The Relative Absoluteness of Truth

A Guest Post by Thaddeus J. Kozinski, Ph.D.

Many today accept a false philosophical dichotomy: either the absolute absoluteness or absolute relativity of truth, as opposed to what is truly the case, as I shall explain presently, the relative absoluteness of truth. The acceptance of this false dichotomy stems from the neglect of a vital philosophical distinction. The distinction is between truth as it exists in itself, that is, in an objective sense and excluding any conditions and limitations, and truth as it comes to be present in and recognized by the minds of actual human beings, that is, in a subjective sense, including all the conditions and limitations that pertain to historical, flesh-and-blood human beings.

While it is necessarily the case that either human beings can transcend their particular history, culture, and language and attain universal and absolute truth—or they cannot; it is not necessarily the case that if they can attain absolute and universal truth, they can do so in abstraction from the relative and particular historical, cultural, and linguistic contexts in which they find themselves. Conversely, if the human attainment of absolute and universal truth is inextricably bound up with relative and particular historical, cultural, and linguistic conditions and limitations, this does not necessarily mean that absolute and universal truth cannot be attained.

Alasdair MacIntyre, one of the foremost Thomistic philosophers living today, describes accurately an understanding of truth and its relation to human reason that the false dichotomy I have described misses:

Either reason is thus impersonal, universal, and disinterested or it is the unwitting representative of particular interests, masking their drive to power by its false pretensions to neutrality and disinterestedness. What this alternative conceals from view is a third possibility, the possibility that reason can only move towards being genuinely universal and impersonal insofar as it is neither neutral nor disinterested, that membership in a particular type of moral community, one from which fundamental dissent has to be excluded, is a condition for genuinely rational enquiry and more especially for moral and theological enquiry.[i]

MacIntyre’s term for this “third-way” between absolute absolutism and absolute relativism is “tradition-constituted rationality.” According to MacIntyre, it is only through active participation in particular, historically and culturally relative traditions that men are rendered capable of discovering and achieving history and culture-transcending truth; for it is only by going down, as it were, through a particular tradition that we rise up to universal truth. As body and soul composites, we encounter reality as mediated by our bodies, which are themselves mediated by history and culture. Even the words and concepts we use to interpret and make sense of the brute facts of reality originate and develop in what MacIntyre calls “traditions of rationality.” All men are necessarily habituated into a particular tradition, even if it is a rationally incoherent and morally defective one like the tradition of secular liberalism. Without the resources that traditions provide, coherent and accurate knowledge of the truth is quite difficult, and perhaps impossible. We are, in MacIntyre’s improvement on Aristotle’s classic definition, “tradition-dependent rational animals,” or as Paul Griffiths puts it, “confessional”:

To be confessional is simply to be open about one’s historical and religious locatedness, one’s specificity, and openness that is essential for serious theological work and indeed for any serious intellectual work that is not in thrall to the myth of the disembodied and unlocated scholarly intellect.[ii]

If MacIntyre is right, the particular beliefs we hold to be true, as well as the ideas we consider indisputable, the facts we deem self-evident, the allegiances to which we are committed, the traditions we revere, the authorities we recognize, the customs we cherish, the attitudes we adopt, in short, the overall picture we embrace of God, man, and the world, although perhaps quite true in an absolute and universal objective sense, is, nevertheless, relative and particular in a subjective sense. Our beliefs, even though perhaps universally true beliefs, are still bound to a particular historical and cultural tradition in their genealogy and intelligibility. We do not discover the truth of our beliefs on our own as much as we inherit and receive them from and through others. We do not obtain knowledge autonomously, as mere individuals, and in abstraction from that which is relative and particular in our lives, but in solidarity with others, as members of a community, and in virtue of our relative and particular histories and cultures, that is, our traditions. Contra the Enlightenment, there is no “view-from-nowhere” to which we can climb, no “tradition-independent” rationality we can exercise, no “universal reason” we can access to enable us fully to escape the relative and particular character of human knowledge.

Now, the reader might be thinking that this so-called “tradition-constituted rationality” sounds a lot like the theological, philosophical, and cultural relativism condemned unambiguously by both John Paul II and Benedict XVI. If so, far from being a pre-condition to conversion, such relativism, however sophisticated in name, would effectively preclude it. If we cannot know absolute truth in an absolute manner, what is the use of talking about conversion anyway? But, to reiterate, it is not that human beings cannot recognize and possess absolute and universal truth about and God, the world, and man, but only that the mode or condition of such knowledge is ineluctably relative and particular, for we are historical and social, as well as rational and spiritual, beings. We are tradition-transcending in virtue of our spirit, yet we are tradition-bound in virtue of our body.

Paradoxically, then, in becoming a “temporary relativist,” focusing more on the genealogy rather than the truth-status of our own beliefs, we enable these beliefs to become truly absolute, with respect to their truth. For, if we hold to the absolute absoluteness of truth, it seems sinful to do anything that might render our beliefs vulnerable to refutation; thus, we avoid those grace-filled discussions and arguments that might reveal to us any errors in those beliefs or in our understanding of the natural or supernatural reality to which they refer. And if we hold to the absolute relativity of truth, it appears pointless to even search for the truth at all. To obtain the best chances of possessing absolute truth, then, we Catholics, though subscribing to a Church possessing absolute truth in an absolute manner, must embrace the relative absoluteness of our possession and recognition of this truth, and we must try to convince our interlocutors to do the same. For, as MacIntyre tells us:

It is only insofar as someone satisfies the conditions for rendering him or herself vulnerable to dialectical refutation that that person can come to know whether and what he or she knows.[iii]

Human beings can know the truth, and know that we know it. Nevertheless, we cannot escape the very human way we come to recognize and possess the truth. The sin of “angelism,” exemplified by Rene Descartes, rightly aspires to the timelessness and placelessness of God, but by rejecting the human body, it rejects God’s plan for the human attainment of transcendence. We ascend to the universal and the timeless by embracing the particular and the time-bound, especially by embracing a particular Jewish carpenter who lived in a particular backwater town in a particular time two-thousand years ago. And we embrace Him by becoming part of his Mystical Body, both timeless and time-bound, universal and particular, divine and human.