Or logomachia - the struggle over 'truth'
There are very few benefits to the study of philosophy - other than coming to know the truth and falling in love with it, of course.
Other than that, the study of philosophy teaches you two things. It teaches you yourself, and it teaches you the world. Not the world as it actually is, of course, but the world as we consider it to be. I would like to tell you something, in all sincerity. Something that I have learned after (let's see, how long has it been?) close to twenty years of the most thorough, the most intense, the most fiercesome questioning.
There is no truth. If by 'truth' is meant a coherent and consistent explanation and answer to the most demanding, the most testing, of the questions that bedevil us as human beings. I know I have a certain reputation here. It's undeserved. I know no more than you do, and I am just as confused as you are. I admit I occasionally pretend otherwise: but that's all it is, a pretence. Like you I have my faith, my beliefs, and my opinions. And that's all I have.
I know no more than anyone else. And having said that, I know what I know with absolute certainty. Just as you do.
Let's consider this phenomenon. Why is there no truth? There is no truth because there is no single coherent explanation of the universe with which all agree. This was not always the case. For almost the whole of the known history of the West there was, once, a single coherent explanation for the universe with which all agreed. The first part of that explanation has to do with the advent of, and development of, Greek philosophy. Which to an enormous, and completely unacknowledged, extent still determines how we in the West view our existence. The most important determinant of the nature of the existence of life in the West, to this day, is the thought of Plato. Whether you know it or not, whether you agree or not, without the philosophy Plato originated, you could not as a child of the history of the Western nations, be what you are.
The second element in the determination of what we are is Christianity. Just as we cannot escape the shadow of Plato we cannot escape the shadow of the Christian revelation. This has nothing to do with whether we as individuals accept that revelation as true or not. Christianity has sculpted the world we live in in ways that have nothing to do with personal acceptance of religious 'truth'. If you disagree with me you have only to look at the American Constitution, which is the apotheosis and perfect fulfillment of the impulse to give religious revelation a political form. The only other document which in any way approaches this fulfillment is the Communist Manifesto - which is also an annunciation of religious revelation.
The only difference between them is that the society based on the American Constitution still exists, while that described in the Communist Manifesto never materialised. One is a success; the other an aborted failure - aborted by the intransigent will to power of Stalin, and the intransigent intellectual pride of Lenin. Neither of them were wrong. Nor were the founding fathers of the American Republic. Why? Because neither success or failure determines 'truth'.
What determines 'truth'? Nothing more or less than the will of the majority - not in any instant of time but over decades, centuries, millennia. The truth is what we all believe, consistently. Which is why the religious impulse will never fail in the face of the criticism of Atheism - even if it sometimes retreats. What we believe, we believe. And no one can argue us from it. This is as true of convinced Catholics as it is of convinced Protestants, as it is of convinced Buddhists, Jews, Zoroastrians. It is a perennial and unfailing truth of life as a human being. We believe what we believe, and what we believe is not in the detail but in the broad stroke of the religious brush. Yes, conversion is possible. But because we convert from one god to another does not deny the truth that we all believe in God.
Aye, from our very birth we believe on It, even those that deny It - because even those that deny posit something real in human existence that has to be denied. In denial is their faith. And I have no doubt that their faith will be answered.
'Truth' is only what we know, at any given moment. The truth of our time, the truth of our individual lives. And in that degree, all truths are true because none is a lie. But neither is there any true 'truth', and for that same reason. Who are you to judge and say 'this truth of my time, of my life, is true forever'. It isn't, as the changing 'truths' of humanity's historical existence demonstrates. Yet each of these 'truths' has been experienced as true. Who shall decide between them?
None but God.
And we are not God. Therefore, in every question of reality, of truth, of Divinity, there is no realistic option for the human being other than to keep silence - because what we know is only what we know, and what we know is incomplete. Do you want to know what blasphemy is? Blasphemy is to speak a partial truth concerning God. Because all partial truths are no more than idolatry, the worship of the thing we think we know.
None of this denies the power of the fundamental conviction that we are right. None of it denies the power of sincere belief. We have no idea of what is true. But we all know what it is to sincerely believe that we are right. To sincerely believe. We all know what that feels like. And we all know what it feels like to confront someone who just as sincerely contradicts what we know to be true. Generally, we hate them for it. Not because they contradict us but because they're wrong. Obviously, they're wrong. And you know what? They know they're wrong. They just won't admit it. And because they know they're wrong they're culpable. And that means we should kick their asses.
That in its essence is the ideological structure of all forms of hate, whether religious, political, or racial. We know you know you're wrong, but you won't admit it. So we're going to kick your ass. Because we're right, and you know we're right. But you won't admit it.
So. In relation to what we as human beings believe, all truths are true and there is no true truth. Equally, neither is there any justified hate. My truth is not true, and neither is yours. Why should I hate you, then?
In order to establish the true 'truth' there would have to be a place in which we could stand, from which we could view and compare all the competing claims of humanity as to what is 'true'. A place in which we could test every 'truth' against every other 'truth', in order to establish which most thoroughly and perfectly accorded with the lived reality of human experience. And not merely the experience of this moment of human reality but every moment of which we have a reliable record. Because there is no moment of human experience which is not, for those who lived it and knew it, a valid moment. Do you think that those who went to the Babylonian Temples, and worshipped God through sexual congress with the Temple Whores, did not engage in a valid religious experience? Of course they did. The fact that we deny the validity of that experience, as being outside our concept of divinely inspired sexual morality, says far more about us than it does about either the religious experience of the Ancients, or about religious experience per se.
Our experience of religious reality is one moment in that experience. Theirs is another moment. And there is nothing and no one to judge between them. They are both equally true and equally false. True, because they are existential realities that typify the religious realities of a given moment in history (people felt and people believed), people feel and believe). And false because necessarily incomplete, provisional and fallible. You don't know God, whatever your experience of It. You can't, because It's God and you're not.
Beliefs, faiths, hopes, ideals. They all have discernible structures They all work in certain identifiable ways. That's what ideology is -a structured belief system. As an example, Marxism is a Romance. So is the American Constitution. That's because 'Romance' in the political sense means 'a structure of human nature that leads toward the perfect outcome in history'. Both Marxism and the Constitution posit a type of Ideal Humanity that achieves the perfect society here on earth. The great difference between the two documents is that the Constitution is far more realistic in its understanding of human nature than is the Communist Manifesto.
Because these structures are discerible they are necessarily types of the imperfect. Anything that can be discerned by a mind is less than that mind, and all material minds that occupy the material universe are less than the immaterial entity that created that universe. Anything they can discern is of the same type that they themselves belong to: the type of 'less than that which is God'.
Anything imperfect is deceptive, because it is only a partial revelation of whatever it is in itself (Plato, again). And all things which are imperfect are equal in their imperfection, so that any 'partial truth' is a complete untruth.
As I said, all truths are true (being equally false because imperfect) and there is no true truth (because there is no criterion by which one could discriminate amongst them).
This is the origin of the logomachia that has consumed the West since Luther posted his 95 Theses on the door of the Church at Wurtemburg, and split the soul of Europe (of which you Americans are the inheritors) in two. With the advent of Protestanism, the social, intellectual, and political cohesion that the Roman Catholic Church provided was utterly lost. With it went all cultural and political certainty.
You're wrong and I'm wrong - but I'm right.
The coexistence of multiple certainties as to what is right and wrong is definitive proof that all such certainties are wrong.
This is the truth that philosophy teaches: we are what we believe. And what we believe is always completely true, and completely false. Which goes some way toward explaining what practical reality also teaches. That those who believe will kill those who don't .
Why wouldn't you? After all, they're completely wrong.