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.

truth, respect and freedom

'and this potion won't help anyone,
to try and tell the truth...'


to tell someone an important truth about oneself is an act of trust in the other person. or, better, it is an act of entrusting oneself to the person. to withhold the truth about oneself, or to lie outright, is frequently a way of putting up a wall between the 'real me' and the me that is seen and perceived. thus, to withhold the truth, or to lie outright, is a common strategy for keeping oneself from being exposed and vulnerable.

conversely, to tell an important truth is to make oneself vulnerable, and hence to express faith that the other person will respond correctly to one's vulnerability -that the other person will show the proper care, make the right effort, not betray one's trust. and to have such faith in others is to respect them. this is one reason why we can be hurt if we feel that a friend is withholding from us some important truths about himself: it can seem that the friend is not willing to entrust himself to us, and hence it can seem that he does not trust us to respond correctly, that he lacks faith in our ability to understand or respond to him.

if what is at issue is not a truth about oneself, but something more general or a even truth about the other person, then truth-telling can be connected to respect in other ways. in talking about her own resolution to tell the truth, a friend recently put the point to me this way: other people are worth it. they are worthy of the truth, no matter how difficult that may be. to tell someone else the truth is to respect her as someone who is able to work out her own life in confrontation with the full truth, whatever that might turn out to be.

another friend put it to me like this: to tell someone is a lie is to cut him off from reality, if only in a small way. insofar as another person accepts my lies, then i have put up a barrier between them and what is actually the case, a wall between them and the real world.

behind both if these formulations, i think, is a point about freedom. it is fitting that a human being be free, and that freedom is a great value. to be free is to be able to direct oneself, to determine one's course rather than be determined from without. moreover, a freedom that is truly valuable (and, we might say, a freedom properly so called) involves one's ability to direct oneself in the right way, to choose for the right reasons. what makes something the right reason, however, is its connection to the good. and the kind of freedom we value is the freedom to choose what is good. at this point, however, the role of truth is crucial: the good cannot be chosen as such unless we know the truth about ourselves and our situation. the point is so obvious that it is strange to say: we cannot choose what is good -and hence we cannot be truly free- unless we know what is good, and we cannot know what is good unless we know what is truth. hence, we cannot be truly free unless we know the truth. thus, to tell someone the full truth, to allow her a confrontation with the whole truth, is to respect her as someone worthy of freely choosing for herself.

the above paragraph is painfully abstract, but what i have in mind is commonplace, even ubiquitous. don't we often fail to give people the whole truth, because we think they could not really handle it? because they wouldn't be able to understand? because the lie helps them to cope with life?

of course, the fact that something is true about another person doesn't in itself give us good reason to tell it to him. and every child learns quickly that telling the truth can easily be an act of manipulation or domination or cruelty. but what i am saying is this: to the extent to which we withhold important, relevant truths from other people, we deny them the privelage of fully and freely confronting what is real. and in doing this, we may quite likely be patronizing them and tacitly disrespecting them as a rational, free beings.

in thinking about what truth to share with another person, a good test might be this: if such a truth were not shared with us, would we feel disrespected or patronized? and if we have a reason for not sharing the truth with someone, is that a reason we would accept for ourselves if we were in his place?