of truth, we are once again dealing with a “horizon” that evades our efforts at intellectual control and adequate definition. If anything, truth would define us more than we would define it. The encounter with truth is more a case of our being grasped by it than of our actively grasping it.
Perhaps, therefore, we can speak of the truth only in a “heuristic” sense, that is, as something we are seeking but which never allows itself to be completely ensnared by our instruments of discovery. We can speak of truth more as the “objective” or goal of a certain kind of wanting within us than as a possession firmly within our grasp. Yet even though we cannot possess the truth or get our minds around it, we can at least recognize clearly, among the multiplicity of our wants, a desire for the truth, even if it is not yet a powerful impulse. A brief reflection on your own thinking process will confirm the presence of this desire in your consciousness.
You may just now have asked: “Is it really the case that something in me wants the truth?” You need no further or more immediate evidence that you do have some such desire. The simple fact that you ask such a question is evidence enough.
It is in the asking of such questions, indeed of any questions at all, that we have the most obvious evidence of our undeniable longing for the truth. We may call this longing simply the desire to know. It may not yet be highly developed within us. It may be only a whisper that is easily ignored, an occasional impulse readily repressed. And yet, it may well be the deepest and most ineradicable part of ourselves, the very essence of our being. It may turn out that of all our longings and wild wishings our desire to know is the only one whose ardor we can give into with completely trusting abandonment. Maybe only an uninhibited following of our desire to know the truth can bring us into a genuine encounter with depth, future, freedom, and beauty.
And yet we may already have given up the quest for truth, saying to ourselves: “There is no final truth; truth is relative to each person’s subjective preferences; truth is a useful social convention; truth cannot be found.” If we have been tempted to such conclusions, we may perhaps take comfort in the fact that some famous philosophers have also taught these same “truths.” But we must also note that other great minds—most of them, in fact—have demonstrated the self-contradiction in such dogmas.
Suppose, for example, someone says that it is not possible to know the truth. This translates into: “It is a truth that it is not possible to know the truth.” Such a statement is self-contradictory because it appeals to our capacity to know the truth (at least the truth of the above statement) even in the very act of denying that we have such a capacity. It overlooks the fact that we implicitly appeal to our trust in the truth every time we raise a doubt about something or every time we say: “It is the case that such and such is so.” We could never hope to convince others even that relativism is a truthful philosophical position unless we assumed in advance that these others were capable of recognizing the “truth” of our skepticism. Hence, even if we may at times have explicitly despaired of ever finding the truth, we have not been able to eradicate either our desire for it or our implicit appeal to criteria of truth every time we use the verb “to be.”
Every act of judging or questioning presupposes the possibility of our finding the truth. Without an implicit “faith” that intelligibility and truth can be found, we would not have the courage either to seek understanding or to make judgments about the world around us. If deep within us some cynical voice dominated our consciousness by saying “there is no intelligibility or truth to be found in the world or yourself,” then we would never even so much as ask a question. Yet by the fact that we do ask questions and make judgments (even, for example, “it is a truth that there is no intelligibility or truth”) we give ample evidence that we cannot eradicate our primordial trust in the intelligibility and truth of reality. Like it or not, we are irremediably tied to truth—even as we take flight from it. We have already seen that the same applies in our relation to depth, futurity, freedom, and beauty.
I stated earlier that the direct evidence for the fact of your having a desire to know lies in the simple fact that you find yourself spontaneously asking questions. If you find yourself questioning this, then it is because you have a desire to know. If you are asking what the meaning of these peculiar reflections is, or if there is any truth to them, then this spontaneous questioning is also evidence of your desire to know. You have a desire to know the truth, and it sharply reveals itself in your asking of these simple questions.
But there are different types of questions. Some of our questions inquire as to what a thing is or ask about its meaning, intelligibility, or significance. This type of questioning is resolved when we are given an “insight” into the essence of something. If you find yourself asking what the author of this book is trying to get across in these sentences, then this is an example of the first type of question. It may be called a “question for understanding.” It will reach its goal when you find yourself saying: “aha, I now see the point.”
But the gaining of understanding is not the end of the questioning process. Not every insight is in touch with reality; there can be illusory along with realistic understanding. So a second type of question spontaneously arises, leading you to ask whether your insights or those of others are true. For example, in reading this chapter, if you reach the point of saying, “I see the point the author is trying to make,” an uneasiness will eventually emerge that will be given expression in this fashion: “Yes, I see the point, but is the point well taken? Is it faithful to the facts of my own experience? Is it based in reality? Is it true?” This type of questioning provides evidence that you are not content with mere insight and understanding. You want truthful insight and correct understanding. Thus you ask: is it really so? Does this or that viewpoint correspond with reality? Is it a fact?
We may call this second type a “question for reflection” or simply a “critical question.” It is especially our critical questions that give evidence of our desire to know and of our fundamental discontent with mere understanding. We want to make sure that our insights, hypotheses, and theories are true to reality. Otherwise we remain unsatisfied with them. This restlessness in the face of mere “thinking” leads us to undertake “verificational” experiments, in order to test whether our insight and understanding fit the real world or whether perhaps they are out of touch with reality. Our discontent with mere thinking—no matter how ingenious such thinking may be—is what leads us toward “knowledge.” Our sense that knowing is more significant than simply thinking is the result of our allowing ourselves to be motivated by a “desire to know.”50
We have all had the experience of listening to very clever people and of reading very learned books. We often assume that their brilliance amounts to veracity and so we sometimes fail to raise further questions about them. It is very easy to be overwhelmed by the genius of an argument or the brightness of an idea. But if our critical sense is sufficiently awakened, we realize, as Bernard Lonergan puts it, that “not every bright idea is a true idea.”51 There is always the need to ask whether “bright ideas” are in touch with reality. We must heed the imperative in our mind that tells us: “be critical; do not settle for mere understanding.” Science is perhaps the most obvious example of this need to challenge hypothetical insight with critical questions.
Again, it takes only a little reflection on our own experience to notice how difficult it can be at times to follow this critical imperative and wean ourselves away from fallacious or shallow understanding. This is the case with respect to our knowledge of others and of reality in general, but especially with respect to self-knowledge. Because the desire to know is not the only motivation in our conscious lives (and perhaps not even the dominant one), we may easily allow some other impulse to construct self-images that have little to do with what we really are. And we may find these fictitious self-images so appealing to our desire for power, gratification, or approval that they divert us from attaining appropriate insight into ourselves.
Our propensity for
