We start from givens, and must be faithful to those givens, but if we work to understand more than we already know, remaining faithful not only to what we know and do not know but also to where we experience perplexity, our givens can change, and we can re-start from new givens, and experience new truth.
We cannot choose those new givens, nor can we invent them. Attempts to choose or invent our new givens — to construct a truth to our liking — in the mistaken belief that with repetition and application any newly-constructed truth can become habitual, familiar and true, will result only in dishonesty, alienation, nihilism and despair. If a constructivist does manage to experience a construction as true, this is only because their sense of truth is so thoroughly lost that there is no faithfully-felt truth with which to compare it. The most hopeless alienation is one ignorant of its alienation, which regards whatever is not itself as a threat. Alienation is homophilic and heterophobic. It hates alterity.
If we wish to live faithfully in truth, all we can do is find live, felt problems and follow them where they lead us. And if we cannot live with where we arrive, we can only iterate this process until we arrive at a given truth we can live with. We must take what is given.
And once we find a given truth we love, we are not required to look for problems. Problems will arise when the time is right.
Truths deserve not only faithfulness, but also gratitude, care and love. Why should we demand unconditionality and immortality from truth?
Looking back over my many decades of life, I see a world in which societal truths morph over time. Where and how do I examine how this influences my own understanding? Faith is one source but even followers can awaken to how they understand and encompass truth.
I am explicitly acknowledging here that truth changes. Societies can and do develop radically different understandings of truth. But societies can also succumb to mass dishonesty and/or delusion, as we saw dramatically demonstrated in the first half of the last century.
Faith misunderstood as willful belief in something one cannot really believe (or believe yet) is one mechanism for producing such dishonestly and delusion.
Faith as I mean it here — as fidelity to what one really experiences as true or false — is not really the source of truth, but more a condition of truth’s emergence — something more akin to honesty and perceptiveness than to doctrinal loyalty.
We can certainly question these experiences, or treat them as merely apparent, but to simply disregard them as untrue before we experience them as untrue, or to accept as true something we experience as false before we experience the falseness produces the alienation I’m talking about here.
We are living in times of dishonesty and delusion on a mass scale. Everyone nods along with me when I say this, thinking I mean those other bad people. And I do mean them, but not only them, and not even primarily them. I get the feeling that most people I know are much clearer on what they are supposed to believe than what they actually do believe.