“Any man who judges well the signs given by dreams will feel their extreme importance; the intelligence of dreams is a great part of wisdom.” (Hippocrates of Cos, Regimen 4, or Dreams)

“Dreams allow us to realize our progress, if in a dream we do not rejoice, desire or do shameful, atrocious or unjust things: then imagination and affectivity are bathed in reason and shine.” (Stoicorum fragment, I, 234)

"Dreams have no divine nature nor any prophetic force but originate from the impact of images" on the senses (Epicurus, Vatican Sayings 24).

My mother baked Christmas cookies and hid the cookie tins. We (I, brother, and sister) would find them. We thought, mom won’t notice one or two missing, but eventually she would—after multiple cookie thefts. If we all said “I didn’t take any,” she and we would know someone was not telling the truth. Kids know that a true statement accurately describes some fact of reality. For a teacher to tell a student “[we can never] really know if anything is true at all” is mental cruelty.

In all areas of knowledge, including ethics and politics, truth requires drawing logical conclusions from descriptions of facts of reality—from true statements. It can be done. We “can know what’s true.”

Robert H.

Hello Anya,

I am reminded of Henry David Thoreau’s wise words: “It takes two to speak the truth. One to speak, and another to hear”. This points immediately to the public-private dichotomy that has always stalked the subject of truth. Western civilisation was formed and sustained on shared ‘truths’ which had grown out of a shared understanding of the source of all Truth, God himself. 

As soon as you depart from that construct the very subject of truth becomes an impossibility, so atomised and individualized as to lose all meaning. The question cannot even be posed. A pastor once told me that there are only two churches - The Church of God and the Church of Man. If you worship at the Church of Man, the only truth that matters is what the powerful say it is. If you worship at the Church of God, Truth is a person.

The topic cannot be debated across that gulf, and need not be debated within either side.

Brien A.

Only wisdom can tell us what is true and what to do with what we learn.

Thomas P.

Anya,

You wrote, "How can we attempt to comprehend the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?"

I would suggest that it is profoundly important to seek truth, but if we insist on the whole truth and nothing but the truth, we are doomed to failure. This is simply not within our reach as mortal beings.

Karl Popper wrote that all scientific truth must remain forever tentative, since future discoveries or insights may cause what we believe today to be incorrect, or at least incomplete. Declaring that the science is settled or that there is no room for debate, is not scientific, but rather dogmatic, and probably wrong, as the vigorous debate and testing of ideas is the best way to weed out the incorrect ones.

As for the truth about current events, that is even harder. Unless I am physically present, I am limited to the reports of other people, and, with rare exceptions, people I do not know and whose biases are not clear. And this is not a recent problem. Robert Heinlein, noted science fiction author, once wrote, "...I have been on the spot eight or nine times when something that wound up as a news story in TIME happened. Not once - not once - did the TIME magazine story match what I saw and heard." (Expanded Universe, 1980, p. 384)

I will conclude that I strive to study, read, and learn, and to discern the truth, but I am always cognizant that my knowledge and perspective is limited and incomplete. I still do the best I can to discern the truth.

Gordon F.

Cuenca, Ecuador

The ancient Greek philosophies took a variety of approaches to the question of how do we know what is true. The letter that asks for responses to this question mentions the skeptics, giving Cicero as an example. The problem with this is that ancient Greek skepticism comprised several philosophies. It is generally considered to start with Pyrrhonism, but the Cyrenaics were also skeptics of a sort and slightly predate Pyrrhonism. Academic Skepticism, of which Cicero was an adherent, came shortly after Pyrrhonism. They all had different answers to the question of what was true. 

The Academics thought truth was unknowable. To get by in life, one had to consider the various points of view and to judge them based on how persuasive they were. Hence Cicero gets taken for, as you put it, an “eclectic philosopher” finding pieces of competing philosophies persuasive and even finding the usual Academic Skeptic position on theology less persuasive than the Stoic account. 

The Pyrrhonists divided knowledge into two categories: knowledge of phenomena and knowledge of what caused those phenomena. Knowledge of phenomena we have. Knowledge of what is behind phenomena we do not have. We just have conjectures - conjectures we should not take on as beliefs, even if those conjectures are persuasive. The Pyrrhonists devised powerful sets of arguments that seemingly preclude that we can ever know anything beyond what is available to us empirically. 

Pyrrhonists make decisions in life based on experience and eschew belief in theoretical doctrines, such as the Stoic dogma that virtue is the only good. Conducting one’s life in this way brings peace of mind (ataraxia) and allows for better decision-making, for both ordinary and ethical matters. In other words, the Pyrrhonists report that they have a prescription for eudaimonia. 

The Cyrenaics - about whom much less is known - thought all we had access to was subjective experience. The Cyrenaics, however, did not go so far as to embrace the position of the philosopher Protagoras who held that man is the measure of all things, and thus we each have our own truth. 

Douglas C. B.

Author of “Pyrrho’s Way: The Ancient Greek Version of Buddhism”