Truth is perhaps the oldest and most abiding issue of philosophy. From the pre-Socratic skepticism of earliest times to the analytic acumen of contemporary philosophy, the question of what truth is, and whether it is anything at all apart from a human construction, has never been adequately answered. Underlying this query is a paradoxical issue: if truth is not relative to a given perspective, how can we, being bound by perspective, ever possibly attain it? And if truth is always relative to a given perspective, then is it ever actually “truth” or merely interpretation?
The concept of truth as objective and independent of the human mind has been maintained by countless philosophers. For example, Plato’s allegory of the cave is a statement of the belief that truth is beyond appearances, a reality unconstrained by shadows or subjective experience. Truth, in this vision, is like the sun: constant, illuminating, and beyond the refractions of human life. That is comforting for those who strive for universality in ethics, science, or metaphysics. If truth is autonomous from human interpretation, then it provides a firm foundation on which we can build knowledge and meaning.
But this quest has a second point to contend with: all knowledge of truth comes by way of human faculties, our senses, languages, cultures, and conceptual systems. Nietzsche established the challenge thus rhetorically with his very insistence that there “are no facts, only interpretations.” We never find ourselves face to face with truth in itself, in this understanding, but always through the blinkers of human vision. What we talk about as truth, then, is not some enduring presence which is beyond us, but something hammered out in and through history, power, and circumstance. Even science, the most promising path to objective truth, is an ideal-based, theory-based, measurement-based exercise—all human approximations. This paradox of truth, between independence and dependence, opens up the possibility that truth is both transcendent and immanent.
It may be in an independent position with respect to human knowledge, but only reachable by human understanding. That is, truth doesn’t require us to be, but our conception of it always will be from a certain perspective. Consider the laws of physics: human or no human, gravity behaves. But our understanding of gravity changed from Aristotle through Newton to Einstein, and perhaps again. The truth of gravity is out there, but all human descriptions of it are partial, provisional, and dependent on a certain perspective. This duality also has moral undertones.
If truth is completely independent of perspective, it threatens to make truth irrelevant to human existence, something that is but never attainable. But if truth is completely a creation of perspective, then it dissolves into relativism, where every perspective is on par and there is no shared ground. The paradox of truth is not in choosing between poles, but holding the tension between them. Truth may be external to us, but is only significant within the hermeneutic borders of human existence. Perhaps the paradox is not to be solved but lived.
The search for truth, then, is not so much a making of claims to ultimate certainty but a sharpening of the mind, a probing of assumptions, and a seeking for increasingly greater clarity. Truth can always be held just out of full grasp, but by stretching for it we are doing the very life’s blood of philosophy, a restless reach toward the real, with the knowledge that the search itself may be the closest we come.