The Good, the Beautiful, and the Emergence of Truth

 By Dr. David Young
  
 [Full Text]
  
  
The opening pages of this paper give us an excellent historical
overview of man’s efforts to define ‘truth’ -starting with ethical
rationalism through Nietzsche’s attack on it, through Baudrillard’s
Simulations, and on to narrative ethics becoming a popular alternative
to ethical rationalism. Narrative ethics, however, sets out a framework
rather different from ethical rationalism, with the result that
rationality is no longer central. As a consequence, it is co-opted by
the status quo and, in the end, a narrative paradigm yields arbitrary
definitions of goodness.
 
Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct, on the other hand, tackles the
issue in terms of understanding those problem situations where we
distinguish good conduct from bad and the relation of both to truth.
The problem here, as Professor Christians points out, is that the truth
does not correspond to reality, but to what we come to believe ‘in the
course of free and open encounters’.
 
This brings us to Professor Christians’ section on ‘Purposive
Nature’, and the ‘Ethics of Being’ which is based on an assumption that
human reason is not autonomous or self-sufficient. In other words, in
keeping with the arguments and assumptions of those theologians with a
world and life view opposed to a rationalistic standard of truth.
(e.g.: Augustine, Calvin, and Niebuhr.) The ethics of being’ is thus
put forward as a radical alternative to modernity’s rationalism and to
narrative ethics.
 
Under the ‘ethics of being’ Christians states that the philosophical
rationale for human action is reverence for life on earth, and this
incorporates three principles: human dignity, truth and no harm to the
innocent. ‘The enlightenment defined nature as material, as
spiritless’, but it could not account for life itself: ‘Purpose is
embedded in the animate world by the Creator and is evident in its own
reproduction’.
 
This is where I would like to draw on my own experience in
government and in building a firm. The purpose of our firm is to
provide the most accurate and objective strategic news analysis in the
most disinterested way possible. To this end we drafted founding
principles in an effort to develop a pragmatic process to get as close
to day to day truth as possible. Of course we do not presume to have a
corner on ‘the truth’ and perhaps come closer to truth as the result of
Dewey’s ‘free and open encounters’. And, in any event, the degree to
which the results correspond to reality depends of course on the
complexity of the issue and the reliability, breadth and accuracy of
the sources as well as on the knowledge and judgement of those involved
in the ‘free and open encounters’ of the process. The link between this
day to day pragmatic goal and the philosophical definition of truth
discussed under the ethics of being is that we do seem, at least in
part, to draw on these underlying principles.