The previous installment may still have been a bit too academic in style, so this time I’ll try to speak a little more casually, offering only some prompts and not taking responsibility for digging too deeply.
Today I’ll start from an ordinary phrase: “The weather is really nice.” Originally I wanted to write “Beauty, the weather is really nice today,” and discuss truth, goodness, beauty, heaven, earth, and humanity, but it felt like that would involve too much, so I narrowed it down to this one sentence and will talk only about “truth” and “goodness.”
“Truth, goodness, and beauty” seem like the most solemn and sacred of all “big words,” the ultimate goals philosophers pursue; some people, when speaking of them, seem ready to fast, burn incense, bathe, and change clothes, just to show how serious they are.
But no philosopher, however arrogant, can easily treat these concepts as the exclusive property of philosophy, because they are far too ordinary: everyone talks about them, and everyone pursues truth, goodness, and beauty.
To show off a sense of superiority, some people draw a distinction, saying that ordinary people pursue an everyday truth, goodness, and beauty, whereas we pursue the ultimate truth, goodness, and beauty—truth in the highest degree, goodness in the highest degree, beauty in the highest degree. In principle, that is not wrong, but here one can easily run into the misleading habit of turning concepts into nouns, as if what we are pursuing were a pure thing called “truth,” something beyond the life-world, floating in a realm of ideas, waiting for us to pluck it down. But seeking truth is not about plucking out some particular thing. Truth, goodness, and beauty can never be separated from the life-world, nor from concrete things; truth is always the truth of something, goodness is always the goodness of something. If there is any “truth” that stands a level above other concrete “truths,” it is nothing other than the “truth” of this special thing called “I.” So one must be a true person, a good person, and live a beautiful life—this is indeed a pursuit one level higher than the concrete pursuit of the truth and goodness of some particular thing, but in the final analysis it still resides within life, not in some lofty goal detached from life.
In philosophical texts, the truth, goodness, and beauty being discussed are the same concepts people speak of in everyday life, only sorted out more carefully and accompanied by more reflection. And philosophical reflection begins with understanding and affirming everyday concepts.
The phrase “The weather is really nice” already contains the two words “truth” and “goodness”—“goodness” is basically just the literary Chinese way of saying “good”; “How good, how good” (善哉善哉) is just “Nice, nice,” isn’t it.
Let’s first look at “truth.” What does “truth” mean here? We find that it actually doesn’t mean much at all; it’s just a particle of emphasis. “Really nice” and “nice” seem not to differ at all; it merely adds emphasis.
In most everyday usages, “truth” is nothing more than a way of expressing emphasis. “Really good” is “good,” “really impressive” is “impressive.” In English, “tell the truth,” “really,” “actually,” and so on, often also serve to express emphasis.
What does it mean to say something and then say that it is “true”? In fact, it is basically also a matter of emphasis, equivalent to repeating the statement once more, without saying anything new. Perhaps you would say that “truth” means this thing is not fictional or fabricated, but even that is something a solemn, emphatic tone can convey.
It should be noted that “truth” can also be used to speak of fictional things, for example: “Holmes is dead.” “Really?” “Really dead.” Here the two people are discussing a plotline in a “fictional” novel; relative to the world constructed by the novel, it is true, but relative to the everyday life-world, it is not true. In fact every sentence has its context; “The weather is really nice” may apply to Beijing today, but not to Shanghai yesterday. No sentence is universally valid everywhere.
So “truth” does not mean that a sentence corresponds to some “single real world,” but that it corresponds to the context in which it is situated.
Here, what is the relation between “correspondence” and “emphasis”? What does “correspond” mean? Break a military tally in two, and when delivering an order, bring the two halves together; if they match up, that is called “correspondence.” “Correspondence” is an action: it is placing the two sides together and comparing them face-to-face. What does “emphasis” mean, or “stress”? It means making one part heavier, or strengthening a stretch of sound; in short, it is to bring something out from its surroundings and point it out. For example, these quotation marks “ ” are a kind of emphasis: they bring the words inside them to the fore. Adding an accent mark, drawing a circle, and so on are all ways of highlighting something, or saying “there”—“There it is”—which is also a typical form of emphasis, namely pointing something out and making it stand out.
So when we say that “truth” is “correspondence,” that is not wrong, but the premise is that “truth” is first “emphasis”; only after emphasis can there be correspondence. We first bring some thing out from its context, distinguishing it from its surroundings, and only then can we examine whether the boundary where the two meet “correspond.”
For instance, I am reading a novel, “The Final Problem.” The story is full of twists and turns; when I am absorbed in the world of the novel, I am not reading it proposition by proposition—I am seeing a whole story. “Holmes is dead” is one plot point within it, not a proposition. There may or may not be such a sentence in the novel; what I remember is the plot, not the proposition. But when I highlight this plot point and ask, “Really?” at that moment, “Holmes is dead” becomes a proposition. This proposition is pulled out of its context and considered on its own, and only then do we put it back into context and judge whether it “corresponds.”
Many philosophers who study truth forget this act of “emphasis”; they only remember “correspondence,” as if propositions were from the very start independent, self-subsisting things floating in conceptual space. Then they go looking for how conceptual space and real space can be made to meet, so as to judge truth or falsity. But in essence, “revealing truth” is not an act of bringing together a “proposition” and the “world” that had nothing to do with each other; rather, it is precisely by means of propositions that some link in the world is brought to the fore.
The reason “emphasis” is forgotten is that emphasis and correspondence are often carried out separately, much as a military tally is first split into two halves and then passed along; after several layers of transmission, it is kept by some general who never experienced the splitting process, and when that general finally fits the two halves back together, he may think they are two entirely unrelated, independent things that can only be joined for some mysterious reason. More skeptical people even think it is impossible in any case to determine absolute fit. Once something is “brought out” of its context by means of words, propositions, or any other preservation technology, those words and propositions can thereafter drift away from the process of bringing-out and circulate on their own; and the person who eventually tries to determine whether they correspond is very likely to mistake the issue of the relation between proposition and world for the issue of how two mutually independent things might accidentally happen to fit together.
People often understand “truth” as the thing’s original appearance, but what is its original appearance? Appearance is what is seen by people; if one insists on saying that before the world is seen by anyone it already has an original appearance, then that appearance is also chaotic and noisy. When we muddle through life in a hazy state, the world is continuous, rather than consisting of one thing after another happening in sequence and then one object after another appearing one by one as phenomena. Only when we use an appropriate method—such as words and propositions—to mark out and emphasize do certain events and objects get grasped.
Is “eating a meal” a thing? Eating a meal may involve innumerable tangled activities, for example: picking up chopsticks, lifting a bowl, watching TV, listening to someone next to you speak, opening your mouth to talk, glancing at the weather outside the window, going out to close the window, standing up to serve rice, picking up vegetables, swallowing, chewing, thinking about what to eat tomorrow, recalling what you ate yesterday, paying attention to national affairs, switching TV channels, and so on and so on. Yet when we reflect or speak, these chaotic innumerable actions are intentionally or unintentionally organized by us; some are subsumed under the event “eating a meal,” while others serve as background or are simply ignored. Is “a bowl of rice” a thing? Or is it two things—bowl and rice—or innumerable objects made up of grains of rice, or perhaps one part of a set meal…
So we always first have to use “emphasis,” through stressing or marking out, to point out things one by one and reorganize our lived experience. Such pointing-out can be appropriate or inappropriate, precise or imprecise. If you ate one bowl of rice but say you ate two, then that is wrong, and so the proposition “I ate two bowls” is not “true” but “false.” Of course, if we are discussing appetite, and my rice bowl is especially large so that one bowl is equivalent to two ordinary bowls, then my saying “I ate two bowls” becomes “true” again. Whether a sentence is true or false does not depend solely on the relation between the sentence itself and the bowl of rice as object; it depends on the relation between the sentence and its whole context. And the bowl of rice as the object referred to was originally also part of the context; it only becomes a definite “object” because this sentence particularly emphasizes it and pulls it out of the context.
I’ll stop here for today. My language still seems not quite colloquial enough—truth really is hard, after all, since this is such a big issue. I’ll do my best~
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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