What is truth? A common theme in different definitions of it has been constancy. For example the Middle English (spoken from about 1150 to around 1475) word treuthe and the Old English treowth meant fidelity or constancy. People still mean constancy when they speak of a lover as true or a person as true to herself. But different cultures’ assumptions about what people should hold themselves constant to have been marvelously varied.
1. Ancient Greeks called truth aletheia. This word conveyed the idea of uncovering something, bringing it into presence, and making it visible. Aletheia thus expressed one of the most resoundingly Western assumptions: The most fundamental aspects of nature are objects that can be put before and seen with our eyes or with laboratory equipment. Truth is commonly about uncovering objects and bringing them into the observer’s view.
Immanuel Kant, in Critique of Pure Reason, echoed this idea when he wrote that the nominal definition of truth is the agreement of thought with its object. Modern scientists have typically said that ideas are true if they agree with observed facts.
All these ideas assume that truth is mainly a matter of correspondence between two distinct entities. If the observer’s perception or idea corresponds with its object, it is true. It’s true because two distinct entities agree with each other: the observer’s perspective and the object or fact she observes or thinks about.
2. Several Western thinkers in the twentieth century concluded that truth is a matter of social convention—what Nietzsche called metaphors and ideals that a society intensifies and holds onto for such a long time that they seem fixed and binding, or what William James saw as guidelines for actions that benefit society, and which become habits after being followed after a long time. For both, truth is what holds a culture or community constant. It gives it stability and coherence, and provides common meanings for its members. The ideas that a society holds are not universal and do not necessarily correspond with something that can be objectively observed in the world. They are constant because they are held as basic by a society over a prolonged period.
3. Many ancient Indian thinkers in the mid-first millennium BCE concluded that the cycles in the cosmic order are actually shackles to an endless chain of rebirths. Upanishadic thinkers felt that truth means being constant to one’s true Self (the atman), which is eternal and beyond the cycles of birth and death. The atman is the primeval, non-dual reality which all things and beings differentiated from. Being constant to the atman thus means realizing that one is essentially unified with all of nature.
This idea of constancy has two striking differences from ideas of truth that the West has often emphasized:
A. What knowledge is supposed to be constant to extends back to the origin of all things; it’s less focused on distinct entities that one sees in the external world. This assumption of what ideas are constant to reflects other ideas that were common in ancient India, including space, time, temple architecture, music, and emotions. All these ideas are primarily linked to domains immeasurably beyond the distinct visible thing and to the ultimate origin of all things.
B. Westerners have typically assumed that truth is correspondence. An idea is true because it corresponds with some object or fact, or with some rational principle or physical law. This idea assumes distance between the thinker and the object he is thinking about; the object and the idea of the object are distinct entities in their own domains. They do not share identities or the same space.
Many Upanishadic philosophers considered truth to be mergence. It’s the realization of the oneness of all things. Truth has meant transcending one’s current identity and realizing that one’s essence is identical with that of everything else. Truth has been less focused on seeing the distinct object in the external world correctly. Constancy has more often meant mergence with the whole universe rather than correspondence between two things or static forms.
These differences between Western and ancient Indian ideas of truth show that different cultures can have different ideas of what is constant to what and of the nature of constancy. Westerners have most often assumed that the most exemplary constancy is between distinct entities. For some ancient Indians, the most exemplary constancy was with the non-dual origin of all things.
4. Traditional China, according to David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames, has had no common word for truth as an objective principle that stands apart from thought, which thought must correspond to. Instead, traditional Chinese thinkers have often seen truth as Dao. It’s the general way of all things, whose locus is in all of nature and society. Truth pertains more to the harmony of all things within this whole than to one object.
Confucianism focuses on maintaining this harmony in society.
So assumptions about what is most basic in thought and reality have a wonderful characteristic: they encourage us to look beyond what we have held them constant/true to and into more creative ways of seeing the world. If we examine different cultures’ definitions of truth, we find a marvelous variety of assumptions about what principles are basic, what is constant to them, and the nature of this constancy. The ways that a culture conceives these ideas are influenced by its whole landscape.
So if we examine the nature of truth closely enough, we can begin to see limitless expansion all around us because it reflects a highly multidimensional cultural landscape, and we are invited to explore and compare thought from other lands so that all cultures shine on each other like stars. What we have held truth constant to thereby becomes a means for expanding our perspectives into one world-view after another, and truth shifts from constancy to one limit to constancy to expansion into a world that becomes richer and richer.