The Wall and the Gate

One of the criticisms invoked against philosophers in ancient times (by Christians, for example) was that the very idea of philosophy implied that they could never reach their goal. The word “philosophy” itself suggested this: It means love of or friendship toward wisdom, not the actual possession of wisdom. From at least Socrates on, the philosophers themselves seemed to acknowledge this open-endedness, denying that they themselves were “wise.”


The famous story of the Delphic Oracle’s pronouncement on Socrates, and his interpretation of it (as portrayed by Plato), seems to support this view. On being asked who was the wisest of men, the oracle replied, “None is wiser than Socrates.” This dictum, delivered presumably from the god Apollo, took Socrates by surprise, because he was convinced that he possessed nothing that he could convince himself was real and true knowledge.

And that was precisely the point. All other men thought they knew things that were true and important and wise, but they truly knew nothing. As a result, they didn’t seek to learn, but instead were content to rest in their false certainty.

Socrates, in contrast, understood that he knew nothing true and important and wise, and continuously sought to learn whatever he could of such things. This made him, in the view of Plato and pretty much all subsequent thinkers, the epitome of a philosopher: a seeker of wisdom.

We are accustomed today to thinking of wisdom as knowledge of a certain kind, and this appears also to have been the most widespread view in ancient Greece. In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates’ most implacable opponents were the Sophists, a group of generally itinerant teachers of what we would call today public speaking, persuasion, marketing, personal presentation. Their special forté was teaching the skill of arguing both sides of an issue with equal effectiveness; in other words, how to win an argument, regardless of the truth.

The Sophists’ claim was that they taught wisdom (“sophia” in Greek), and Socrates’ (and Plato’s) counterclaim was that they taught nothing of the sort – and indeed that wisdom could not be taught. But what the philosophers offered in opposition to the Sophists was not a different version of wisdom but instead a different way of thinking about what wisdom is. And their way of thinking about wisdom was in some sense an end in itself: To think about wisdom, what it might be, how to acquire it, is better than to believe one has it.

Then as now, people mostly preferred to believe, or hope, that they could pay a Sophist and in return receive the knowledge they needed to succeed (by whatever yardstick success might be measured). The career of the Roman statesman Cicero provides an object lesson in how the single-minded pursuit of sophistic learning could in fact pay off in the accumulation of wealth and the acquisition of power. But the philosophical question is whether such a life is truly good.

The alternative the philosophers offered was a life of constant self-examination with no tangible reward, and their refusal to admit that wisdom is something definable and teachable continued to be a point of attack by their enemies even after the Sophists had faded from history. Christian apologists took up the argument: The philosophers can only “seek” wisdom, but we know we “have” wisdom because God Himself gave it to us through divine revelation – and we have the divine books to prove it, providing us with a complete and final truth. Our task thus is not to find the truth but just to understand and live according to the wisdom that has been packaged and delivered to us so neatly.

There’s a Sufi story I ran across at some point, I forget exactly where, that seems to me to have some relevance here, though I might be wrong.

Once upon a time, there was a king who ruled over a city where farmers and tradesmen and so on came to sell their goods and services.

This king was genuinely determined to be righteous and virtuous. One day, walking through the marketplace in his city, he heard the sellers of vegetables and livestock and metalware and ceramics and fortune-telling and love potions and so on touting their products and performances, and he was appalled by the dishonesty of it all: Everyone, it seemed, was exaggerating or distorting or otherwise misrepresenting what he or she had to sell.

The king went back to his palace and thought about what he had seen and heard, and he decided that he would find a way to force everyone who came into his city to tell the truth. That night, he sent his soldiers to build a gallows next to the gate by which the farmers and tradesmen entered the city.

At dawn the next day, when all the peddlers and farmers and so on were lined up at the gate to come into the city, the king stood on the wall and addressed them. “All honest men are welcome in my city,” he said, in his archaically gender-specific way. “But dishonest men are never welcome here. So to guarantee the honesty of all who enter here, I have built this gallows. If you want to come into my city, you must answer one question. If you tell the truth, you may come in and do your business. But if you lie, you will be hanged from this gallows. Now, who wants to come in?”

Naturally, everyone hesitated. But after a moment, an old man stepped forward. The king saw him and said, “All right, granddad, where are you going?”

The old man answered, “I’m going to hang on your gallows.”

As far as I know, the king may still be standing on that wall and trying to figure out what he should do with the old man, because whatever he does, he will make himself a liar.

Just Gimme Some Truth

“Pilate said to him, Are you a king? Jesus answered, You say I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.
“Pilate said to him, What is truth?” (Jn. 18: 37-38)

This passage from the Gospel of John (chapter 18, verses 37-38) has been on my mind a lot lately, maybe because of the inexcusably prolonged presidential campaign, maybe because I’ve had to spend a lot of time the past few years dealing with marketing and PR people.

In John’s book, Jesus doesn’t answer Pilate’s question. In fact, Pilate doesn’t actually give him an opportunity to answer; it’s a truly rhetorical question. Here we have an upper-class Roman interrogating a Jewish laborer-cum-holy-man and not wanting to bandy words with him; as a presumably well-educated man of his time, Pilate has heard or read the extensive philosophical discussions of “truth” and isn’t interested in hearing some backwater crackpot’s views on the subject.

And in any case, John already has given us the answer: “Jesus said to him, I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” (Jn. 14: 6) In brief, Jesus himself is truth, but the overly worldly Pilate can’t see it even when it stands directly in front of him.

A Zen teaching known as the “Flower Sermon” presents, I think, a similar message: One day, the Buddha sits before his disciples and instead of launching into the expected sermon simply holds up a flower. The disciples don’t understand, they scratch their heads and whisper to each other, “What does he mean?” Except for one, Mahākāśyapa, who just smiles.

The lesson in both cases, I think, is this: Truth is what really IS. Or put another way, every real thing is true, is a truth.

Where untruth enters is in any attempt to describe or explain what is. Whenever we venture beyond the actual object and start trying to give an account of its nature or causes or relationships or meanings, we run the risk of getting it wrong, of falling short, of misrepresenting reality. It isn’t necessary to attribute this to deliberate deception or plain stupidity, either; as Plato and his followers emphasized, every representation of a reality is, so to speak, less real than the thing it represents.

Such a representation, account, explanation or description was referred to by Platonists as a “logos.” Many modern Christians are aware of that word as meaning simply “word,” because of the standard translation of the opening verse of the same Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

But that translation conveys nothing of the many implications the word “logos” would have held for John and his readers. By the time his book was written (late first or early second century), “logos” had been in use as a technical philosophical term throughout the Greek-speaking world (which included most of what we now call the Middle East) for a full four centuries at least. In Platonism, it especially referred to the expression in physical reality of an inexpressible “higher” reality: Just as a spoken sentence is an incomplete expression of a thought, a person or a dog or a tree is an expression of (so to speak) God’s idea of a person or a dog or a tree.

Another way of translating logos might be “narrative,” in the sense in which that term is used by social science types nowadays: a description of life and the world that we believe explains “the way things are,” that gives us a sense of how to fit into this complex and often confusing universe, and that helps us justify our choices and goals.

For example, the much-discussed “clash of civilizations” between the Christian (or post-Christian) West and the Muslim East might better be described as a “clash of narratives.” Similarly, the “culture wars” within American society could also be said to be a conflict between or among narratives. In both cases, I think this way of looking at it helps explain the frustration and exasperation felt by people who can’t understand why their opponents can’t see the point, why they “just don’t get it”: because both sides are looking at their narratives, not reality.

It was the ancient Greeks, of course, who invented formal logic, and I think they were impelled to do so by their own democratic traditions: They saw the risk of their institutions being hijacked by demagogues and sophists who could sway public opinion with untrue but emotionally stirring speeches about the issues. They realized that good decisions depend on good information, and saw the need for a reliable way to separate true statements about reality from untrue ones.

That analytical apparatus still exists, naturally, but judging from the blatant falsehoods so widely stated in our time – by the media, the marketers, the lobbyists, the lawyers and of course the politicians – our culture leaders obviously are confident that few of us have the time, the knowledge or the will to use it – or to “bear witness to the truth.”