What is truth? – In Defence of Marxism magazine #48 out now!

Issue 48 of In Defence of Marxism magazine – the quarterly theoretical journal of the Revolutionary Communist International – is out now! Alan Woods’ editorial, which we publish below, takes up the central question of whether we can truly know and understand the world around us, which is a theme throughout this issue. The four articles in this issue take up a wide range of questions relating to this topic: the crisis and stagnation of contemporary science, mysticism in interpreting quantum physics, the philosophical insights of Goethe’s Faust, and a critique of the philosophical writings of Mao.

“What is truth?” said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.

Thus begins Francis Bacon’s essay, Of Truth. Bacon was referring to the Gospel of St. John, in which Jesus, when questioned by the Roman governor, says: "I came into the world to bear witness to the truth”.

By way of response, Pilate, not without a heavy dose of irony utters the words: “What is truth?” With those few words, he shows not that he was a cynic in the modern sense of the word (though he most probably was), but an educated man, and an adherent of a viewpoint that was common among the cultivated and world-weary Roman upper classes at that time.

Pilate did not wait for an answer for the simple reason that he did not believe that an answer was possible. A fashionable philosophy of that period – the product of a decadent society – asserted that it was impossible to arrive at any objective conception of the truth.

This kind of extreme subjectivism (subjective idealism) is not new. It emerges periodically in philosophy as a kind of nervous twitch, or rather, a paroxysm that despairs of ever arriving at anything resembling objective truth.

It found its most complete and consistent expression in the writings of the famous Greek sophist, Gorgias of Leontini, who asserted that: (1) nothing exists; (2) even if it did, its nature cannot be understood; and (3) even if it could be understood, it could not be communicated to another person.

Sophists like Gorgias were the ancestors of the philosophical standpoint known as scepticism. On the whole, Hume and Kant did not get a whole lot further than this. It is all variations on the same theme. It was carried to an extreme by Bishop Berkeley, who Lenin answered in detail in one of his most important theoretical works, Materialism and Empirio-criticism.

But probably the most influential exponent of a kind of scepticism was the great eighteenth century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant.

Kant

Kant was one of the most original and significant thinkers of his age. He made a number of brilliant discoveries, notably in the field of cosmology. However, he never succeeded in escaping the trap of philosophical dualism, which holds that the world of thought and the material world exist independently of each other.

When he discovered that there were insoluble contradictions in the way we understand the material world, he concluded that there must be an absolute limit to our powers of understanding.

Kant thought there was an unbridgeable abyss between the thinking subject and the object of cognition. According to the Kantian theory, we are shut off from reality by means of the very tools we vainly employ to understand it.

He therefore claimed that we could only have knowledge of phenomena – things as they appear to an observer. Human knowledge was thus restricted to the immediate knowledge of sense perception, beyond which lay the mysterious “thing in itself” (das Ding an sich), which he declared to be unknowable.

Scepticism today

Ever since Kant, scepticism has re-emerged repeatedly in different guises. Each disguise may be different, but the essential content remains the same: human knowledge is limited and there are certain things which can never be known.

Some philosophers (paradoxically taking empiricism as their starting point) assume that the world does not exist at all. Others try to evade the issue altogether, claiming that the conflict between idealism and materialism is a ‘non-issue’ and the product of a misuse of language or misunderstanding.

The same sceptical attitude may be seen in the world of academia today, where the same old mouldy and discredited ideas have more recently been surreptitiously rescued from the dustbin of history and resurrected in the guise of so-called postmodernism.

Here, hiding behind a thin disguise of spurious objectivity, the essential narcissism of the petty-bourgeois intellectual stands exposed in all its naked glory. Slavishly following this well-trodden path, modern bourgeois philosophy has ended up in a blind alley.

By the truth we mean human knowledge that correctly reflects the objective world, its laws and properties / Image: public domain

In place of the truth, we only have my truth, my personal opinion, because this is all that I can ever aspire to know. The search for real objective truth here comes to a full stop, since my truth is just as good as your truth. In fact, according to this theory, my truth is infinitely superior, since only I exist.

An irrational tendency

Let us be clear about this. If one accepts this point of view, it would signify the end not just of all philosophy, but of rational thought in general. It would reduce all thought to mere subjectivity and absolute relativity, in which my truth is just as good as your ‘truth’, since all truth is merely subjective opinion.

In place of knowledge, we would have only opinion. In place of science, faith.

As consistent materialists, Marxists reject this point of view. Philosophical materialism asserts the primacy of matter over ideas and explains that ideas, thought, etc. are only the properties of matter organised in a certain way.

Let us therefore take the trouble of answering the question posed by Pontius Pilate. By the truth we mean human knowledge that correctly reflects the objective world, its laws and properties.

The whole of science is based precisely on the fact that:

a) the world exists outside of ourselves, and

b) in principle, we can understand it.

The proof of these assertions, if proof were required, consists in over 2,000 years of the advance of science, that is, of the steady advance of knowledge over ignorance.

It is self-evident that, at any given point in time, there will naturally be many things that we do not know. And since nature abhors a vacuum, these gaps in our knowledge can easily be filled by all kinds of religious and mystical nonsense. The so-called ‘indeterminacy principle’, which Ben Curry deals with in his article on idealism in quantum physics, is a prime example of this mysticism in the world of science. It is the equivalent of those ancient maps of the world, where the unexplored regions are marked with the words: “Here be Monsters”.

But there is a vast difference between saying “We do not know” and “We cannot know”. There are always many things that we do not know. But what we do not know today, we will certainly know tomorrow. The process of knowing the world advances precisely by penetrating the secrets of nature, steadily advancing and deepening our knowledge of the material world.

From ignorance to knowledge

The search for the truth is a never-ending process of delving deeper and deeper into Nature. The progress of science is a constant process of affirmation and negation, where one idea negates another, and is in turn negated, as Adam Booth explains in his article on the crisis in science today. This process has no limits; it knows no impassable barriers, and every time a barrier is encountered, it is eventually passed and negated.

The contradiction between conscious ‘subject’ and external ‘object’ is therefore overcome by the process of knowledge, of penetrating ever deeper into the objective world – not only by means of thought, but above all by the application of human labour, by which humankind has transformed the world, and in the process, also transforms itself.

The whole history of science is nothing other than a constant struggle to arrive at the truth, passing from ignorance to knowledge. This never-ending search for truth is signposted by the rise and fall of different theories, each of which contradicts what went before, but at the same time retains its essential content.

In a remarkable book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (first published in 1962), Thomas Kuhn defines a scientific paradigm as: "universally recognised scientific achievements that, for a time, provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners”.

For a time, the existing paradigm is regarded as absolutely valid and correct. These long periods of continuity and cumulative progress, represent periods of "normal science". The existing paradigm is universally accepted, and it is this that permits science to advance in orderly fashion, within a generally accepted theoretical framework.

However, all theories must be constantly tested through observation and experiment. Over a period, certain anomalies will appear, but these do not seem to present a serious challenge to the existing paradigms. At a certain point in time, however, quantity becomes transformed into quality. The contradictions pile up, and eventually lead to the collapse of the old paradigm, which must be replaced with a new and superior paradigm. The status quo is suddenly interrupted by periods of “revolutionary science”.

A striking example of Kuhnian crisis and scientific revolution is currently playing out before our eyes – or rather, behind closed doors – in the field of cosmology. For decades, scientific understanding and study of the universe has been based around the so-called ‘Standard Model’. This includes the assertion that all matter, time, and space originated in a 'Big Bang' singularity, estimated to have taken place around 14 billion years ago.

However, recent observations of far-away galaxies provided by the James Webb Space Telescope, have started to cast serious doubts about this commonly accepted theory. Within the confines of the Big Bang model, there is no way that these distant galaxies could be as big and developed as they are. The latest evidence, in other words, is a major anomaly, which contradicts the current paradigm.

Just as Kuhn predicted, this has provoked a crisis within the scientific community. One section is burying their heads in the sand, attempting to provide further fudges to make the facts fit their broken theory. Another section is exasperated, and is beginning to question the entire model – upon which many careers and reputations are based.

For now, these debates are largely taking place out of sight, amongst the scientific establishment and away from prying eyes. But eventually the crisis within cosmology will burst into the open, paving the way for a paradigm shift – a revolution – in the arena of fundamental physics.

Relative or absolute?

For a considerable period of time, we accept the existing paradigm as an absolute truth. Only in the final analysis, as the absolute truth reveals its incomplete and contradictory nature, does its essentially relative and transient character become clear. But are we entitled to draw from this fact the conclusion that there is no such thing as truth, and therefore, as Pontius Pilate supposed, it is futile to even attempt to define it?

No. We are not entitled to conclude any such thing. Truth is not an absolute thing, given and fixed for all time. It is a process that moves through a never-ending cycle of constant contradictions, affirmations and negations. The history of science and technology and the entire course of human social development has served to define, deepen, and verify knowledge.

Humankind’s striving for knowledge will always come up against barriers that, at first sight, seem insurmountable / Image: public domain

In that sense (and in that sense alone) truth can be said to be relative. It is the constantly evolving process of development, which is never at rest, but constantly striving to dig deeper into the secrets of the universe. It is this theme that Goethe took up in his epic masterpiece Faust, which Josh Holroyd explores in this issue.

It is this which does not allow truth to be transformed into a dogma, insofar as we will never arrive at an immutable Absolute, because the universe itself is infinite, and constantly changing, with no beginning and no end.

The truth is to be found, not in some imaginary final result which resolves all our doubts and difficulties, but in the process of endless discovery which alone permits us to gradually unveil, one-by-one and step-by-step, the secrets of the wonderful, complex and infinitely beautiful material universe.

Hegel wrote in The Science of Logic that it is in the nature of the finite to pass beyond its limit, to negate its negation, and become infinite.

That is a very profound truth. Humankind’s striving for knowledge will always come up against barriers that, at first sight, seem insurmountable. But the barriers are eventually overcome, only to produce new barriers and challenges, which in turn need to be overcome.

If we are searching for an absolute truth, which will finally allow us to say: “we now understand everything, and there’s nothing left to discover”, that day will never dawn.

The universe is infinite, but the capacity of human knowledge is as infinite as the universe itself. And the only Absolute is change.

In the final analysis, it is this endless process of the deepening of all knowledge of the universe alone that constitutes the truth.

What does this mean for Marxism?

What implications can we draw with respect to Marxism itself? Can we say that the ideas of Marx and Engels will remain valid for all time? This would appear to fly in the face of the very dialectical essence of Marxism.

It would be a futile exercise to try to anticipate all the many complex changes in human thought that will inevitably occur in the future. I have no wish to engage in such empty speculation. However, we can be sure that sometime in the future, new ideas will emerge that will displace old ideas – although, as Hegel explained, it is often a process of discarding unnecessary ideas, while preserving all that was valuable, useful and necessary from the past.

These observations must refer to Marxism, as to everything else. However, at this point in time, the ideas of Marxism undoubtedly have won the right to be taken seriously as a necessary guide to action. The same cannot be said of the wretched ideas of the bourgeoisie, which have been shown to be false in one field after another.

It is sufficient to point to the fact that a growing number of bourgeois economists are now studying the pages of Das Kapital in an effort to make some sense of the present crisis of capitalism, which not a single one of them were able to predict or explain.

For the whole of my adult life, I have made it my business to study Marxism. I have also taken the trouble of reading the works of the critics of Marxism and considered a number of alternative theories. But none of those theories can be compared to the brilliance and profundity of that titanic body of works that was produced by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky.

Those ideas alone have stood the test of time. We can therefore safely leave it to the future to furnish us with something better. Until that happy day dawns, I will continue to base myself on the solid foundations of scientific socialism, which until somebody can convince me of the contrary, I will continue to regard as absolute truths – at least for the present. And that is quite sufficient.