The Problem of Truth and the Truth of the Problem, by Olavo de Carvalho, is a thought-provoking text that explores the concept of truth and its intricate relationship with judgments. Divided into three parts, the text examines contrasting attitudes towards truth, where some believe in its existence as a fundamental measure, while others dismiss it as unnecessary. The text presents a provisional definition of truth as the universal and permanent cognitive foundation for the validity of judgments, challenging the notion that truth is a property of judgments. It introduces the concept of veridicality, which pertains to judgments with a universal and permanent cognitive foundation. The text further delves into the foundation of judgments, extending beyond judgments themselves to include intuitive perception and the truth of empirical data. It concludes by addressing the question of where truth resides, positing that truth is a domain that transcends and encompasses facts, judgments, and relations.
The Problem of Truth and the Truth of the Problem offers a fresh perspective on truth, presenting a broader understanding that goes beyond the traditional view of truth as a property of judgments. It challenges the prevalent frivolous approach towards truth and emphasizes its importance as the foundation for the validity of judgments. The text highlights the significance of truth in our cognitive processes, recognizing its presence in a domain that encompasses various aspects of human cognition and experience.
The Problem of Truth and the Truth of the Problem
Olavo de Carvalho
Philosophy Seminar, May 20, 1999
1. Radical Questioning
1. Satisfied Frivolity
Quid est veritas? This is the most serious and the most frivolous of questions. It depends, evidently, on the intention of the one who asks. Some admit that the meaning and value of human life depend on the existence of some truth that is eminently certain and reliable, which can serve as a measure for assessing the validity of our thoughts. Others believe that life can perfectly well go on without any truth and without any foundation. Among these was certainly the old Pilate. When he exclaimed, “What is truth?” he was not really asking a question, but expressing, with a shrug of his shoulders, his little disposition to take that question seriously. The prospect of there being no truth, which would lead to despair for those who believe that life needs it to justify itself, was for Pilate a relief and a consolation—the guarantee of being able to continue living without concerns. Some bet on the existence of truth and cherchent en gémissant. Others turn their backs on it and wash their hands.1 The verbal formula with which they express themselves is the same: Quid est veritas? But in the difference of their nuances lies the entire distance from the tragic to the comic.
The frivolous or comic school is widely dominant today, whether in universities or in culture in general. Even those who seek to believe in an effective truth surround it with all sorts of limits and obstacles, for example by reducing it to the type of partial and provisional truth given to us by some experimental sciences. Others cling to faith, saying that truth exists but is beyond our comprehension.
In any debate about the problem of truth, these days, the program almost invariably consists of reiterating the observations made by philosophers, from Pyrrho to Richard Rorty, about the limits of human knowledge. These limits, seen together, form a formidable mountain of obstacles to any claim to know the truth. And this mountain is growing, with a peak that moves further and further away as we climb it. For example, from the simplistic objections of the Pyrrhonian school against the validity of knowledge through the senses to the enormously complex constructions with which psychoanalysis denies the primacy of consciousness or Gramsci reduces all truth to the expression of ideologies that succeed each other throughout history, the machine for injecting discouragement into the seeker of truth has evolved a great deal. It is not surprising that many of the builders of this machine, when they add a new piece to it, instead of lamenting the increase in human impotence, bring to their lips a smile similar to that of Pilate. The nonexistence of truth or the impossibility of knowing it is a comfort for them. We will see later what the deeper reasons for this strange satisfaction are.
2. Provisional Definition of Truth
For now, let us set aside these creatures and, on our own, raise the question of truth. Since we do not yet know whether truth exists or what it asserts, we must appeal to a provisional formal definition that allows us to begin the investigation without prejudging its outcome. This provisional definition, to meet this requirement, must express the mere intentional meaning of the term, as it appears even in the mouths of those who deny the existence of any truth, since to deny the existence of something one must understand the meaning of the term that designates it.
I say, then, that truth, that truth which we still do not know whether it exists or not, that truth whose existence and consistency will be the object of our investigation as they have been for so many investigations that preceded us, is the permanent and universal cognitive foundation of the validity of judgments. If we say, for example, that the only foundation for the validity of our judgments is their utility, we deny the existence of a cognitive foundation, that is, we deny the existence of truth by denying one of the elements that make up its definition. The same applies if we say that all valid judgments are based on faith. However, if we affirm that there are no valid judgments of any kind, then we deny the existence of any foundation, cognitive or otherwise. If we affirm that judgments are only valid for a certain time and place, we deny that the foundation is permanent. If we affirm that judgments are only subjectively valid for the one who pronounces them, we deny that the foundation is universal. If we say that the foundation for the validity of judgments is purely logical and formal, without any relevance to the real objects mentioned in the judgment, we deny that this foundation has cognitive meaning. All these denials of truth presuppose the definition of truth as the permanent and universal cognitive foundation of the validity of judgments. Likewise, if we say that truth exists, that it is knowable, and that based on it we can build a set of valid knowledge, we have not added or subtracted anything from this definition, but have merely affirmed that the object defined in it exists. Our provisional definition, therefore, being compatible with the two maximally opposed currents of opinion that dispute the question, is a higher and neutral ground from which the investigation can be initiated without prejudice and with all honesty and rigor.
3. Is Radical Questioning of Truth Possible?
We start, then, from a consensus. The next step in the investigation is to ask whether truth, as defined, can or cannot be the object of radical questioning. By radical questioning, I mean the type of questioning that, admitting ex hypothesi the nonexistence of its object—for example, as has often been done with the existence of God, innate ideas, or the external world—ends up concluding either in favor of that same nonexistence or of existence.
The radical questioner of God, innate ideas, or the external world can question them because he places himself, from the beginning, outside the divine, innatist, or worldly domain; that is, he reasons as if God or innate ideas or the world did not exist. Depending on the course of his investigation, he will either conclude that his premise is absurd, leading him to admit the existence of what he had initially posited as nonexistent, or, conversely, he will conclude that the premise holds perfectly well and that what was supposed to be nonexistent truly does not exist.
The most classic example of employing this method is that of Descartes. He assumes the nonexistence of the external world, sensory data, his own body, etc., etc., and continues to reason along these lines until he reaches a limit—the cogito ergo sum—which forces him to retreat and admit the existence of everything he had initially denied.
Radical questioning is the harshest test to which philosophy can subject any idea or entity that claims to exist.
Therefore, what we must ask, right after obtaining the formal definition of truth, is whether truth, as defined, can be the object of radical questioning or not. The answer, which may surprise many, is a categorical no. Truth cannot be the object of radical questioning.
No investigation into truth, no matter how radical it claims to be, can assume the nonexistence of any permanent and universal cognitive foundation for the validity of judgments and continue to reason consistently with this premise until it reaches some result, positive or negative. And it cannot do so for a very simple reason: the affirmation of the absolute nonexistence of any permanent and universal cognitive foundation for the validity of judgments would itself be the permanent and universal cognitive foundation for the subsequent judgments made in the same line of inquiry. The investigation would be paralyzed as soon as it was formulated.
Let us briefly examine some of the classic strategies of denying truth that the questioner could resort to in order to escape this cul-de-sac.
Let us try, for example, the pragmatist strategy. It asserts that the validity of judgments rests on their practical usefulness, and therefore the foundation of this validity is not cognitive. If we were to say that the nonexistence of a universal and permanent cognitive foundation for the validity of judgments is not itself a universal and permanent cognitive foundation, but only a practical foundation, one of two things would follow: either this practical foundation would have to be, in turn, universal and permanent, or it would be merely partial and provisional.
In the first hypothesis, we would have two problems: on the one hand, we would fall into the paradox of a universal usefulness, that is, something that could serve usefully for all practical purposes, even the most contradictory ones. It would be the universal means to all ends or, even more clearly, the universal panacea. On the other hand, we would have to ask whether belief in this panacea would itself have a cognitive foundation or whether it would be merely a practical usefulness, and so on infinitely.
In the second hypothesis—that is, if the questioner were to admit that the assertion of the nonexistence of truth is only a partial and provisional foundation for the validity of subsequent judgments—then, obviously, the possibility would always remain unshaken that outside the thus delimited domain there could exist other universal and permanent cognitive foundations to validate an infinity of other judgments, and the investigation could continue indefinitely, jumping from provisional foundation to provisional foundation, without ever being able to be grounded in its own presupposition, that is, in the radical nonexistence of truth.
Let’s try a second strategy, that of subjective relativism. This proclaims, with Protagoras, that “man is the measure of all things,” which is commonly interpreted as “to each his own,” meaning that what is true is only true from the perspective of the one who thinks it, and it may be false from the perspective of everyone else. Can this statement constitute the basis for a radical questioning of truth, in such a way that the denial of the existence of any universal and permanent cognitive foundation for the validity of judgments does not itself become the universal and permanent cognitive foundation on which the validity of subsequent judgments in the same line of inquiry is based? In other words, can relativism deny the existence of valid judgments for all men without this denial becoming a valid judgment for all men? To do so, it would have to deny the universality of this denial, which would result in admitting the existence of some or some or an infinity of valid judgments for all men. Thus, relativism itself would be relativized and would end up being reduced to a platitude without any philosophical meaning, that is, the affirmation that some judgments are not valid for all men, which implies the possibility that other judgments may be valid. No, subjective relativism cannot achieve a radical questioning of truth, just as pragmatism could not.
Can historicism do it then? This declares that all truth is merely the expression of a temporally localized and limited worldview. People think this or that not because it imposes itself as universally and permanently obligatory truth, but only because it imposes itself in a limited place and for a limited period. By proclaiming these limits, can historicism prevent the affirmation of these limits from becoming itself the universal and permanent cognitive foundation for the validity of judgments? For this to happen, it would be necessary to admit that there may be some foundation that denies this affirmation. However, if such a foundation exists, then there is some truth whose validity is unlimited in time and space, some truth whose validity escapes historical conditioning—and historicism would be reduced to the miserable realization that some foundations of validity are historically conditioned, while others are not, without even being able to apply this distinction to specific cases without affirming, in the same act, the invalidity of the historicist principle taken as a universal rule.2
I will spare the reader the enumeration of all possible subterfuges and their detailed refutation. They can perform them themselves as an exercise, if they so desire. I even suggest that they do so. And no matter how many times they do it, they will always end up coming back to the same point: it is not possible to deny the existence of a universal and permanent cognitive foundation for the validity of judgments, under any pretext, without that denial, along with its respective pretext, having to affirm itself as the universal and permanent cognitive foundation for the validity of judgments, thus paralyzing the subsequent denial by which the investigation should continue if it could. In short, truth as we define it cannot be the subject of radical questioning. Nor can the possibility of knowing it. Once it is denied that it is possible to know any universal and permanent cognitive foundation for the validity of judgments, this impossibility itself would become such a foundation, affirming in the same act its own lack of any foundation, or else, in order not to assume this shameful role, it would have to limit itself to affirming that some judgments have no foundation and others probably do—a statement within the reach of any schoolboy.
Unable to reach the desired target, the enemy of truth is therefore condemned to nibble at it around the edges eternally, without ever reaching the vital core of what it desires to destroy. It will deny one truth or another, under one pretext or another, varying the strategies and directions of the attack, but it can never escape its fate: each denial of a truth will be the affirmation of another, and both that denial and this affirmation will always result in the affirmation of truth itself, that is, the actual existence of some universal and permanent cognitive foundation for the validity of judgments.
This explains, at the same time, the continuous, unlimited, and unrestrained proliferation of denials of truth, and its complete impossibility to sweep away the belief in the existence of truth, the belief in the possibility of knowing the truth, the belief in the present and full possession of some truth capable of providing a universal and permanent foundation for the validity of judgments.
Therefore, the number and variety of attacks on truth, from Pyrrho to Richard Rorty, far surpass the number and variety of defenses that formally present themselves as such: it is because they themselves, even against the will of their authors, always end up constituting defenses and praises of truth, not only sparing the apologist’s effort but also enlivening what they would like to bury and honoring what they would like to humiliate.
This is also the reason why beginners, impressed by the variety and continuous recurrence of attacks on truth observed in the history of philosophy - with a remarkably increasing speed in today’s days - quickly adhere to skepticism to avoid feeling like a member of an isolated and weakened minority. However, by continuing their studies and overcoming the initial impression based solely on apparent quantity, they cannot maintain this position and eventually realize that the strength does not lie in the number of deniers, no matter how impressive it may seem, but in the quality of the happy few who serenely affirm the truth.
2. Truth is Not a Property of Judgments
1. Truth and Veridicality
The impossibility of radical questioning, as we have noted in the previous chapter, leads to the conclusion that truth can only be attacked in parts, but each denial of a part reaffirms the validity of the whole. In other words, what can be questioned are “truths.” “The” truth cannot be questioned and in fact never has been, except in words, that is, through a feigned denial that ultimately results in an affirmation.
But this leads us one step further in our investigation. A venerable tradition, initiated by Aristotle, affirms that truth resides in judgments, that it is a property of judgments. Some judgments “possess” truth, others do not. We call the former true judgments, and the latter false judgments. The set of true judgments is therefore a subset of the set of possible judgments. The set of possible judgments, in turn, is a subset of the set of human cognitive acts, which is a subset of the set of mental acts, which is a subset of the set of human acts, and so on. Thus, the territory of truth is a small area within the vast world of thoughts, acts, and beings.
Is this really possible? How could truth be both the foundation for the validity of all judgments and a property of some specific judgments? Is there not a glaring contradiction or at least a problem in this?
To address and resolve this, we must here establish a distinction between truth and veridicality. Truth is the universal and permanent cognitive foundation for the validity of judgments. Veridicality is a quality observed in some judgments, whereby their validity has a universal and permanent cognitive foundation.
Once we understand this, it becomes clear that truth is a foundational condition for veridicality, and not the other way around. If there were no universal and permanent cognitive foundation for the validity of judgments, no judgment could have a universal and permanent cognitive foundation. However, if a particular judgment possesses this foundation, nothing in the world can determine that only it possesses it, i.e., that the existence of the foundation depends on the existence of that particular judgment. On the other hand, that particular judgment could not exist and be veridical if there were no truth at all. Truth is therefore logically prior to veridicality and constitutes its foundation.
Being the foundation not only for the veridicality of true judgments but also for the inveridicality of false judgments, if veridicality is only present in true judgments and cannot be present in false judgments, truth must be present in both as the foundation for the veracity of the former and the inveridicality of the latter. Thus, the territory of truth is not identical to the set of possible true judgments but encompasses it and the set of possible false judgments.
2. Is the Foundation of All Judgments a Judgment?
Must truth, the foundation of all judgments, necessarily be a judgment itself? Can only a judgment be the foundation of another judgment? The answer is both yes and no. Yes, if by foundation we restrictively and conventionally mean the premise on which the proof of the judgment is based. But the premise affirms something about something else, and this something else is not a judgment but an object of it. For example, I say that turtles have shells. I base this judgment on the definitions of “turtle” and “shell,” which are judgments, but these definitions are based on observation - which is not a judgment - of turtles and shells, which are also not judgments. Shouldn’t this observation also be true, capturing truly present traits in true objects? Or will I resort to the subterfuge that the observation must only be “exact,” and the concept of “true” does not apply to it? But what does “exact” mean in this case, other than that which informs me of nothing beyond or other than what was truly observed in what an object truly showed? Moreover, is it genuine accuracy or just a semblance of it? There is no escape: either there is truth in the observation itself, or it cannot be exact, correct, adequate, or possess any other quality that recommends it unless that quality is itself true.
Thus, the foundation for the veridicality of a judgment is not only in the veridicality of the judgments that serve as its premises, but also - in the case of judgments concerning objects of experience - in the truth of the data from which I extract those premises and in the truth of what I know about them through experience.
Furthermore, if the foundation of judgments had to be itself always a judgment, then the first foundation of all judgments would itself be a judgment devoid of any foundation. Aristotle, led to this impasse, claimed that knowledge of first principles is immediate and intuitive. But by this, he only meant that these principles had no proof, not that they were devoid of foundations. For example, the principle of identity, expressed in the judgment A = A, has no judgment behind it that can serve as a premise for its demonstration, but it has an objective foundation in the ontological identity of each being with itself, which is not a judgment. Now, what can be known intuitively is this ontological identity, and not the judgment A = A that merely manifests it. The intuition of the first logical principle does not occur in the form of a judgment but as an immediate evidence that, in itself, is not a judgment. There can be no judgment without signs that transform this immediate evidence into a verbum mentis, a conscious assent that, while not yet a proposition, a verbal affirmation, is no longer mere intuition but a mental reflection of it, and therefore, a derived and secondary cognitive act, not a primary one.
Thus, if the territory of logical premises begins with the judgments that affirm the first principles, this territory by no means covers the entire field of cognitive foundations, which, on the contrary, extends into the domain of intuitive perception, whether of objects of experience or of first principles.
Therefore, the falsity of the image in which truth is a small zone carved out in the vastness of the territory of possible judgments becomes evident. It is the judgments, true and false, that are a modest cut within the immense territory of truth.
3. Where is Truth?
1. Truth as a Domain
With this, we come to understand that truth, being the criterion for the validity of judgments, cannot be an immanent property of the judgments themselves, nor can it be something entirely external to the judgments that judges them from outside, for such judgment would itself be a judgment. If I say “the chicken laid an egg,” where can the truth of this judgment be found? In the judgment itself, independently of the chicken, or in the chicken, independently of the judgment? The absurdity of the first hypothesis led Spinoza to proclaim the futility of judgments of experience, which are never valid or invalid in themselves and always depend on something external: a true judgment, according to him, would have to be true in itself, regardless of anything, such as a = a, which is independent of what a may be and of any other external verification. But the identity of a with a is not only in the judgment that affirms it but also in the consistency of a, whatever it may be. There is no purely logical judgment that can be true or false in itself and without reference to what it speaks of. Even a judgment that speaks only of itself unfolds into the judgment that affirms it and the judgment from which something is affirmed, and the latter is certainly not the former. Saying that a judgment is true in itself cannot mean complete detachment from the world, which is presupposed in the very possibility of enunciating a judgment. The flight to the realm of formal identity does not solve the problem at all. Shall we then say, with an old tradition, that truth lies in the relation between judgment and thing? Well, this relation is itself affirmed in a judgment, which in turn must have a relation to its object (the affirmed relation), and so on infinitely.
The other hypothesis, that the truth of the judgment “the chicken laid an egg” lies in the chicken independently of the judgment, leads us to equally insurmountable difficulties. It would imply that the truth of the judgment is independent of whether the judgment is actually uttered, meaning that once the chicken lays an egg, the judgment affirming it is true even if, as a judgment, it does not exist. Edmund Husserl would subscribe to this without hesitation: the truth of the judgment is a matter of pure logic, which has nothing to do with the merely empirical question of a particular judgment being affirmed one day by someone. The confusion between the sphere of the truth of judgments and the sphere of their psychological production has indeed done great harm to philosophy, and Husserl definitively clarified this confusion. But if the chicken laid an egg and no one said anything about it, the truth in that case is not in the judgment but in the fact. The judgment that has not been uttered yet cannot be true or false, it can only have the conditions to be so; if it is true that the chicken laid an egg, the judgment affirming it will be true if formulated, while the truth of the fact is already established with the appearance of the egg.
But if the truth of the judgment “the chicken laid an egg” is neither in the judgment independently of the chicken, nor in the chicken independently of the judgment, nor in the relation between the chicken and the judgment, then where on earth can it be?
Well, we have just seen that, regardless of the judgments that affirm them, the objects intended in the judgments can also be true or false, independently of any judgments that may be uttered about them. “The chicken laid an egg” is opposed to “the chicken did not lay an egg,” regardless of whether someone says it or not. There is contradiction and identity in the real, independently of whether a judgment affirms or denies anything about it. Or, to put it equivalently, truth exists in reality, not just in judgments, or else it could not exist in judgments in any way. There is truth in the fact that the chicken laid an egg, there is truth in the judgment affirming it, and there is truth as well in the relation between the judgment and the fact, as well as in the judgment affirming the relation between the judgment and the fact: truth cannot then be in the fact, nor in the judgment, nor in the relation, but it must be in all three.
Moreover, if it is in all three, it must also be in something more unless we admit that a single fact, the judgment affirming it, and the relation that unites them can, together, be true in the hypothesis that everything else is false. But this “everything else,” which is not contained in the fact, the judgment, or the relation, necessarily includes the very existence of facts, as well as the logical principles implied in the judgment and the relation. If there are no facts or logical principles, then chickens will lay eggs in the domain of non-fact and the search for a relation between fact and judgment will be in the realm of illogic. Therefore, the truth of a single fact, a single judgment, and their relation presupposes the existence of truth as a domain that transcends and encompasses facts, judgments, and relations.
To search for truth in the fact, the judgment, or the relation is like searching for space in bodies, their measurements, and the distance from one to another; just as space is not in the bodies, measurements, or distances, but bodies, measurements, and distances are in space, likewise truth is not in the fact, the judgment, or the relation, but they are all in truth or they are nowhere, and even this “not being,” if it means anything and is not just a flatus vocis, must be in truth.
Truth is not a property of facts, judgments, or relations: it is the domain within which facts, judgments, and relations occur.
2. Is Truth an “a Priori” Form of Knowledge?
The Kantian temptation here is practically unavoidable. As a condition for the possibility of facts, judgments, and relations, truth is indeed an a priori condition. But is it a condition a priori for the existence of these three things or only for their knowledge?
This problem can be resolved simply and abruptly: if we say that truth is an a priori form of knowledge and we claim that this is true, then knowledge must be in truth, and truth cannot be in knowledge, for the a priori cannot be immanent to that which it determines. To be an a priori condition for knowledge, truth must necessarily be an a priori condition for something else, which in turn is not knowledge but the object of knowledge. Knowledge, like facts, judgments, and relations, is within the domain of truth, regardless of whether we consider knowledge solely in terms of its eidetic content or as a fact: the truth of the known, the truth of the knower, and the truth of knowing are aspects of truth, not truth as an aspect of any of them. There is simply no Kantian escape. Either knowledge is in truth, or it is nowhere.
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There are also those who believe in the existence of truth and are confident of possessing it without any investigative effort. But these are outside the philosophical debate and are not of interest to us.↩
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Further on historicism: "[...] Our civilization is the first to have access to documents from the history of all other civilizations and all other times. Since the beginning of the development of historical science, starting in the 18th century, and modern philology, which had already begun in the Renaissance, we have been able to gather increasingly better, more extensive, and more refined documentation regarding all eras, places, and civilizations. With the progress of historical science, which began to advance in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the development of the philosophy of history, a global view of human development is proposed, for example, in terms of progress in a particular direction. This is where the progress of historical science is also offset by progress in error. Because the first great generalizations made by the history of philosophy are obviously incorrect, since their documentation is insufficient and there are no mature methods or criteria. And as the documentation in the following centuries (19th and 20th) progresses, we tend to receive these documents with a biased perspective influenced by the first philosophies of history that emerged. So, for example, the idea of linear progress of knowledge is so deeply ingrained in our minds today that we can hardly see ancient philosophy except as something that is situated in its own time and that no longer tells us anything except as a historical document; as if Aristotle or Plato had spoken only to the Greeks, in the Greek situation, and not to us. This perspective is called historicist, situating each idea in its historical, cultural, and social context. By doing this, it helps us understand these ideas in terms of their motives, but on the other hand, it distances these texts from us as it refers them to the immediate concerns from which they emerged, and radically distinguishes these concerns from ours: the ancients are trapped in ‘their time,’ and we in ‘our time,’ as if the divisions of time, actually artificial inventions of historians, were real distinctions and as if there were no subtle exchanges of affinity between distant times.
"The historicist perspective, which emerged in the 18th century and was affirmed throughout the 19th century and is deeply embedded in our minds—as a kind of dogma that we believe without examination—believes that situating things in their proper temporal perspective is the best or only way to understand them. However, to the extent that we situate facts and ideas in historical time, we also relativize them, making them relative to that time, and diminishing or reducing their importance, significance, value, and efficacy for us today. The historicist understanding thus becomes a true misunderstanding, an artificial detachment from the meaning of the messages. Instead of reviving the values of the past, it buries them in ‘their time,’ leaving us confined in the immediacy of the present like in a dome of shadows.
"This is a methodological problem of the utmost importance [...]. Let us, for example, create a miniature model and imagine that all the ideas and feelings we have had throughout our lives refer exclusively and absolutely to the stage of our lives in which those ideas and feelings arose, denying them any effectiveness or importance in our present life. For example, if we were to entirely refer certain beliefs or feelings that arise in childhood to the situation of childhood and explain them exclusively in terms of that moment, as if the child we were were dead and buried. This means that each idea we have would only be valid for that moment and would have no relevance for subsequent moments. For example, in childhood or adolescence, we all have certain ideas and values. Childhood cultivates myths, legends, heroes, and loves. In adolescence, we have grand ambitions and plans. If later, at the age of fifty, for example, while writing our autobiography and studying it ‘scientifically,’ we refer these ideas solely to the stages in which they emerged, we remove the current validity they may have, we judge our childhood with the eyes of a mature person, considering it an absolute judge of a childhood that can no longer speak and will be condemned without having been heard, just as we will later look at the ideas of the mature person with the perspective of the old person we will become, and this mature person, having nothing to say to the old person, will be condemned by the latter in a trial where the defendant is always absent. If nothing from the passing epochs retains the always current validity of an enduring spring, our life is nothing more than a collection of corpses—or, worse yet, a succession of betrayals and abandonments. This means that situating ideas in their historical perspective, on the one hand, is to understand them in relation to the moment, but on the other hand, it is to confine them to that moment and to take away from them the vitality they may have at this moment. Historicism, on the one hand, gives us an understanding of history, but if it elevates history, that is, temporal development, to the supreme or only criterion of understanding, it situates each idea in its time and each idea is only valid in its time. Now, if ideas were only valid in their time, they would not actually be valid for any time because they would only represent images that passed through the human mind and only express that moment, which may last a century or a day. Now, if that were the case, if ideas exclusively expressed that moment without any validity for subsequent moments, we wouldn’t even be able to understand them. Therefore, historicism, which creates this narrowing down and refers ideas to historical moments and situations, must be offset by an inverse operation, a kind of ‘dehistoricization,’ which judges these ideas not by the moment in which they arose but by what they demand and require of us today. This is valid for the history of the world as well as for our personal history. I remember a quote from Alfred de Vigny, a great poet of French Romanticism, according to which ‘a great life is a childhood dream realized in maturity.’ Yes, if the mature person no longer remembers their childhood dreams, or if, remembering them, they no longer feel the appeal of their message, then how will they judge and understand the trajectory of their life, except as a succession of images that, having no meaning for each other, do not together form any meaning? Another great writer, Georges Bernanos, when asked who he wrote for, replied: ‘For the boy I once was.’ The boy is the judge of the man because what comes later is the realization or failure of the expectations and dreams from before.
"Now, if we judge our present personality in light of our childhood or youth aspirations, the result of this judgment will often be negative. In this sense, historicism is a kind of anesthetic of consciousness because it exempts us from being accountable to our old ideas and projects; it segments life in such a way that it loses unity. However, the meaning of my actions and my life now only exists if I compare them with my dreams and projects from the past. Because you can only understand where you have arrived by comparing it to where you wanted to go.
"In its understanding of ancient thought, most people are still under the dominion of historicism today. In other words, we now understand the ideas of Aristotle or Plato very well in terms of their moment and place of origin. But we have not yet performed the dehistoricizing operation, which would lead us to understand them in terms of what they have to say, not to the Greeks, but to all men, including ourselves. We can judge their ideas based on the point we have reached, but we have not yet done the reverse operation, which is to judge ourselves based on Plato and Aristotle or antiquity in general. We make our time the judge of antiquity and never call antiquity to testify about our time. We judge, as Karl Kraus said, so as not to be judged. To correct this, we must detach ourselves from the unilaterally temporal and evolutionary perspective and, by reversing historicism, judge the present with the criteria of the past.
"This back-and-forth operation has been performed, for example, in another sense—not temporal but spatial—in the science of anthropology. Anthropology began to emerge in the past century with travelers, especially the English. The English have this habit of traveling and settling in all exotic places in the world, and as they send information about the habits, customs, and values of all societies to the Scientific Society of London, anthropology gradually develops. Thanks to this immense accumulation of information about other societies, anthropological relativism was able to emerge. This means that we should not only look at other cultures through the lens of our own but also try to do the opposite: look at ourselves through the eyes of another culture. If an English anthropologist is among the pygmies of New Guinea, it is not only interesting what the Englishman thinks of them but also what they think of the Englishman. This is called anthropological relativism. It should not be absolutized, transformed into a dogma of the equivalence of all values, but it is a useful method because it helps us understand other people in their own terms.
“Our historicism needs to be balanced by a kind of relativism, not in the geographical sense as the anthropologists did, but in the temporal sense of looking at our time through the eyes of other times. If there is cultural relativism, there must also be historical relativism. Historicist relativism itself performs a relativization, but in the sense of fitting each idea into ‘its time’ and creating a collection of ‘time-ideas,’ each in its chronological jar, tightly sealed and without contamination from other times, that is, all equally neutralized and relativized. However, since this type of neutralizing relativism is characteristic of our time and stems from a scientistic ideology that is inherent to modernity, practicing it imposes a modern perspective on other times while pretending to respect them in their respective isolated specificities. That is not what I propose. I suggest judging our time with the eyes of other epochs, not as a relativistic dilettantism, but as a means of self-knowledge and a prerequisite of the scientific method in history. In this sense, anthropology, which often, based on values from other cultures, has made profound criticisms of our present culture, has been wiser than history, or at least the history of thought, where the values of the present continue to be the measure of all things. [...].” (Ibidem, p. 22-23).↩
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