The 'treowth' of trust

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?