truth, opacity and community

to tell a lie is to attempt to cover over a piece of reality. in lying we try to hide something. sometimes we try to hide something that has happened, or something that will happen. but everytime we lie, i think, we also try to hide some piece of ourselves. frequently what motivates us to hide is fear; dishonesty and fear often go hand in hand.

in contrast, to tell the truth is the make something apparent. that is not to say that every truth which gets spoken will be clear to every listener, or easily grasped. but the truth as such puts us in confrontation with reality, and telling the truth makes something present, manifest. hence the appeal of metaphors of light to describe truth-telling -e.g. 'bringing something into the light'.

in telling the truth about ourselves, what is made manifest is our selves. but when i go to tell the truth, i find this difficulty: i am not transparent to myself. i am unable to tell the truth about myself, unable to make myself apparent, because i do not know the truth about myself. i am opaque to myself. and moreover, it seems that this opaqueness is greatest when it comes to the most important things about myself -my deep motivations for choosing to be one kind of person rather than another, the source of my guiding loves, of my persistent fears. these are the very things that are hidden from me, or that i understand only dimly.

to my mind, no one understood and expressed the self's opaqueness to itself better than augustine. for augustine, i think, this opaqueness brought forth both frustration but also awe. i am tempted to say that with augustine the self's hiddenness from itself comes to be constitutive of the self -that is, part of what it is to be a self is to be the kind of thing that is a mystery to oneself. but perhaps that is too strong. in any case, one of augustine's most valuable insights is that the self is implicit in its own opaqueness. that is, part of why i am hidden to myself is that i am, perhaps without realizing it, actively hiding -from others, from god, from myself. (this augustinian theme is wonderfully developed in c.s. lewis' last and, in my opinion, best work, the novel 'till we have faces)

what the opaqueness of the self means is this: if we are to tell the truth about ourselves, then such truth-telling is for us a task. to be able to tell deep and imporant truths about oneself is an accomplishment, an acheivement.

it seems to me that one of our greatest needs is to be able to tell the truth about ourselves. it also seems to me that we need others both to be able to know the truth about ourselves, and to develop the capacity for truth-telling. we need, in short, a community of truth.

there are a number of things that could be said about what such a community would look like. one important thing that bethany brought out in her comment on the last past was that the virtue of truth-telling needs to be shaped by the virtue of humility. what i would like to stress here is that a community of truth is much more than 'keeping others accountable' or 'calling each other' on our lies. more fundamentally, it is a making space in which the other person can come to know and to tell important truths, including truths about herself. this 'making space' need not be something abstract or vague. rather it involves familar features of conversation and time spent together -it is a matter of the questions we ask, the comments we make, the smiles or frowns we offer to each other, the silences we let stand.