Truth is an elephant…

It’s one of those side benefits of parenthood, getting asked the big questions and dusting off the undergraduate philosophy books, and answering, wait, this really is what I believe. And your answers hopefully don’t sound tired and clichéd to a ten-year-old, right? So the question of the day is what is there between the absolutist rock and the relativist slippery slope?

I am so uncomfortable with worldviews that hold that only this one version of the truth can be real, the arrogance of believing you have access to capital T Truth that others don’t, that one arrow alone is hitting the bullseye; at the same time, I have this horror of a nihilism that denies that there is any absolute truth to get at. Maybe this is what makes discussions of religion so potentially uncomfortable, because conviction clashing with conviction has an inevitable outcome, and conviction clashing with anything other than conviction either makes the person not holding the conviction look indecisive or the person with the conviction seem like a blowhard. But I am completely in favor of convictions. And I am completelly in favor of open-mindedness. Damn, I am waffling again!

There is a book of art projects for preschoolers titled “It’s the Process not the Product” and that’s sort of where I come out on the question of the nature of truth — we are all pretty much blind, and arguing tends to favor the good arguers, who are not necessarily the possessors of truth. I am sure my Philosophy 101 survey textbook responded to the question of absolutisim vs. relativism with the story of the blind men and the elephant, but it works for me. If you don’t give primacy to the trunk, to the tail, to the tusks, if you don’t try to persuade other people they’re not experiencing what they are experiencing, if you can put aside the apparent contradictions for awhile and accept them all, you can get on with the deeply rewarding and very important work of trying to figure it out — and understanding where another person is coming from, having your own ideas handed back to you enlarged but still recognizable, just, that’s better than chocolate.

Of course, if the story of the elephant seems like a cliched response to the question of absolutism vs. relativism, wikipedia offers this:

A joke exists in which three blind elephants argue what a man looks like. The first one feels the man with his leg, and says that the man is flat. The other elephants touch the man as well, and agree.