Ellul on the Nature of Truth

"How could we live if our senses advised us that the reality in which we live does not really exist in the final analysis, that it is only a tangle of whirlwinds and illusions?"

"What would become of us if we could grasp truth with unvarying precision and express it without the slightest imperfection or without any uncertainty?"

"Such a situation would be dreadful and completely unlivable... my certainty is false as far as exact reality is concerned, but this certainty allows me to live."

"One person’s word against another’s is the only possible fragile pointer to truth, like a compass quivering in its case... we need truth to be expressed by the most fragile agent, so that the listener remains free. The uneasiness which enables us to keep going involves knowing that we will never be able to grasp truth in its entirety, or be able to bring our adventure to a close by identifying our life with truth."

These are just some of the issues Jacques Ellul tackles in "The Humiliation of the Word." The following is just a teaser, including some provocative questions that move beyond the realm of abstract philosophy or theology into practical existence - affecting every aspect of our daily lives.

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The reality around us changes and flows constantly. Everything flows: panta rhei. The river I see is never the same. This water I am looking at races away and will never return. At every level, reality is unstable and fleeting. Consider politics or economics: every moment changes their framework. Every moment presents some loss or accident that rules out planning ahead with a view to efficient organization. History does not repeat itself; no two situations will ever be truly comparable.

Time is not alone in making reality unstable. What is the nature of reality? Bernard d’Espagnat’s fine book (Bernard d’Espagnat, A la recherche du Réel: Le Regard d’un physicien (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1981). questions and upsets us. I am aware that this rock I am looking at is essentially a vacuum with atoms whirling around it. But the more physicists progress, the less able we are to grasp reality. In the last analysis, only mathematics can assure us that reality exists. We finally arrive at such refined analysis and a knowledge so subtle that reality becomes a gradually disappearing object that leaves us bedazzled.

Reality is present and yet nothing is there. What I think I grasp is not only transitory and changing, but imperceptible in its "substance" (if one can still use this word in the light of the vacuum and emptiness revealed to us by theoretical physics). We have tools for measuring, but beyond that.... Is everything then an illusion produced by our senses? This old question needs to be brought up again, because it leads us to an astonishing contradiction. I perceive the reality around me (such as this table I am looking at, and on which I am writing) through my sight and sense of touch. That is, I grasp it by means of my most reliable and indisputable senses. We do not need to return to this idea: I cannot doubt what I see. Yet we know for a certainty that what I see is not what I see. But what difference does this make? My sight gives me certainty concerning reality, and I need nothing more.

Here is the other side of the coin: in Measure for Measure, Shakespeare says "Truth is truth to th’end of reck’ning." And Shakespeare is right. Truth remains truth in relation to and in spite of everything. It is firm, stable, hard, and irrefutable. We must not relativize it just because science has changed. We must not say that yesterday’s truth becomes today’s error (and vice versa). We must not become so extremely liberal that we say everything is relative, so that one person can be just as right as the person who says the opposite. If truth is truth even beyond the limits of our grasp and our approximations, it exists. And that settles it. It remains true to itself, of necessity. In observing vanishing reality, Heraclitus says something that does not vanish, and his statement falls within the scope of truth.

Truth is the absolute or eternal. We are not able even to approach its outskirts. We do not construct truth out of bits and pieces added to one another, so as to enable us to remove them and dismantle the construction. By means of language we transmit and understand this truth that is as tightly closed and solid as a dot, reliable as a map, translucent as a crystal, but hard as a diamond. We transmit it and even discern it only through language. Truth is connected to the word and communicated by it. That is, truth is communicated by the most uncertain means, the one most prone to variations and doubt, as we have seen -- by the word, that fragile thing that does not last, evaporating as soon as it has been said. Thus what we are surest of is connected with the most uncertain thing in existence; our most changeable means has to do with what is most certain.

Now here is the amazing thing: this is a godsend for us. How could we live if our senses advised us that the reality in which we live does not really exist in the final analysis, that it is only a tangle of whirlwinds and illusions? How could I walk if my senses showed me nothing but emptiness in front of me? How could I eat if my senses showed me the utter unreality of what I am eating? Not that everything can be reduced to the impressions of my senses. That is not what I mean. My point is that sight and touch, the senses of certainty, give me the guarantee indispensable for living, concerning a milieu that is strange and foreign to me. My certainty is false as far as exact reality is concerned, but this certainty allows me to live.

Physics or mathematics can teach me many things about reality, but they cannot contradict the unimpeachable evidence of my senses. What do I care about the fact that chemistry can give me the exact formula for the wine I am drinking? That has no effect on the great pleasure I derive from it. (Moreover, when chemists claim to be able to reproduce wine, vanilla, orange extract, etc., on the basis of their exact formulas, the result is always horrible -- at least for those with a sense of taste.) In order for me to live, my senses must be right in spite of the scientific analysis of reality. (This is part of d’Espagnat’s rigorous analysis.)

The opposite is just as true. What would become of us if we could grasp truth with unvarying precision and express it without the slightest imperfection or without any uncertainty? What would happen if the means were perfectly adequate for expressing truth? Such a situation would be dreadful and completely unlivable. We would be pinned down once and for all in a butterfly museum. We would be there in all our splendor, unable to move any more, because everything would be said, closed up, and finished: perfect. We have seen the horror that has resulted in the course of our history every time a person or group has claimed to express truth in its entirety, believing their word to be identical with the truth, or that truth could not be "elsewhere" or "other." This attitude has given legitimacy to all dictatorships, oppressions, falsehoods, and massacres. One person’s word against another’s is the only possible fragile pointer to truth, like a compass quivering in its case. And quite apart from human pretension to have a proud, exclusive corner on truth, even if we could seize truth as it is and transmit it without wasting any of it and without confusion, truth would crush us of its own weight and prevent us from living. In order to live, we need truth to be expressed by the most fragile agent, so that the listener remains free. The uneasiness which enables us to keep going involves knowing that we will never be able to grasp truth in its entirety, or be able to bring our adventure to a close by identifying our life with truth.

Some people, including Christians (I think particularly of my Protestant friends), have the profound conviction that truth is "there." They say, for instance, that "the word of God is expressed in the Bible." Even so, I must be prudent enough to say that this word is conveyed through human language: witnesses who pass it on to other witnesses. And when I hear it, I understand it with my words, my verbal images, and I speak it with my language -- and I am not God, fortunately. If this were not so, human life would be closed. By these statements, I do not reduce the value of revealed truth in the slightest; on the contrary, in this way I respect it and recognize its special dimension and the depth and permanence that make it truth. If I claim to grasp and express it in its entirety, then it is no longer truth.

The connection between Word and Truth is of such a nature that nothing can be known of truth apart from language. This truth establishes itself over the duration of generations (Hebrew toledoth), in the ebb and flow of words, through our fellowship and our misunderstandings. This is where this marvelously human life is located. The most reliable thing speaks to the most uncertain world; my most flexible means expresses what is irrefutable.