John’s Gospel tells us in 14:6, “I am the way, the truth and the life.” How should we think about such a statement? The first mistake, it seems to me, would be to confuse the terms by considering that, in some way, Christ is stating the same reality three times in a row, “way,” “truth” and “life” being merely synonyms for expressing a higher state of being that we might call, for example, “transcendence.” Such an explanation explains nothing at all, especially not why “way,” “truth” and “life” are synonyms. So, let’s take the opposite route and examine these three concepts one by one, in an attempt to understand what unites them. Then perhaps we will better understand the real value of this statement, which lies, at least as much as in these three terms, in the coordinating conjunction “and” that unites them. The singularity of Christ is not only to be “way,” “truth” and “life”: it is to be these “together,” to be in the common maintenance of these three terms and, perhaps, to be the common maintenance of these three terms.
Accuracy Eclipses Truth
Let’s begin by exploring the concept of “truth,” which is, on the surface, the most easily accessible. Indeed, everyone thinks they intuitively know what truth is, if only as opposed to its antonym: error. A child utters a sentence, “I didn’t eat that cookie.” Either he actually refrained from eating the cookie, in which case he is telling the truth. Or he has eaten the cookie, in which case his statement is wrong, either because he did not understand the meaning of his sentence, or because he knowingly lied to conceal the fact that he had eaten the cookie.
However, this intuitive perception of the notion of truth is not necessarily self-evident. For what we are so quick to call “truth” also goes by another name. It is called “accuracy.” It is true, or it is not true, that the child ate the cookie. To know whether this statement is correct, we have to check it, for example, to see if there is a cookie missing from the box. Accuracy thus presupposes a specific task for human reason: verification and confirmation, linking an assertion to a fact. Accuracy is not limited to easily verifiable material facts. If I ask the highest metaphysical question, “Does the universe have a meaning?” and assert that it does, I will quickly be confronted with the legitimate need to provide proof of my assertion, even if this ‘proof’ is infinitely more complex than verifying the number of cookies in the box. So, we are in the same register, which is that of accuracy.
But why use two different terms if they mean the same thing? Why has language, usually thrifty with its resources, produced this duplication? Or perhaps we need to think another way: “truth” and “accuracy” don’t mean the same thing, and perhaps they even mean very different things, but we have forgotten this difference, and forgotten it so well that we no longer even wonder, however mechanically, about the possibility of such a difference. If this hypothesis is well-founded, our questioning is bound to evolve. It presupposes that we first answer the question: why do we spontaneously overlook the possibility of a difference between “truth” and “accuracy?”
To answer this question, we will use the eclipse analogy. In astronomy, an eclipse is the apparent and temporary disappearance of all or part of a star, resulting from the interposition of another celestial object either between this star and the light source illuminating it, or between this star and the observer’s eye. We hypothesize here that accuracy has progressively eclipsed truth, so that truth in the contemporary West can no longer be anything other than accuracy. To understand the primacy of accuracy, however, we need to introduce a new concept: opinion. In our modern, democratic societies, opinion is the most widely shared thing. Indeed, everyone is invited to have an opinion, his or her opinion, on every subject, whether it is a question of everyday life or the major issues that govern the functioning of a city.
The egalitarian principle of our societies assumes that, in theory at least, everyone’s opinion has equal dignity. However, not all opinions are equal. As we all know, there are some opinions which, as the saying goes, don’t hold water—absurd, even delusional opinions, false opinions. One of the major preoccupations of our time is precisely to be confronted with a general inflation of opinions, via social networks, and to have to constantly sift through them as a result. Because this need to sift has become a necessity, themes such as “conspiracy,” the need to systematically check facts, have become obsessive in public debate.
But how exactly do we sift opinion? Two tools need to be combined. Firstly, factuality: factuality is an examination of conformity. Either what we say conforms to a fact that we can observe, such as an event that happened as we say it did, or this test of conformity is not verified. The second tool is rationality. Just as, in mathematics, or more precisely in the dominant representation of mathematics, there is a process that starts from basic axioms and logical rules, which we call demonstration, so we can, and must, find in every assertion, especially when it comes to public speech, this articulation of basic axioms and logical reasoning leading to a demonstration. Mathematical demonstration is, of course, irrefutable, whereas in the common affirmative process, we are more frequently in the realm of verisimilitude—the reasoning is credible, because it meets the requirements of logic, as long as it has not been refuted by a more credible reasoning, because it is even more determined by logic, so that it erases the previous reasoning. This is how it is done, particularly in the human sciences.
The combination of factual conformity and logical rationality produces accuracy, and accuracy is for us the face of truth, or rather, to use the metaphor I employed earlier, accuracy has eclipsed truth. What are the fundamental characteristics of exactitude, the face of truth in our world? Firstly, it comes from below, i.e., from the confrontation of opinions which, at the outset, all have the same status. Secondly, it presupposes conformity—conformity, first and foremost, to facts that must be verifiable, according to a binary logic that knows only two categories: conformity or non-conformity. This, of course, presupposes that there are facts, and that these facts can themselves be grasped, by means of objective information (such and such an event did indeed happen), and/or measurement, for example, in the form of statistics. Accuracy presupposes another mode of conformity—conformity to the logical rules of rationality, inspired by our common representation of mathematics, which induces the faculty, at least theoretically, of refutation by logical overcoming. All rational reasoning can, a priori, be surpassed by more profoundly rational reasoning, just as Russian dolls fit together. Accuracy is truth, but that does not necessarily mean that it is, in practice, the truth forever. There are always ways of being more exact. Accuracy is thus one of the concrete expressions of the notion of progress.
Accuracy as a Product of the Metaphysics of Determination
These characteristics of accuracy do not come about by chance. They stem from the metaphysical inclination that has governed the West for several centuries now, and which can be described as the metaphysics of determination. This dominant metaphysics consists in a representation of the universe as a space of determination. Each component of the universe, each “being,” to use Heideggerian terminology, is merely a support for its rational determination, which is apprehended by the “I” of human consciousness, which has a monopoly on this apprehension. It is the “I” of consciousness that posits the meaning of each being, on the basis of reason, and reduces the being to this meaning, which has become its determinant.
The eclipse of truth by exactitude stems directly from this metaphysical inclination. The latter assumes that truth never comes from the being itself, but from the “I” of human consciousness, which pronounces a determining statement about the being. This determining statement is not, however, the expression of a purely arbitrary “I.” The “I” is bound—it is bound to determine from the perspective of reason. What is reason? It is that which logically accounts for the order of the world, so that what is, cannot be other than what it is, where it is and when it is. Reason has a multitude of facets— philosophical, scientific, historical, technical, sociological, economic—but they all converge on the principle of the logical necessity of the presence of states in the world.
As I described in relation to accuracy, reason presupposes progress, which is the progress of knowledge. Even if it is always possible for definitive knowledge to be pronounced about a being, it is, at least in theory, always possible to go further in the knowledge of the being, i.e., to impose on the being an ever more rigorous account of its presence in the world. On the other hand, logic presupposes facts, so as to be able to arrange them through, in particular, the principle of causality. Hence the essential importance of verifying facts, i.e., the traces left by them and the imprint of these traces.
The metaphysics of determination thus summons truth in the form of exactitude. It even demands that exactitude be truth, because exactitude brings together all the categories that the metaphysics of determination needs to qualify truth: the enunciation of a statement from the I of consciousness, which separates the exact from the inexact; in other words, the opinion founded in reason because it conforms to facts and logic, from the opinion that is not founded in reason. Sorting and conformity to both facts and logic are thus the foundations of the exercise of truth in our societies.
The Age of Experts
The domination of experts, of “forensic scientists,” who hold the monopoly of accuracy through the monopoly of its verification, is a direct and inevitable consequence of the eclipse of truth in favor of accuracy. Whether we are talking about the ups and downs of a soccer match or an international conflict and its military translation, it is always the expert who is summoned to say what is “true,” i.e., “right,” by stating what actually happened and linking this statement to the logical mastery of the rule that must govern a soccer match or international relations and armed conflict.
There are two possible interpretations of this domination. One is the idealistic view, held by the experts themselves, that objective, exhaustive expertise in any field is always possible. Ultimately, it all boils down to a question of competence. All we need to do is find a sufficiently competent expert, so that we can be sure that he or she will be able to give us accurate information on the exact nature of a fact, a situation, etc. If this hypothesis is well-founded, the domination of the expert is legitimate, just as is the domination of the competent scientist who states the scientific truth of a natural phenomenon, giving an account, in particular, of why this phenomenon occurs. Moreover, in this case, expertise is nothing other than the extension of science to all areas of human existence.
But there is another way—objective and exhaustive expertise, absolute expertise, is impossible, not because the expert is lying, but because he is unable to define a fact, a situation, in such a way and with such exhaustiveness that he informs us with effective and definitive accuracy about the accuracy of this fact and this situation. This can happen, for example, if there is a debate about the materiality of a fact, or about the behavior that determines the materiality of a fact, such as the actual content of the notion of “consent.” But this can also happen when a situation is so complex (an international crisis, for example) that it is humanly impossible to state all the logical reasons that have given rise to it, or when these logical reasons contradict each other, opposing, for example, two principles of international law, two equally rational rules.
In the latter case, the expert’s word is biased. This is not to say that the expert is deliberately lying. It means that the expert no longer speaks for accuracy; he no longer detects it, but delivers an interpretation that he considers logical and well-founded, but which remains hopelessly his own. There is no shame in indulging in such an interpretation, as long as it is accepted as such. Unfortunately, in our world, interpretation is of little interest. What we seek is definitive accuracy, because accuracy is truth, and the world cannot do without the notion of truth—even if it confuses truth with accuracy.
The expert, the forensic scientist, is condemned never to say that he is merely interpreting the facts, with all the limitations inherent in such an interpretation. On the contrary, he or she must redouble assurance and certainty to dispel the fear that this is a mere interpretation of the facts, and thus fully assume his or her expert status. There is a style inherent in the expert’s discourse, immediately identifiable, and blending the imperative assertion, the implicit content considered an acquired knowledge that no one can contest, the prediction that is both intimidating and sufficiently prudent that one can always catch up with the many strands later, if things evolve differently from what one has asserted. The professional use of style, its intelligent management, obeys a well-known discipline, which is rhetoric. The expert, in our world, is first and foremost a rhetorician whose art consists, through the use of style, in showing that he is more competent, i.e., an expert, than other experts, because he possesses complete accuracy; he knows exactly what happened, and why, and how.
The transition from the highly vaunted exactitude to the reality of the rhetoric employed opens up new horizons. As I have just indicated, rhetoric is generally used in a context of competition to convince. “Competition” in society also means the struggle to acquire power, whatever that power may be. In fact, in our world, the theoretical quest for accuracy is essentially a struggle for power: the power to state “what really happened” and to explain it logically and rationally. This struggle for power governs what we call “truth.” This means that what we call “truth” is in reality nothing more than the result of a ruthless struggle for power, through which certain experts impose their determination of accuracy to the detriment of their competitors and, through this imposition, make themselves the bearers of truth, naturally profiting from this priestly function.
The fact that these experts have won does not mean that they are “better” than the other experts (a result to the contrary would also be devoid of such significance). It simply means that they are better rhetors. But when it comes to rhetoric, there’s no such thing as an egalitarian distribution of gifts. There are personal qualities, of course, which combine genetics with self-improvement. But above all, there is a question of positioning. We do not speak from the same place in society, and there are places where, even before it is spoken, the word is already better heard and understood. This can be the case, of course, and generally speaking, if you belong to the “ruling class,” in the broadest sense of the term. But, more precisely, there is, in every sphere of human existence, a “field” that legitimizes such and such an individual to speak, because he or she has studied at such and such a university, because he or she has published such and such a book, because he or she is a member of such and such an institution deemed “prestigious.” And there is also a skill, that of “speaking well” in general, i.e., the ability to have a legitimate opinion on everything that inhabits certain categories of speakers, because the capital they have acquired in this or that field is of such quality that they can constantly recycle this capital, sometimes on subjects that are the antipodes of their initial “specialty.”
From Reality to its Deconstruction/Reconstruction
What I am describing is by no means new. Already in Roman antiquity, and more precisely in imperial antiquity, the rhetors of the “Second Sophistic” enjoyed international renown and influenced rulers. But back then, almost everyone knew that rhetoric was an embellishment of reality. In our time, on the other hand, expertise has the power to name the real, all the real. As a result, in our world, and in the name of accuracy, the real loses its importance and, if you like, its “reality” every day, to the benefit of what the expert says is the real. Our world is not the world. It is a world mediated by expertise, which accounts for what the world really is, which may have nothing to do with the humble daily experience that each of us has of reality, with what we intuitively feel to be the real, actual reality of the world. The expert knows better than we do what is, because he knows what is.
There are several ways of replacing reality with mediatization. The first possibility is not to talk about it, to say, in the most radical way, that reality is not real, that what we take to be real is merely an illusion of consciousness. But we can also function differently, and consider that the only effective reality is that which the expert names, based on the words he uses to designate it. In this case, the expert’s fundamental task is to create a reality exactly in line with his words. Of course, this “reality” must not be too far removed from the “real” as we intuitively perceive it, to retain its credibility. As a general rule, it is not a question of distorting the facts, but by withholding certain facts and overemphasizing others, to create the conditions for an overall interpretation of this or that subject which, in the name of accuracy, of which the expert is the sole authorized guarantor, is designed to erase the reality of immediate intuition and replace it with a reconstructed reality, generating an overall rationality, which is that of the expert, and which is designed to give meaning to the necessarily truncated, partial and biased reality of immediacy.
In his work of mediatizing reality, the expert fabricates. These are intended to replace the a priori categories of real human experience with new categories, spontaneously inaccessible to lay people, which are supposed to say more and better about the reality of things, because they are bursting with intellectuality, i.e., rationalized determination. The world of the expert, which has become our world since we can no longer conceive of truth as anything other than exactness, is a world perfectly in tune with the metaphysics of determination—a world in which things, whatever they may be, are no more than the pre-text of the text that names and norms them. The production and arrangement of concepts do not leave the world untouched. They produce an imperialist vision of things and their organization, to which things must submit without resistance; otherwise, they are eradicated, or fall victim to an eradication perhaps even more complete than physical eradication, which is eradication through silence.
Little by little, a mediatized world is built up, which resembles the real world of things from afar, but in much the same way as a photograph resembles life. Within this mediatized world, the rules are clear—things are never in possession of themselves; they can be constantly deconstructed and reconstructed through concepts that explain that the thing is not the thing, but its interpretation; as only the interpretation of the thing counts, the thing is not valid in itself, but only through the discourse of the authorized expert who will deliver his or her relevant interpretation, explaining, for example, that the thing is not the thing, that it is nothing, or that it is anything other than what it has been said to be up to now. By the same token, the thing cannot, of itself, bind any bonds of solidarity with other things. It is always the expert eye that has the monopoly on saying what links the thing to other things, this “link” itself being the subject of expertise, i.e., of mediatization.
All in all, a new world is being built. A world that ignores, or more or less, the existence of things, but is only interested in their determinative interpretation. The latter is seen as the only reality, so that the quest to understand the world is limited to a permanent conflict to produce concepts and an arrangement that will replace one interpretation with another, deemed more profound, more “determining.” Some present this conflict as a scientific process, the “progress” of knowledge. Above all, it must be seen as a permanent struggle for power between competing experts, each striving to impose his or her own concepts, because we all know that the dominant interpretation is imposed first and foremost by the concepts used, which, supposedly “neutral,” in reality already carry within them the interpretation that we claim to be operating on the basis of these concepts. To illustrate this, we need only think of the lightning success of the concept of “gender “ in the space of a decade, and the interpretation it necessarily induces of the socially constructed nature of the categories of man and woman.
Our world never talks about things, even when it fancies denouncing the imperialism of technological or economic reason. In this case, in fact, its denunciation remains rigorously within the realm of determination; it is carried out in the name of a more “pure” and “profound” knowledge, but one that remains the knowledge of exactitude, stubbornly refusing to give voice to things. The knowledge of concept and interpretation no longer knows the thing, because for it, the thing is of no importance—what counts is the industrial production of concepts and the incessant struggle to impose these concepts, which we call in choice terms the “confrontation of expertise.”
But how do things differ from concepts? How can we know? It is impossible for us to know what a rose really is, to use a canonical example from philosophy and theology, because we are entirely formatted by the metaphysics of determination, and indeed the very notion of “knowing” about the rose, in the sense of “knowing determining” it, is open to question. Perhaps the rose is without “knowledge,” or perhaps authentic “knowledge” about the rose is totally different from our representation of “knowledge.”
Measuring our Distance from the World
But while it is impossible to know what a rose is, we can measure the distance that separates us from that knowledge. How do we measure this gap? By measuring what our reconstructed world lacks to be the world. For this, we need poets and thinkers. Among the latter, I would mention Henri Bergson and Michel Henry. Bergson has shown that our system of determining things fails to think about duration: it may well conceptualize time, categorize it, segment it, including by naming it “duration,” but it fails to think about the very movement of time, which makes time what it is. Michel Henry, for his part, has demonstrated that our system of determination fails to think of the experience of life, which is the founding and fundamental experience of all living things.
These two failures delimit a gap, which we can measure as a gap, a lack, an absence, as a negativity whose positivity eludes us. This gap is time and life. Our representation of the world, which has taken the place of the world, just as accuracy has taken the place of truth (it is, incidentally, the same movement we are talking about), excludes time and excludes life. As it excludes time and life, we do not know, or we no longer know, what time is and what life is. But we do know what “exclusion” is. Exclusion is the very movement of our world, which has substituted itself for time and life. Our world is indeed animated by a movement, but it is a paradoxical movement, one that represses time and life. This means that, the more we “advance” in our modernity, the more we deconstruct and reconstruct our world, the more we believe we possess it, and the more we repress time and life outside our world. This process of repression has a technical name: it is a process of neantization. What this means is that the more we “progress” in our “knowledge” of the world, the more nothingness we inject into the world, and the more obscure and distant it actually becomes.
The world distances itself from us. Or perhaps it is we who are distancing ourselves from it. The more we expertise it, the more we represent it with concepts, the more certain we are of mastering it and organizing it so that it is definitively and irremediably at our service, the more the world escapes us. This paradox underpins the deep, pathetic tragedy of our times. But even more tragic is the radical lack of awareness that we are drifting away from the world. It takes a shaking of the great equilibria of the physical order for us to become aware, fleetingly, that the world does not need us to be, that the world does not belong to us, and that the artifact we have built, which we are free to manipulate as we please, will never protect us from the reality of the world. But these moments of lucidity are short-lived.
If they do not last long, it is because we prefer the process of neantization. We prefer this process because it gives us the illusion of infinite power over the world. I say “illusion” because, in reality, it is not we who, despite appearances, take power over the world, it is power that takes power over us. The quest for ever-greater power over beings and things leads us to constantly desire this power, and thus to become ourselves the products of power, to become mere tools in the service of taking power over the world. Tools upon the world, but also tools upon ourselves, insofar as we ourselves are part of the world and can become a component—and not the most efficient—of the technique employed by power to increase its power. “Augmented humanity“—this is not a slogan for slightly enlightened Silicon Valley billionaires. It is about each and every one of us working on our bodies and our psyches, to further order them in the direction of ever-greater productive and pleasurable efficiency of body and psyche, in order to acquire more intense power over our world, that which is within our reach—ourselves, our “loved ones,” our work, our occupations, our leisure activities.
The Difference of Truth
But now we must return to Christ’s words. There is one objection that could have been raised against us throughout our journey around the notion of accuracy. Does this notion actually eclipse truth? In other words, and as our modernity asserts, why should not truth and accuracy merge? What is the difference between truth and accuracy? It is logical that we should ask ourselves these questions, since in practice we can no longer distinguish one from the other.
Yet truth is radically different from accuracy. “Radically” means not in detail, not in form, but in substance.
In the first place, truth is not an opinion that is better founded than others. Truth, in its origin, is totally different from opinion. Opinion emanates from the subject and undergoes a kind of “test” of factuality and rationality before it can be validated as accurate. But the truth is. That it is, always has been and always will be, makes it indifferent to opinions and rational verification processes. Truth is neither logical nor illogical. It is; man can do nothing about it. This, incidentally, is why it is unbearable for modern man, engaged in the ongoing quest for power over the world, and why he strives to substitute accuracy for it, since man has no power over truth while he constructs accuracy. Truth is and so it is: that is all we can say.
Does this unconditional presence of truth impose on us the sole path of dogmatic submission, of a priori fideism, characteristic of the various “fundamentalisms” as they are usually described in the language of our world? But truth is quite different from dogmatic submission. They who accept truth as unalterable evidence, whatever form that truth may take, are in no way in the truth: they are in the evidence. From this point of view, they are very close to the person (who thinks he is about to throw up) for whom there is only sensible evidence in this world. They do not believe in truth; they simply observe the obvious—the sensible for one, the transcendent for the other. They approach the obvious, rub up against it, and are reassured by this contact, which they will hold onto for the rest of their lives.
But truth is not evidence. It does not impose its intimidating self-evidence; it waits for men to come to it. Truth is too noble to impose itself by force. In doing so, it takes a major, unreasonable risk—the risk of not being recognized. Anyone wishing to move towards truth must start from this starting point: the non-obvious, non-determining nature of truth. Because it is non-determining, truth does not preclude the possibility that it is not. Quite the contrary, in fact. Any genuine journey towards truth must begin by weighing this possibility with all its tragic weight, and freely deciding that, despite this possibility, truth is worth moving towards. Lev Shestov, in particular, has written profoundly on this subject. It would be a mistake, moreover, to believe that this tragic questioning is a beginning, destined to be quickly overcome and surpassed, by means of dialectics, for example. For there to be an authentic journey towards truth, the possibility that it may not be must always remain, so that the decision to move towards freedom always remains free.
We call this free decision faith, which, for the reasons mentioned above, has nothing to do with the certainty of the fanatic. Faith is a gamble, which will always remain a gamble. Does this mean that the seeker of truth is condemned to throw himself off the cliff with his eyes closed? As mathematicians know, the field of betting is far from devoid of “rationality,” including arithmetical rationality. There are “probabilities” and even an “expectation.” These probabilities and expectations can be evaluated, and sometimes we can even be almost certain that the event we have bet on will come true. But it is all in the “almost.” In betting, there is never absolute certainty, and that is why you have to end up betting, i.e., committing yourself to a truth without being certain that it is.
Because truth is consubstantial with the need to gamble, truth deals exclusively with the essential questions that confront man, those “cursed questions” evoked by Dostoyevsky, and which will never find a definitive answer in the sense of exactitude, in a hurry to conclude. Truth is always on the side of the un-demonstrable. That is why essential questions remain questions, leaving man the freedom and responsibility to make up his own mind, if he so wishes, and to commit himself to a truth that will never be certainty.
Because it is on the side of the un-demonstrable, truth ruins the metaphysics of determination, according to which only that which is determinable is real. Indeed, it reveals to mankind that what is true, perhaps, is that alone which cannot be determined. Through this revelation, truth opens up. It is a commonplace of philosophical modernity—the one exalted by Michel Foucault, at any rate—to assert that truth excludes, that it is a machine of exclusion, so that it should give way to the “diverse,” the “plural” supposedly the benevolent antonym of truth. But such an assertion is simply a further trace of the eclipse of truth in favor of accuracy, as I have already noted. Accuracy excludes, not truth; and it is only because it is confused with accuracy that truth is spontaneously perceived as a machine for exclusion.
On the other hand, if it does not exclude, truth decides. What is the difference between “deciding” and “excluding?” Certainty, born of exactitude, excludes, insofar as it is there to confirm itself as certainty. We might therefore say that its fundamental aim is to exclude, because it is by excluding, and by continuously excluding, that it constitutes itself as certainty. Truth, on the other hand, makes a decision—that is, states what is true—in the name of its own requirements, which imply that “not everything is equal,” that not everything is equally divided between truth and falsehood, that there is truth and falsehood, and that these categories are imposed on the subject, who is not free to sift or erase them. Truth, however, is not about exclusion. It enunciates a statement about the world and about men, but is not responsible for the use men make of this statement. In itself, it feels no need to exclude, because it feels no need to be comforted. Truth is, or it is not. But, in both cases, it feels no need to disguise itself as certainty.
The Way of Life
But the question remains: how do we get to the truth? For we are not in the truth as we are in certainty, the owners or co-owners of a space of knowledge with clearly defined limits. We can only move towards the truth, since we do not appropriate the truth; and the moment when we believe we appropriate it is precisely the moment when we move away from it and enter the field of certainty. We move towards the truth, and to be in the truth is precisely to move towards it, i.e., to deepen the measure of the distance that unites us to it. So to affirm “I believe in God ,” to take the example of the most serious, the most decisive truth, is only the beginning of a path where the initial “I believe” is constantly deepened.
The “way” here is a spatial metaphor for time. Truth, in fact, is a question of time. Not just in the trivial sense of “progress” in knowledge, which after a certain period of time would enable us to know more and better about the object of our knowledge. There is nothing to say that, as we go along with the truth, we will always know more and better about it. And besides, is the goal to know “more” and “better” about the truth? There are moments of illumination, moments of darkness, moments of slow meditation. The journey with truth draws a story—the story of a soul.
History is the refraction of time on the “I” of consciousness. To journey towards truth is to enter into a story, that is, to experience time no longer superficially, as a succession of “moments” for example, but in all its mystery, which consists both in containing eternity in an instant, and in being the eternal flow of everything. In history, the “I” encounters time and receives meaning from time—what we call destiny. It is impossible to separate truth from history and destiny, and this is perhaps where we find the sharpest divide between truth and certainty—certainty is a representation of knowledge outside time, where nothing can move, because the result is forever acquired; truth is time as meaning—in other words, as that which happens, and never ends.
This ad-venance that never ends is life. Only those who experience time as meaning are “alive,” because they have always been on the way towards truth, which is truth. Living time, they give thanks, eternally at every moment, for what is to come, the emergence of the world into the world, the great miracle of the “appearing” of things, and they strive to guide mankind along the way. What is this way? That of the free gift of the universe, which means that everything, far from being exclusively determined by necessity as the dominant metaphysics proclaims, is in its being an infinite gift of itself.
But to experience the universe as an unconditional gift, we must ourselves be a gift to the world. And this state of self-giving can only be achieved by the permanent and total abolition of all concern for oneself, in order to give oneself to the entire universe, including that which is the most distant, the strangest, the most foreign, the most daunting.
Featured: Christ enthroned, detail, from the Tree of Jesse, ceiling fresco, St. Michael’s Church, Hildesheim, Germany, ca. 1130.
