An obsession with Truth is a central concern of the human experience. This fundamental need is expressed in various ways. Anglo-American culture—the West—expresses this concern through our Aristotelian emphasis on precision and analysis. The Truth is what can be perceived, measured, and quantified. Extending this definition of Truth to non-physical phenomena frames many other experiences in our lives. We describe personal dynamics, social relationships, the economic world, and other abstractions utilizing this sort of mathematizing perspective. We want to know what really is the case—what are the facts—and use that to navigate each aspect of our world.
Definitions and experiences of Truth are relative to one’s culture. A person who hasn’t examined their own fundamental beliefs likely will utilize the perspective within which they were educated in the fullest sense. Not just classroom education, but what is instinctively absorbed from family, friends, and other social dimensions of a young person’s world. Truth is a fundamental human concern not because Western culture defines it as such. Its status as a constituting element of human experience derives from the universality of this concern. Every culture defines Truth in some way. Whether such a definition is implicit or explicit, some shared method of agreeing with one another is necessary for social interaction.
That said, I’m not a cultural relativist—at least, not about Truth. I really do think that the West’s fixation on Aristotle and the pursuit of an objective description of the world around us has served us well, and not just in the sense of being socially useful. Western affluence was possible in large part due to the inquisitiveness and inventiveness encouraged by this definition of Truth. The urge to define the world in a way which can be verified by others as an accurate description of the facts facilitates making use of that knowledge. That’s not to say the West has some intrinsic monopoly on this perspective. For example, a similar perspective led to the flourishing of medieval Islamic mathematics and science.
Just as the Delphic imperative gnothi seauton—”Know Thyself”—commands the listener to seek self-knowledge, so too should a society seek to understand itself. The internal search for self-knowledge is a task for which the Western tools of analytic inquiry are not well suited. Precise quantification can allude to, but never fully capture, the meaning immanent in lived experience. Sociology can quantify the number of Americans who live in poverty; it can describe their demographics, their education, their illnesses, their mortality. But the scientific approach cannot capture the subjective despairs and joys through which they experience living.
Internal analysis of the subjective and experiential is best accomplished by the imagination. It is not the sole purpose of the imagination—for we should never disregard the imagination as merely “useful”—but rather a task for which the imagination is well-disposed to be of assistance. The presentation of a fictional individual’s interior experience allows us to imagine other ways we might exist. Speculative fiction’s power extends that borrowed interiority beyond what can be described as the plausible. So-called “literary” fiction is restricted, by definition, to describing the possible. Its stories remain contingent on what plausibly might occur on the third rock from the Sun.
This is why, when it comes to exploring concepts such as Truth, I find speculative fiction to really be necessary for an attempt at analysis. It is a vehicle by which the imagination can tour itself and rub up against the boundaries of the mind.
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