Truth comes from Trust
An interesting quote from
phenomenologists about the nature of ‘trust’ that has gotten me thinking
(Carolan and Bell 2003):
“Etymologically, truth (from the Old
English treowth) and trust (from the Old Norse traust) have
different origins. But in terms of the history of meaning, truth came from
trust. Treowth meant fidelity, constancy, loyalty, the underpinnings of
what we now call ‘trust’. During the Middle English period, between the twelfth
and early sixteenth centuries, alongside this older meaning developed the
parallel and ultimately dominant sense of factual correctness, which became our
‘truth’. The adjective related to treowth was treowe, the Old
English word for ‘faithful’ and ‘trustworthy’, which also carried a sense of
‘true’.1 We still use ‘true’ in this way: a trustworthy person is true to his or
her word; a faithful person is ‘true’ to his or her group or cause. A person
who is ‘true’ is a person we can ‘trust’.”
from Carolan and
Bell 2003: In Truth We Trust: Discourse, Phenomenology, and the Social
Relations of Knowledge in an Environmental Dispute
The evolution of our language can
tell us so much about ourselves. What I take from this is not only that we
have to come to accept that what is true is what is trustworthy. But that
there is a sort of physiology or embodied experience of trust. There is a relationship between what is
hidden inside, and what is real. Being faith-full may imply a kind of unbroken quality between the full reality of what is inside and what is. An unbroken coherence invokes the experience of something that is strong, something that
you can physically ‘lean’ on and depend upon. Perhaps there is a way in which we have learned this experience: That the character of ‘truth’ is a kind of
powerful trunk of solid wood that has grown strong and tall in its clarity, in its unflinching tie between inside and outside.
Carolan
and Bell go on…
“Phenomenologists have long noted the
importance of ‘trust’ in the taken-for-granted character of most of social
life, as in the trust-breaking experiments of Garfinkel. But the loss of trust
in those experiments, as in much of phenomenology, was understood as an
individual ontological problem, not a collective one. Phenomenologists have
thus largely understood ‘trust’ as a metaphor for ontological issues. We
believe the aptness that phenomenologists have found in this metaphor speaks to
the implicit importance of the social character of our ontology. It is people that we trust, if we trust our
ontology, not merely the ‘facts’ of our existence. “ (2003)
Perhaps this is experienced in the same sort
of physiological way. We know ‘trust’ through knowing a person. And ultimately,
our relationship to truth comes from our trusting the ties to another human being. And thus the loss of
trust in a person, the violation of trust, can erode one’s ontological
confidence, the way we come to know ourselves in
relation to the larger world and to life itself.
We are held alive in
fragile webs comprised of faith – that there is meaning to what people say, to
the ties between people, to the ties between myself and my past, my future.
This faith is always in need of nurturing, and cautious care. So our lives and
our spirits can easily be tossed and shaken to the core when these brittle webs
of faith are ripped.
This also matters when we contemplate
the significance of the opposite of truth: the lie. How much do our lives come
to depend upon lying, tolerating the lies of others, learning to read through
lies to survive. “People of the Lie”, as Scott Peck describes them, are those
who are touched in some way by a kind of evil. The opposite of truth, a lack of
connection between the internal reality and what is presented. Literally, his
argument seems to be, as we learn to live by lying, so we learn to internalize
a degree of evil, a break from what is true.
Thus, the capacity to impersonate
truth – to ‘act’ truthfully – would seem to be the utmost in this form of
internalization. What makes it possible to pretend to tell the truth – to
“confess”, to emulate sadness, to
profess devotion – and to mean something else? What kind of physiology does it
create? Depend upon?
