Relation to truth· Belief and knowledgenamed middle
Truth that empowers
Axis: The value of truth — Should we want the truth at any cost, or do some illusions help us live?
Truth is worth having for the grip it gives: wherever knowing lets us act, adjust, and live better, it is preferable to illusion. But when it offers no grip and can only weigh on us, wisdom consists in turning our attention elsewhere and putting things in perspective, without ever replacing what is true with a consoling fiction.
Philosophers 3
Humeexplicit
Pushed to the limit, reason leaves neither world nor self standing, and that lucidity is unlivable: it is nature, not argument, that cures the philosopher, a dinner, a game of backgammon, the conversation of friends. Hume owns this remedy of inattention: those skeptical conclusions do not deserve the sacrifice of common life.
A Treatise of Human Nature, I, 4, 7 (1739)
Michel de Montaigneexplicit
No one scrutinized his own weaknesses more honestly, yet this lucidity stops where grip ends: of insoluble questions he concludes that they make a good place to rest a well-made head. To know about oneself what helps one live, and let sleep what only torments: the perpetual essaying of oneself coexists with an avowed incuriosity.
Essays, III, 13 (Of Experience)
Show inferred positions (1)
Rousseauinferable
It is not truth that corrupts but presumption: we go astray not through what we do not know, but through what we think we know. Émile's education therefore delays the truths that cannot yet be either understood or verified, religion, metaphysics, conventions, and admits knowledge only in the measure of its present usefulness and of the pupil's experience; ignorance there is a lesser evil than error, and conscience a surer guide than reasoning.
Emile, or On Education, II-III (1762) · Emile, IV (Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar)
- PrescriptiveExistentialHope, an illusion?
To hope is not to believe falsely: since the future is not yet settled, hope may escape the divide between lucidity and illusion altogether, unless it is illusion's most discreet form.
the hoped-for future - PrescriptiveMoralIllusion for another's sake
Withholding a diagnosis, embellishing a situation: deciding that someone will live better without a truth means judging in their place what it is worth to them; who has that right?
the truth owed to another