Relativity, perspective and truth
Stephen Curkpatrick

Perspective is intrinsic to human life. People live within time and region—here and not there, this time and not another—with an outlook on life that may be modified in certain contexts and situations. Perspective is therefore the possibility of growth; it can also be badly mistaken.

Within a given perspective, a person is responsible for the ethical and social implications of that perspective. Contemporary acclaim for relativity obscures this responsibility by regarding perspective as either incidental—“I am who I am” and therefore beyond reproach, or irrelevant—“Who cares, it’s all relative anyway!”

Every decision, including the decision of faith, involves a choice in contrast to another or several other possibilities. A decision requires commitment to a particular perspective. To be without decisions—because everything is supposedly relative—is to be without responsibilities and relationships.

Much is made of “truth” being a problem because any expression of truth in a particular time and place is relative to other assertions elsewhere. This is to state an obvious human dilemma! Yet the quest for accuracy contradicts the suggestion that we are satisfied with the relativity of truth. Instinctively, we yearn for a sustained word or logos of existence. Humans aspire to accuracy. In an age that celebrates relativity, we are curiously driven by the quest for accuracy and precision, yet according to what measure?

Consider the irony of a musical composition written to celebrate the relativity of sounds, yet played by a highly trained orchestra that seeks accurate and consistent quality of sound on instruments that have been finely crafted for trueness of tone, in public performances judged by the capacity of a conductor to elicit, even with flair, fidelity to a musical score.

The phenomenon of precision suggests a desire for the true. A defining word of accuracy continues to be sought, even if people also dismiss this as a foolish idea in our time.

v

Is conscience a reliable indicator of accuracy concerning human values and perspective? Coupled with human freedom, this seems an inviolable site for determining truth. Yet diverse anthropologies give conflicting valuations of conscience, which in turn generate conflicting degrees of permissible and prohibited actions.

Conscience can be formed and nurtured within regional configurations of phenomena that for purposes of survival and tribal harmony have a functional value. Almost any value can be forged from phenomena and inscribed in a tribal conscience encompassing several generations.

By contrast, Israel’s testimony to righteousness was distinctive, unlike anything among the nations. This testimony is a reference point for relational responsibility beyond the endless configurations of phenomena that can be formed with varying degrees of regulative value for cooperation and survival within specific human tribes.

Even if conscience accords with the law revealed in Israel, this does not alleviate the problem of compromise or sin preventing humans living adequately by the imperatives of the good, holy and just disclosed in the law. Humans cannot make a virtue of their own goodness, for the assumed nature of goodness is always contested. Even with agreed criteria for goodness, humans exhibit varying degrees of compliance with and compromise of their own values.

Appeal to conscience expressed in actions, instead of conscience informed by principles inherited and grafted from others, does not move any closer to integral values, for actions can be pursued to the detriment of oneself or others in the absence of guiding principles. Wisdom is therefore integral to the continuity of relationships, goodwill, harmony and hope within any culture.

The human imperative to seek wisdom suggests that conscience requires intentional formation in each new generation. In biblical testimony, wisdom is trust in the word of God, which is given beyond any possibilities within phenomena and its continual idolisation within institutions, legislation, ideology or religion.

Contemporary relativity of semantics—concerning wisdom and its dissemination, conscience and its incubation—as so many words constructed for ideological ends, presents yet another cul-de-sac in the quest for truth. Do words have any intrinsic value? Is language wholly given to ideology? Does language convey anything real?

v

How much does the word “kilo” weigh? This question concerns the use of language to make claims about the world. Ideology can make assertions about the world in language that have little correlation with the world as it is. Ideology pitches an ideal world in contrast to the world people experience, for there is a great difference between words and tangible realities such as hunger, insomnia, affection and beauty. This difference, according to Weil, is like the difference between the word “kilo” and carrying so many kilos.

Through language, we can negotiate our way in the world; language both is and is not the world. The world is seemingly wall-papered with language, for everything we do occurs within language and interpretation, yet what language articulates can be speculative and hypothetical. Language is two-edged.

Language enables us to think beyond our tangible limits—by reading a book, we can be immersed in a different time and place. Language can articulate anything people imagine. Language combined with imagination can expand our world beyond tangible limits, yet language can also signify nothing even though it is used to signify almost anything. Words can nurture illusions.

For a time, humans might presume their ideals are invincible and therefore imperative, especially if imperiously, these ideals can be imposed on others. Eventually, illusions of seeming invincibility, bolstered with rhetoric, are undone by life as change and mortality. Human experience of time eventually unravels as impotence and death.

Already in life, ambitions and ideals are negated within time that erodes permanence before a horizon of death that establishes a final limit to our possibilities (Ps. 90). However much humans extol the diversity of their views, the eventual leveller of life—death—is a uniform human reality.

While humans seek a word that can adjudicate on all their words, they remain confused, jaded and lost within a cacophony of voices on the meaning of life. In their freedom, humans have the possibility of professing wisdom only to become fools as assumedly wise illusions eventually come undone with time.

As the word of God speaks into human existence, it makes clear that our lives do unravel as compromised in time. Such compromise is only surpassed by life in Christ, the tangible word of God’s grace and truth. All human life is relative to its source in the word of God that is also our possibility of resilient grace and truth within life’s ever present potential to unravel into relative disarray.

v

Relativity and perspective within conscience and language represent a veritable contest for durable meaning and values in contemporary life. The critical issue for Christian testimony does not concern degrees by which the right approach to relativity and perspective is grasped and articulated. Instead, Christian faith affirms the radical exposure of human life to the word of God as a word otherwise of grace and truth that is defined in Jesus Christ.

In relation to Jesus Christ, every perspective is called into question, which is why our perspective requires new and continual orientation. Biblical witness calls this repentance; New Testament testimony calls him the truth. As the claim of God on our lives beyond personal opinion, the truth necessitates humility in deference to this claim in order for it to be heard as truth.

 

Reference: Weil Lectures on Philosophy