More Than Allegory

by Bernardo Kastrup

  —Greetings, wise seer. My brother Castor and I are on a quest for truth. But we know not which course to pursue. Bewildered as we are by the myriad myths of man, we humbly plea for your guidance.

  Phineus looked over the two brothers with compassion. He knew the inevitability of what was to follow. After a long sigh, he replied:

  —There are only two authentic paths to truth, young seekers. Man has no shortage of myths at his disposal. If his true motivation is to find peace, he must search for the myth that resonates with his heart and make it his life and reality. This, the path of the heart, is legitimate and true to man’s nature.

  He paused, knowing full well what he was about to do to the son of his nemesis:

  —The other path is one on which many truth-seekers before you have found their demise. It is the path of the absolute: the rejection of every myth in the quest for a truth as pure and untarnished by the touch of man’s thoughts as a buried jewel in the bowels of the Earth. This path requires the rigorous cleansing of raw experience from the narratives constantly woven and projected by the intellect. Behold, for he who finds and polishes this jewel will know the absolute truth!

  Castor—whose mother, like Pollux’s, was Leda, but whose father was the mortal king Tyndareus—interjected:

  —How do we know which path to choose, great seer?

  Phineus:

  —Find out what is your deepest, most uncritical, most sincere motivation, young seeker! What does your heart truly yearn for? Peace?

  And then, turning slightly to glance at Pollux, he continued:

  —Or the absolute truth? Listen to your heart and, above all, be honest to yourself. This is the most intimate of all quests. In its pursuit, you cannot deceive anyone but yourself.

  Pollux and Castor, confused but resigned, thanked Phineus and returned to their ship. The darkness of the night had already descended upon them.

  The choices

  On the deck of their ship, bathed by the light of many stars—Gemini particularly conspicuous above their heads—Castor shared his thoughts with his brother:

  —I must be honest about my most sincere motivation, brother. Truthfully, what I seek is peace. The confusion, doubts and insecurities of life corrode my very soul. If I can find safe haven in a myth whose validity my heart can accept, there my quest will end.

  Pollux:

  —I respect the sincerity of your choice, brother. But truthfully, no myth can sooth my heart. I must know what is, not the narratives woven by my own thoughts or the thoughts of lesser men.

  The brothers then parted ways, each pursuing the path dictated by his heart.

  Castor’s quest

  Having scoured the known world for the many myths and traditions of man, Castor failed to find the peace he yearned for. He did find a handful of myths that resonated deeply with his heart, but how could he surrender to a myth while knowing that it was just a narrative, a story? How could his heart be soothed by something he knew fell short of a direct depiction of the absolute truth?

  Castor, diligent and attentive as he was, could observe his own intellect in the process of weaving narratives—arbitrary explanations for the harsh realities of life—whose true motivation was to sooth his suffering. The narratives were self-created wish-fulfilling devices. Castor was aware that he was trying to trick himself. But how could the trick have any effect upon one who knew how it was done?

  Pollux’s quest

  Having spent years in seclusion in some of the most isolated islands of the Aegean carefully observing the dynamics of his own mind, Pollux sought diligently to separate the jewel of immediate experience from the pollution of explanations and predictions. He saw through the many layers of narrative-making: stories built on top of stories, all ultimately resting upon unexamined assumptions and circularity. He realized that removing the narratives was like peeling an onion: there was always another, more subtle layer underneath.

  In his quest, he tried to find the most basic, raw factors of reality: he had a body; that seemed free of narratives. His bodily sensations in the present moment seemed as close to an apprehension of the raw truth as he could get. The past and the future were just stories. Extrapolating this line of thinking, he concluded that only a newborn baby could experience the absolute truth, before any narrative had a chance to contaminate its sense of reality. As a grown man, such a state was not available to Pollux, but it suggested to him that an absolute truth did exist. His ultimate goal was there, just tantalizingly out of his reach.

  Yet, upon further reflection, Pollux began to question his own conclusions. The possibility of narrative-free cognition in a newborn was itself a narrative; a story constructed by his intellect, since he could not experience the state of being a newborn in the present moment. Could there really be such a thing as raw cognition without narratives? Was the mind of a newborn truly story-free, or was it simply in the process of weaving its first stories as it perceived the world for the first time? Was perception fundamentally concurrent and codependent with the narratives that give it context? Could anything—anything at all—be perceived without being couched in an explanatory narrative, chaotic and inconsistent as it might at first be? Pollux realized that he was forever locked in the story-making processes of his intellect. Even his search for truth was a story.

  The meeting

  After many years, the brothers met again on the deck of their trusted ship. As it floated gently on calm night seas, under the light of the full moon, Castor offered:

  —Brother, I have failed in my chosen path. The soothing power of myth needs permission from the intellect to be accepted as truth. Without such permission, it is sterile. Knowing, as I do, that narratives are not the absolute truth, my intellect cannot give my heart permission to bask under the light of its chosen myth. I cannot find peace. For this reason, wise brother, I shall follow your example and pursue your path toward the absolute!

  To which Pollux, in horror, replied:

  —Seek not through my path, brother! It is a hall of mirrors. Nothing absolute will you find there; only reflections of yourself, layered in exquisitely subtle veneers. The intellect is an unstoppable narrative-making machine of unfathomable power. It constructs our entire world, like a cocoon that we end up inhabiting. In my search for the intellectual ideal of an ‘absolute,’ I have only found my own limits.

  The brothers sighed as they gazed at the moon. In quiet desperation, Pollux concluded that their quest had been doomed from the start; and there was nothing to be done. He, the immortal son of a god, was defeated. But he said nothing to his brother. ‘Damned be you, Phineus,’ he whispered to himself instead.

  The dreams

  That night, they fell asleep on the deck of their ship. Pollux dreamed of Phineus. In the dream, Phineus sat by a rich banquet table, indulging his appetite and laughing hysterically at Pollux’s predicament. Phineus had taken revenge on Zeus simply by telling the truth when requested to do so. What an ironic twist of fate, Pollux thought, as he descended into a domain of restless hopelessness.

  Castor, in turn, dreamed that he was swimming naked in the sea, under the moonlight. He swam effortlessly, drifting along as if one with the waves. He could feel the water caressing his skin. There were no narratives … only curious, unreserved communion with the sea, the moon and the fresh air, as if they were aspects of himself he’d just been rediscovering. In the dream, he found his peace.

  Chapter 6

  Deconstructing truth

  We usually take the meaning of the word ‘truth’ for granted. Part I of this book is guilty of this sin: we’ve freely spoken of not one but three kinds of truth—literal, allegorical and transcendent—without stopping for a moment to consider what the very concept of truth actually entails. We’ve concluded that many religious myths point to transcendent truths, but never questioned what it means for something to be true in the first place. Dictionary definitions aren’t sufficient, for the question here is much deeper than mere semantics: What hidden
, unexamined metaphysical assumptions do we make when we think of truth? Turning our attention to this question, as we are about to do, can open Pandora’s proverbial box by deconstructing the foundations of our view of reality.

  Three culturally sanctioned concepts of truth

  It’s prudent to start from the beginning: whatever else it may be, ‘truth’ is surely a concept of the human intellect. This concept isn’t at all essential for experience: a five-year-old can have a rich life without it, freely conflating what we adults call reality and imagination. But after infancy, developing the notion of truth helps us to categorize experiences and organize our actions. What is entailed by this notion? What do we actually have in mind when we talk of truth? As it turns out, there are at least three different things we commonly mean by it, motivated by our cultural ethos.

  The first culturally sanctioned concept of truth has to do with the validity of perceptions in the present moment. It entails that our perceptions are true only if they correspond to states of affairs that exists now, independently of our subjective inner lives. For instance, my experience of seeing daylight at noon is true because it corresponds to the presence of the sun in the sky out there. But schizophrenic hallucinations are untrue because they exist only in the subjective inner life of the schizophrenic. Notice that the mind-independent state of affairs that a true perception supposedly corresponds to must exist in the present moment, simultaneously with the perception itself. After all, the vivid re-experiencing of an episodic memory is not a true perception, for it does not correspond to a thing or event out there in the present moment. Let us call this first concept of truth ‘perceptual truth.’

  The second culturally sanctioned concept of truth has to do with the validity of explanations, whose essential elements are inferred past causes. For instance, suppose that a person visits her doctor presenting a skin rash. Based on the rash’s appearance and the patient’s memory of a recent walk in the woods, the doctor infers that a now-invisible insect bite was the cause. After a few days, the rash clears by itself. Since this is the outcome expected in cases of mild insect bites, can we then say that the diagnosis was true? Not really: it is conceivable that the rash was caused by exposure to a chemical, cold weather, or even by clothes rubbing on the skin. In all these cases, rashes also tend to clear on their own. We can only assert that the doctor’s explanation was true if it corresponded to past causes that existed independently of the doctor’s conjectures: in this specific case, an actual insect piercing the patient’s skin just prior to the onset of the rash. In other words, a true explanation is supposed to be more than just a story that happens to be fully consistent with the present; it must also correspond to a past state of affairs independent of subjective, internal conjectures. Notice that what we call episodic memories are, in essence, elements of our explanations for the present moment: they, too, are only considered true if corresponding to past states of affairs outside mind. Let us call this second concept of truth ‘explanatory truth.’

  The third culturally sanctioned concept of truth has to do with predictions and deals with future possibilities. For instance, imagine that Italian seismologists detect earth tremors in Sicily, suspecting that Mount Etna is going to erupt once again. A first team of seismologists runs the measured data through a first computer model and concludes that Etna, despite the tremors, isn’t going to erupt any time soon. A second team then runs the same data through a second model and concludes that Etna is indeed going to erupt within a week. Imagine that the models of both teams, though different, are theoretically sound and internally consistent. Nonetheless, if Etna actually erupts within the week, only the second team’s conclusion will supposedly have ever been true. Indeed, a true prediction requires more than just theoretical soundness and internal consistency: it must also correspond to a future state of affairs independent of subjective, internal expectations. Let us call this third concept of truth ‘predictive truth.’

  In summary, perceptual truth entails that an internal, subjective perception is true only if it corresponds to a present external state of affairs. Explanatory truth entails that an internal, subjective explanation is true only if it corresponds to a past external state of affairs. And predictive truth entails that an internal, subjective expectation is true only if it corresponds to a future external state of affairs.

  Truth is a concept of the human intellect that arises after infancy. There are three culturally sanctioned concepts of truth: perceptual, explanatory (which includes memories) and predictive. They are meant to correspond to present, past and future external states of affairs, respectively.

  The subjectivity of the past

  All three culturally sanctioned concepts of truth require that there be mind-independent states of affairs that our subjective inner states correspond to. But can this be the case when it comes to the past?

  Think about it. Where is the past? It exists only as memories and inferences, which are inherently subjective: they aren’t ‘out there’ but ‘in here.’ If you now play a video of an old family holiday on your computer, the watching of the video may be present perception, but the holiday itself is still just a memory. Look around you: Where is the holiday? It isn’t out there, is it?

  Even your conviction that your memories are true is itself subjective. You may proclaim that you know with 100% certainty that you had fish for dinner last night, but the memory of the dinner and your conviction that it corresponded to a mind-independent state of affairs are still entirely in your mind. Where else could they be? The dinner isn’t out there right now and neither is your conviction in its mind-independent reality. If they exist at all, they can only exist in your mind. Can you take the dinner and the conviction in your hands right now and show them to me? You see, I am not saying that your memories are false—I will soon argue that this assertion is as meaningless as to claim that they are true—but that they are subjective.

  Our confidence in the objectivity of the past arises from our subjective, intellectual models of reality. These models take our memories and perceptions as inputs and then interpolate a chain of causal links between them, so to couch the present in a coherent, reassuring and actionable context. This way, when you find yourself in a meeting room surrounded by colleagues, intellectual models of reality in your mind take your recent memories—like having driven to work in the morning and having gotten a meeting invitation from your boss yesterday—and string them together so to make sense of your perceptions in the meeting room. This linear and coherent chain of connected events is a mentally constructed story that reassures you and allows you to take appropriate actions. Imagine how disorienting it would be if you found yourself in a meeting room having no idea how you got there or why you were there! Your intellectual models often even infer past events that you don’t remember at all, but which are necessary to cover eventual gaps in the storyline: you may not remember this particular morning’s drive to work, but of course it happened; how else could you have gotten there, right?

  Fundamentally, thus, what you call the past is the output of your intellectual models of reality. And since the models themselves, as well as the memories that feed them, are subjective, the past can’t be anything other than subjective, no matter how plausible or even certain you believe it to be. Even your conviction in the objectivity of the past is a subjective result produced by these subjective models of reality. It can’t be anything else.

  The past is a mental, intellectual construct meant to give context to your present perceptions. There has never been a moment in your entire life in which the past has been anything else; I challenge you to find one.

  Again, I am not saying that this mental construct is false; I am saying that it is a mental construct. It can be very easy, due to the subtlety of the topic at hand, for you to read into my words more than what I am actually saying. Therefore, I am choosing my words very carefully and ask that you follow them with attention. At this point, what I am not saying is probably as important as what I am
saying.

  If the past is entirely subjective, it follows that there can never be explanatory truths. We can never say that any explanation is true in the culturally sanctioned sense, for the past is always already gone; it’s never out there. The best we can ever say is that the explanation is consistent with memories and present perceptions, like the doctor’s diagnosis was consistent with the then-present perception of the rash and the patient’s memory of a walk in the woods.

  Because of our cultural conditioning, this idea may be tough to swallow at first, so let us dwell on it a little longer. You may claim, for instance, that if the doctor had subjected the patient to a conclusive battery of tests—biopsies, blood work, whatnot—the status of the past would be objective. We would be able to look at the test reports now, in the present, and know that the diagnosis of an insect bite was true. So explanatory truths are possible after all, aren’t they?

  Of course not. Even in this case, it would still be our intellectual models of reality that, based on subjective memories (the recall of the patient’s symptoms) and present perceptions (the examination of the test reports), would produce the subjective conclusion that the patient really had an insect bite. Our confidence in this conclusion would arise solely from our subjective, intellectual inability to envision any other coherent story to connect memories to present perception. But that says nothing about the mind-independence of the conclusion. At best, it only says something about the limitations of our intellectual models. We aren’t seeing the insect pierce the patient’s skin right now, are we? The event exists only as an inference of and in the mind. It isn’t out there no matter how plausible the inference. To say that the test reports prove that the rash was really caused by an insect bite is just a story, no matter how appealing. As a matter of fact, at this point even the rash is just a story, a memory in the mind. What else could it be? Where is the rash now? Where is the insect? Where is the past? Can you point at them and say ‘There they are’?