The Truth and the Person
Ever since first studying Aristotle years ago, the quote has always stuck out at me: Piety requires us to honor truth above our friends. As someone who has had many discussions, arguments and debates with many people on many issues, online and off, the issue of the proper balance between love of human and love of truth to me is eternally relevant. How does one reckon with a person who refuses to accept argument or evidence? At what point does such a person no longer deserve our respect? It is tempting to say, simply, “when they show themselves to be unreasonable” but who among us has always been reasonable at all times? Unreasonableness is an inextricable part of the human condition, and is present in every human to some degree at some time. And yet it is our capacity to reason that sets us apart from lower life forms and allows us to achieve our highest levels of flourishing.
The Aristotelian sentiment points to possibly one of the most extraordinary leaps in human consciousness to ever occur: the radical notion that first loyalty belongs to an intangible thing–an idea–and not a person. From this groundbreaking intellectual development arose the commitment to objective truth, the actual state of the world, separate and apart from the subjective experiences, desires and assumptions of people. And once humans could conceptualize a world outside of personhood, a reality existing of its own accord with or without any person to interact with it, human thinking and consciousness reached an authentically new level, and has never been the same. Whether or not this mindset actually originated with Aristotle himself or the Greek philosophers themselves (which I doubt), it nevertheless has been delivered to us in excellent form by those philosophers, and it remains one of their simplest, most profound and most important contributions to western thought.
To be sure, the concept of fidelity to something outside of humanity existed long before complex civilization arose, in Greece or anywhere else. The awesome power and huge uncertainty found in nature was enough to get the earliest humans worshipping and praying to forces beyond their control, and seeing human life in the context of the larger universe, rather than the other way around. From these animist origins came the polytheistic conception of “gods” with personalities and desires and consciousness. These gods were essentially intangible beings, immaterial creatures who could control the material world. And once humans acclimated themselves to bodiless personalities, the next step was to eliminate the personality, leaving only an intangible thing, the truth, devoid of personhood or human-like characteristics and attributes, and therefore qualitatively outside of humanity itself.
This remains an essential difference between the theist and the nontheist, to this day. Both can maintain fidelity to an objective thing, outside of humanity. But one has taken the leap beyond an anthropomorphized “god” who is still a person, and the other has not.
So my commitment to the truth remains intact, because it is the one thing that has not changed and will not change, is not tied to personhood and is therefore not tied to persons. While truth borrows nothing from humans, humans cannot thrive without it. Friends, personalities, leaders, followers, whims, emotions, life, death–all these things come and go. The truth remains. And that is why it should be honored above all else.
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