This is a German podcast script translated to English – if the wording seems a bit off, that may be why.
In recent years I have noticed more and more often that there are many people with serious problems regarding the idea of truth. I think it has not escaped anyone’s notice that the Western individual finds it increasingly difficult to presume to be capable of making a judgment about reality. One sees it this way, the other sees it that way – who presumes to say which one is right? But what is behind it?
I’d like to discuss some of my thoughts on the social phenomenon of relativism, and also touch somewhat superficially on its intellectual roots. Then, at the end, I will give my personal perspective as a Christian on this challenge.
You can learn a lot about the general worldview of the public by observing the way people talk on social media. Especially in Germany, I often notice that as soon as the concept of objective truth or even truth itself is mentioned implicitly or explicitly, people tend to get upset and reject what is being said. Almost as if the person who invokes this concept has committed some kind of mortal sin. How did this come about and what is the essential idea behind it?
First, explain an important concept: what is the idea of objective truth? Basically, it is the idea that an idea represents the real world as it really is. It is then objective in the sense that it rises above mere feelings or perceptions and comes into contact with something that is above us, namely the real world. I mean, the majority of people in the Western world still believe, for example, that science can provide us with objective truth because it describes the world as it really is, not just as we subjectively imagine it to be.
And, maybe then you’re the type who thinks this general relativistic trend is absurd – truth is truth precisely because it is true, not because we prefer it or have it under our control. Or, maybe you’re more likely to believe that there are very good reasons for this trend in thinking that often go unacknowledged.
I will try here to find a conciliatory middle ground between these views. I think both offer insights that are quite important and should not be neglected, but also tend to unhelpful excesses if they do not take the other side into account.
On one side is the ideology of realism. The general idea is that objective truths such as 1+1= 2 and that the atomic number of hydrogen is 1, what happened in the past, whether God exists or not, or even that murder is wrong are objective realities about which we are simply wrong if we believe anything other than what simply is. In this sense, there is objective truth because there are things that are simply true whether someone agrees with them or not.
People with this view readily admit that there are indeed some subjective truths such as „vanilla ice cream is delicious“ because the content of their statements is inherently self-referential, that is, a feeling statement. The statement says nothing about the external world, so of course it can be true for one person and not for another. But the general idea is that statements that refer to the real world outside our heads must necessarily be either true or false. There are, of course, other nuances to this, but I will leave it at that.
On the other hand, there’s the more relativistic ideology, we’ll discuss that in a little more detail.
But one problem with talking about relativist ideology is that it is not a single ideology, but a family of critical schools. But these can be explained more generally as a family of ideas with similar themes.
When I first encountered relativist thought, it seemed obviously absurd and wrong. Basically, relativism apparently meant to me, the claim that there is no objective reality. Or, that there is no world outside our heads to which statements correspond. This seemed to be the inevitable consequence of claiming that there could be contradictory truths, like claiming that Christianity and Islam could both be true.
Therefore, my simple response to relativism until recently was that it is an ideology that is self-contradictory, claiming that there is no objective truth and therefore it cannot be objectively true.
I sometimes feel that the Christian critique of relativism has landed here on a popular level, but I think that is rather insufficient.
So what did I miss earlier? yes, I think the most important thing was that there is an important difference between on the one hand truth and on the other hand reality; a difference between the perceived and the perceiver.
Okay. To claim that there is no objective reality is indeed absurd. But to claim that there is no objective truth is not so crazy as at first impression.
The emphasis then is not on the idea that there is no world outside of us about which true things could be thought, but rather that the human capacity to interact with reality is profoundly limited. To the point that it compromises our ability to be objective. And therefore the problem of relativism suddenly becomes less absurd than a serious problem to think about.
Depending on the extent to which one adheres to relativistic thinking, there is ultimately a serious distrust of humanity’s ability to really know anything about metaphysical reality. By the way, metaphysical means, beyond the physical, or basically the ultimate reality beyond appearances. Our minds and brains are too limited and influenced by subjective forces to really form a picture of the world that is accurate enough to say with confidence that we even recognize it correctly.
So: let’s follow the rabbit hole a bit. What is the basis for this skepticism? We take a very limited look at the history of philosophy.
Immanuel Kant, certainly not a relativist himself, introduced the idea of the noumenal world and the phenomenal world in the 18th century. Or: the world of subjective perception: phenomenal, in contrast to the real world in itself: noumenal. The basic idea was essentially this: we humans cannot experience reality directly, as if we somehow had direct access to it. Instead, we only have concepts in our heads that we impose on our sensory information in order to understand it.
For example, when I look at ‚a flower,‘ not only do I experience the flower somehow directly, but my eyes show me the image of a flower, I smell something like a flower, my hands tell me that I’m holding something like a flower. But ultimately my mind puts the concept of a flower on my experience of what my eyes and ears tell me, and only in that limited way do I have the ability to really experience or understand reality.
The problem, after all, is that we have no a priori reason to believe that the mental concepts we impose on our experience really accurately describe the real world. Concepts like causality, matter, past, future, composition, form and substance, identity, etc. Do these concepts describe reality as it really is, or do they only work for us? It may be that they help us survive as physical living beings, but that these concepts actually correspond to the world as it really is is another matter. In view of this, Kant concluded that it is completely impossible for us humans to know the real world as such. I can look at a human being and impose my understanding of what a human being is on what I see; I can look at heaven and impose my belief in a supernatural God on my experience of being itself. But is our mere imposition of these concepts more than a mere imposition?
After Kant came other philosophers, including Schopenhauer, who claimed that we not only impose our mental concepts on the sense world, but also impose our own will on the world. According to Schopenhauer, our will plays a preconscious role in interpreting the world as we experience it.
This would mean, in practical terms, that what we think is a phenomenon of the real world can also only be an expression of the will. The king, for example, who considers all his subjects to be slaves, is thus not reflecting an objective reality, but imposing his own will on reality and, in a certain sense, bringing his perceptions into existence through his power.
Or, to give a more relevant example: A male-dominated society is naturally shaped by men. But men, whose perceptions of the world are shaped by their desire for dominance over women, can make choices based on that impression that shape society to actually bring that perceived dominance over women into being, creating structures of oppression and power that create opportunities for what women can do in their lives. This can give rise to ideas such as women’s „proper place,“ which is assumed to be an objective reality in relation to women, but is instead a social structure enforced by the will of the men in the society they control.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche also noted that we never have an objective understanding of the world – in fact, it is impossible. Each person views the phenomena before him not as a purely objective observer, but as the sum of his past experiences, background beliefs, feelings, and so on. We are all limited to our own perspective in the way we see the world. We cannot see it objectively.
For example, let’s quickly listen to some of the thoughts Nietzsche wrote in „Die fröhliche Wissenschaft.“
It is a fortiori not the opposition of „thing-in-itself“ and appearance: for we do not „recognize“ nearly enough to be allowed to separate even in this way. We have no organ at all for recognizing, for the „truth“: we „know“ (or believe or imagine) just as much as it may be useful in the interest of the human herd, the species: and even what is called „usefulness“ here is in the end also only a belief, a conceit and perhaps just that most fatal stupidity, by which we once perish.
Easy reading for a nice look into the abyss. But what Nietzsche has to say here is extremely important and lays another building block for the further analysis of the perspectivism of human cognition.
And since then, there has been an enormous and even growing body of analysis of how human subjectivity affects and even determines belief. From the structures of patriarchy, white supremacy, materialism, religious power, Eurocentrism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, etc., there are lines of study that seriously question the human ability to see the world objectively, and metaphysical ideas that were supposedly introduced to enforce certain social norms are really being strongly questioned.
So, the fact that we can look at the world today and see that there are and have been an infinite number of variations on how to think about ultimate reality, religion, the ultimate nature and purpose of human beings, etc., makes us seriously question how objective our belief formation process as human beings really is or can be. Can there really be such a thing as an objective view on our part? Or can we even dare to claim something like an objective truth?
I would argue that relativism does not at all assert that there is no objective reality about which one could have true beliefs, but rather that we as humans simply do not have the capacity to achieve this. We are deeply influenced by our own creatureliness, background, feelings, the society we grew up in, etc., and therefore the confidence we can have about whether or not we really have true beliefs should be greatly diminished by this understanding.
And even further, relativism as a general tendency has, in light of this, gradually disconnected the notion of worldview from the idea of truth, actually. In the Western world, and especially in continental Europe, one increasingly encounters those who seriously question the very idea of truth when it comes to philosophical and religious beliefs. I would say that an exception is often made here for scientific knowledge, because it has the advantage of being tangible and more verifiable, but ultimately science itself is also based on a considerable number of metaphysical assumptions that are themselves intangible.
Instead, the general idea that we must not claim to be objective enough has led people to feel the need to shift the status of worldview toward subjective preference rather than a set of beliefs about the world that presumably actually describe it correctly. Out of these realizations come the ideas of „my truth“ and „your truth.“
Moreover, the focus of worldview formation has shifted away from the idea of conforming to an objective reality to an expression of individuality, freedom, and autonomy through one’s beliefs, ideas, and perceptions about the world.
Metaphysics itself was ultimately dismissed as scholastic fallacy that lacked a view of the big picture and the whole.
Ok. So how would I, an ordinary and Orthodox lay Christian, view all this? Because many would claim that my trust in the Christian faith would be seriously shaken by these general findings.
Well, I’m not sure I would go that far. But first I would like to make three points in which I agree with and commend the relativist way of thinking. Then after that I have some points to discuss where I think it goes too far.
First, yes, that the human capacity to know the world is limited is fully true. We are deeply influenced by the surrounding culture, our own prejudices, our will and our creaturely nature. Yes, ultimately we will always have only a perspective understanding of reality. And we have to come to terms with that somehow.
We have to understand that our knowledge of the world is nothing more than a drop of water in really an ocean of possible knowledge — and learning new things can create a new light through which to see everything else — the painful inverse, after all, being that for every thing you don’t know, that’s another layer of darkness or ignorance about our knowledge. That’s one of the reasons I got personally involved with philosophy. at some point it became clear to me that: if I were born in a different culture, I would very likely think very differently about the world, religiously, philosophically, economically, etc. If I were of a different gender, skin color, or economic status, I would be more likely to see the world differently as well. It is extremely important to recognize this on a deeper level.
Everything that has been said by various philosophers regarding our need to impose our own human concepts on nature is also true. As humans, we have no way out of this.
It is also true that we tend to project our will onto the world and act as if what we experience through it is reality. A simple example would be anger – when you are angry with someone, you tend to perceive him as evil. But he is probably no less or more evil than others around him.
And, there are and were indeed social power systems of ideological structures that have little to do with reality, but act as realities and determine our lives. I do think that these need to be questioned to some degree – you have to be careful there, but that’s another conversation. It all exists and there’s no point in denying it. What is important in the end is what conclusions one draws from it
This brings us to the second point. In light of this, it should be perfectly clear that we need to listen with an open mind to those with whom we disagree and really seek the truth, rather than just defending what is comfortable to us. Our beliefs don’t deserve much respect if our commitment to reality doesn’t precede them. And that requires listening and learning.
I am sometimes somewhat disillusioned with the fundamentalist certainty claims of Christians as well as atheists and even relativists (we’ll get to that later). I find that, in general, the less one has sincerely listened to those with whom one disagrees, the more secure one feels in one’s beliefs.
Also, it is clear that we are abandoning fundamentalist claims of certainty about things of which we are in fact not certain. By fundamentalist, I mean the conflation of moral commitment and intellectual certainty. By this I do not at all mean that we should reject the idea of believing everything we believe to be true, but rather that we should take a step back and recognize that all of our beliefs are themselves phenomena in our own minds that may have origins other than a purely rational formation of belief.
The third point is that we should be careful to allow others freedom and respect for their own beliefs about the world. In other words, it is simply absurd to impose our own certainty about a particular belief on other people and assume that they are guilty because they do not see what we see.
Yes, they may just not believe in the same things or even in basic worldview principles as we do, and they may have a completely different experience of the world. Humility is an extremely important virtue because it requires us not to assume that we know more than we really do. Please note that I am not saying that there is no need for accountability among Christians because we can never be sure of our belief systems. That would be going too far.
So. Now we come to my critique: here are some of the reasons why I think relativism can go way too far, even to the point of becoming a fundamentalist claim itself, with little more merit than religious fundamentalism.
So to my first point:, and that is: certainty is not a prerequisite for knowledge.
This has a lot to do with our very conception of what knowledge is, because the assertion that something is the truth implies that we believe we know it. Traditionally, philosophers have understood knowledge as having three parts. Justified true belief. For us to know an idea, we must have reasons to believe it, we must actually believe it, and: it must be true. Logic.
The two parts that say an idea must be true and believed to be known are pretty clear. The third point, the justification or reasons we have for believing something, seems to be the crux of the problem here.
And that is, after all, the important question: do we have to have a sure or indisputable reason to believe something before we can really know it? I think the answer here is no. In epistemology (or, the philosophical study of knowledge), the concept of contestable knowledge, or knowledge that can be constantly revised, has gradually established itself as a competitor to the more traditional understanding of knowledge as indubitable certainty.
Specifically, this means that the notion that one must be completely certain of something before one can really know it is simply not at all consistent with the way our beliefs play out in daily life. When my wife tells me she’s going to the supermarket to buy groceries, I don’t run her through a polygraph, check the car engine to make sure it won’t break down, check traffic conditions, call the police to give her an escort, and call the supermarket to make sure it’s open so I can finally know she’s really going to the supermarket.
In that case, I believe what is more likely; not what I can find certainty for. Based on general traffic, store hours, my wife’s honesty, etc., in all likelihood I have more reason to believe that she will actually go to the supermarket and buy groceries, and therefore I know that she will go to the supermarket. It may be knowledge I am less certain of compared to other knowledge I have, but it is knowledge nonetheless.
Why is that so important? It’s because the alternative is that I’m exposing my judgment in a completely unrealistic way that I ultimately can’t live with consistently. Imagine that I suspend my judgment and try to be completely agnostic about whether she is doing what she said she was doing, so that when someone asks me, „Where is your wife?“, I say, „I cannot know.“
If I want to believe in relation to the evidence or namely in a rational way, I must not believe that she will certainly go, nor must I believe that she will certainly not go. In fact, according to a purely Bayesian statistical analysis, it is more likely that my wife will actually go shopping at the supermarket. So the rational thing to do, and the thing our minds are already naturally inclined to do, is to believe what is more likely with revisable certainty. After all, it is obvious that we base our beliefs on the evidence of probability and do not wait until we are completely certain of something to be able to say that we know it in such a way that we can consistently act on it.
The important concept here is revisability. Apart from mathematical truths and truths of reason, all of our knowledge is revisable because ultimately we do not know it with absolute certainty. There are some beliefs we know with greater certainty than others – for example, that the street we live on exists, or that the Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989. And there are other things we know with less certainty, for example, whether I will achieve everything I set out to do today: and let’s face it, for me the statistics suggest not.
Or even, for example, that certain historical events took place, such as the battles between Sparta and Troy in ancient Greece. These beliefs have some degree of justification, but ultimately are not at all completely certain. If I come across new evidence suggesting that they did not in fact take place – whether, for example, some very well-preserved writings by authors close to home are discovered by archaeologists suggesting that they were entirely made-up civilization propaganda – this would undermine my confidence in my belief and I would revise it. Faith and evidence are always in some tension or dance with each other, and part of keeping an open mind is always remaining open to new information and being open-minded.
My point is that religious faith and belief in metaphysical realities also belong here. There is no reason to make an exception, as if belief in things we cannot see suddenly requires a mathematical or extraordinary level of certainty to be accepted as knowledge.
The commitment that religious faith requires is precisely not that of an intellectual certainty, but that of a phenomenological intimacy. In other words, the intimacy of a life-changing faith that brings about repentance of sins and surrender of the individual to the infinite in God does not require that we know with absolute certainty that God exists, just as my love for my wife does not require that I know with absolute certainty that she exists or loves me in return. I trust that what seems more likely is actually true because it is ultimately the most reliable way to come into contact with the real world. In doing so, I acknowledge that I could be wrong, but I suspect that I am not.
Second: Assuming that we know that our knowledge is limited in order to justify skepticism about our cognitive abilities implicitly requires knowledge of a very complex set of facts in order to even conclude that we are wrong.
For example, 1) that our memories reliably tell us about the past, 2) that we or our ancestors believed certain things in that past, and 3) that the things our ancestors believed are actually false, 4) that we are sufficiently capable of perceiving the world to distinguish between true and false things
You must understand what a huge metaphysical and epistemological framework of knowledge this already implies. Even the claim that our knowledge is limited presupposes a considerable amount of knowledge before we can even make the argument.
Third: Criticism of knowledge is valid, but overzealous skepticism is not a rational solution.
The solution to the problems posed by the relativistic critique of knowledge is not to give up hope of ever knowing anything, but to show intellectual humility. The student who keeps making mistakes in arithmetic can be corrected by the teacher – but only if he is willing to learn.
Our misconceptions about the world can be corrected by listening to those who disagree and by educating ourselves about the world in which we live. Realizing that we are inherently incapable of knowing the world completely objectively can teach us to be very careful in forming beliefs so that we end up with a more accurate picture of the world than we had before.
And there I come back to the concept of humility. Humility is a virtue that is actually often a double-edged sword. Humility not only tells us that we shouldn’t presume to know things we don’t know, but it also demands that we shouldn’t presume to deny things we should actually acknowledge.
Ultimately, both skepticism and the claim that one cannot know something are themselves truth claims that require evidence and argument. And here we come to an extremely important point.
Epistemologically, we as a society far too often give skepticism a free pass, in the sense that we don’t require those who are skeptical to justify their skepticism as consistently as we require those who make positive truth claims. But skepticism itself is a negative truth claim. When one doubts that God exists, one does not take a neutral stance. One affirms the non-existence of God, which is an intellectual position that has as much substance as the claim that God exists.
Or if one takes a more moderate agnostic route, in which one doubts the evidence for God’s existence, one affirms the fact that the evidence is not good – for which, in fact, one must provide reasons, as one would require of someone who believes it to be good.
The idea that the person who constantly holds back, folds his hands, and refuses to believe anything is more objective is a myth based on the misleading notion that belief is always an overzealous expression of subjective preferences. Don’t get me wrong: it is indeed good to reserve judgment on things for a period of time at the beginning, to get as accurate a picture of the data as possible in order to draw an accurate conclusion. But even if that is wisdom in my opinion, you can’t stay forever. When it comes to things that are of great importance to our lives, it is impossible to live in a state of constant neutrality. Consequently, we will live with what we think is more probable, and that cannot be avoided.
The insistence that we simply dare not make judgments about reality unless we can be absolutely certain therefore turns out to be an unfounded and fundamentalist assertion of not knowing that cannot be justified without adopting an absurd epistemological standard for knowledge. Indeed, it becomes a kind of Kafka trap. The moment one raises an objection, one’s objections are interpreted as illustrating the very problem being proposed. One resists the idea that one cannot know anything simply because poor Homo Deus’s own intellect is so limited that he does not understand that he can know virtually nothing.
In summary: it seems absurd to me to claim that the solution to realizing that we are not the most objective creatures is simply to give up trying to be objective – and instead sink into our own invented versions of reality. Nah, the most reasonable solution would be to use that realization to help us in our struggle to be objective.
Fourth, the notion that humans are unlikely to gain knowledge of metaphysical realities because of the limitations of their intellects and their ability to know reality objectively is somehow made somewhat implausible by the fact that some now well-attested scientific theories in cosmology and physics in ällen were not first discovered by observation, but merely by abstract mathematical theories of the human mind. Gravitational waves, dark matter, the Big Bang, the Higgs boson particle, and others are discoveries that were predicted by human theories long before they were supported by scientific evidence. In light of this, I tend to think that while the human mind is limited, its ability to connect with reality on an important level should not be underestimated.
Fifth and finally, the general points I raise here also imply that the concept of honest and sincere disagreement is possible after all. The intuition many of us have that moral or intellectual disagreement is primarily a battle of tastes and feelings derives directly from relativist doctrine, namely that given humanity’s completely unobjective approach to reality, disagreements and clashes of worldviews can be nothing more than clashes of preferences, cultural forces, or power structures in society. But once you dismiss these cynical notions about human nature as inadequate, as you probably should, you begin to realize that disagreements can be really real, even if they are not always, of course.
If there were one thing I wish could be explained to every person in the Western world, it would be this: it is possible to respectfully and lovingly disagree with someone about their lifestyle or beliefs. It doesn’t always equal hate.
I think that one of the reasons why the culture of debate in our society has gone so full downhill is that no one believes anymore that others are capable of sincerely disagreeing.
Ok, in conclusion.
Ultimately, I believe that the concept of „objective truth“ in a strict sense is only possible for something like God. As human beings, we do not have the ability to see anything completely objectively. However, the concept of objective reality is something we should all be able to affirm.
And furthermore, it is reasonable to think that we can know something about it. But we must be careful how we arrive at our conclusions, because it is easy to go astray. Knowledge about ultimate realities is possible because knowledge does not require absolute certainty or one hundred percent accuracy.
And in that light, I see no significant threat to Christian faith or knowledge about things in the world, as long as we are careful. I do believe that Christianity is true, not because I am 100% certain that it is true, but because I think it is more likely than nothing. And yes, as unpopular as it may be, I do believe that people who think Christianity is false are probably (and not certainly) wrong.
Finally: many modern people see the idea of a world of truth or reality outside of ourselves as a threat…. well, I can certainly understand that, because the real world not only exalts us, but also rebukes us. But in the end, I can’t include myself in that.
Personally, I find it extremely exciting – I mean, think of all the wonders and riches of discovering and enjoying the truth and beauty of the real world, and not having to be busy asserting and shaping your own reality. Isn’t that exhausting anyway?
And, honestly, I find myself pretty boring at heart. In my life, it’s ALWAYS when I give up on myself and my self-will and think outside the box that I really feel like I’m finding the real me.
For I am not convinced that the purpose of life is to invent ourselves or to create only our own existential truths, but to find our true selves by seeking what really lies beyond the appearances of the stars and the sunrise — yes even when I cannot know that perfectly. Perhaps it is the same with you.
Evan Garrett: Writings 