis-cover” the secret of natural truth in research. The secret of human truth is placed in our truthful spirit and our honest hearts. The secret of divine, that is to say, pure, full Truth, must be “revealed” to us. Perhaps we cannot say what pure, full Truth is, but it is already manifest in the index falsi, the uncovering of falsehood. Truth reveals falsehood; good reveals evil; true life makes “false life” apparent.

But do we really have to choose between God’s two hands? For the “pure, full Truth” and the “steady and diligent drive for Truth” are mutually dependent and complementary to each other: Without Truth, there would be no drive for Truth, and the drive for Truth indicates that Truth exists.

So why not take hold of both of God’s hands? To be more precise: God’s right hand holds us and God’s left hand drives us onward.

In faith, we are grasped by the self-revelation of the eternal Truth, and then the Spirit of Truth drives us onward to search for Truth and chase after peace.

Psalm 36:10: “In your light we see the light” of Truth.