When you start to think seriously about universal truth, I can think of no better introductory place to send you than Bertrand Russell’s classic book The Problems of Philosophy. (You can read it here for free.)
Russell was a modernist philosopher who wrote in the early twentieth century. He was very technical in his approach and his writing is very dense, but anyone can understand the well-known example of his writing-table that he gives in the first chapter.
Within just a few pages, Russell proves that
- There is a big difference between one’s perceptions of the table (what Russell refers to as “sense data”) and the table itself (the reality/truth of the table).
- While it is easy to identify perceptions about the table, it is very difficult (if not impossible) to know anything about the reality/truth of the table itself.
- The perceptions of the table are relative to the perceiver and the environment and based on many factors that have nothing to do with the table.
Again, if you are not familiar with the concept I am discussing, take fifteen minutes and read the first chapter of that book.
A non-philosopher might look at what I have written so far and wonder why I am making mountains out of molehills. I get that. The distinction between the table itself (what I am going to call an object) and our perception of the table (perception of the object) is possibly unimportant in everyday life.
When you start teasing at the implications though, you get a sense of why this is so important. Discussing a writing-table is one thing but what happens when you start examining other objects including non-physical objects?
For example, how about the concept of justice? If we consider justice to be an object, you could easily argue that the same differentiation exists between the perception of justice and what justice actually is. The same goes for morality and other non-physical objects. In fact, perception is itself an object. Do we have to question our perception of our perception?
What I am discussing here is the essence of philosophy. While throughout history, philosophy has sometimes included many disciplines from medicine to astronomy, today, philosophy primarily limits itself to two important yet unanswerable questions:
- Metaphysics: What is the nature of reality?
- Epistemology: What is the nature and source of knowledge?
Russell’s example of the writing desk goes to the heart of these two questions, which are really two different ways of looking at a few bigger questions:
Is there universal truth/reality independent and outside of ourselves and our perception? And if so, how do we learn what it is?
To return to our example one more time, when considering the writing-table, what, if anything, is universally true about the table that exists outside of our perceptions about that table?
Even after thousands of years of bright minds arguing sophisticated theories, this question of universal truth is difficult and every answer is unprovable. If you talk to someone that provides a dogmatic answer, that person is either unfamiliar with the difficulty of the problem or is speaking from a faith paradigm. (As you will see later, I do not have a problem with either of those things.)
Whether unanswerable or not, the question is important. How a person or culture answers that question shapes a lot of things downstream such as religion and science. Yes, I think that the universal truth question is upstream from any religious decision, and it is fairly easy to prove that it is upstream from science. I am going to demonstrate why I believe this in the next post.
Before I end this article, I want to give a very general outline of how Western civilization has historically viewed universal truth. I am going to categorize by time period and also differentiate as Russell did between the perception of an object and the object itself.
I hesitate to do this not only because of the danger of oversimplification but also because there always have been philosophers and theologians that were outside their mainstream. Hume for example lived during the modernist era, but would probably have been more comfortable in postmodernism.
| Period | Timeframe | Perception | Object of perception |
| Premodernism | Ancient Greece – Middle Ages (400 BCE – 1600 CE) | Varied* | Universal |
| Modernism | Enlightment – modern era (1600 – mid-20th century) | Relative | Universal |
| Postmodernism | mid-20th century to present | Relative | Relative |
Note how the concept of universals has changed over time. While premodernists generally saw objects as universal, modernists decoupled the perception of an object from the object itself, generally accepting the object as a universal but the perception as relative. Today’s postmodernist generally goes further by rejecting the universal nature of at least some objects themselves.
Most of you are probably either modernist or postmodernist at least in a lot of your thinking. Unfortunately, there is a big problem with accepting the inherent uncertainty of either position: if you cannot be sure of universals, how is doing life even possible? In the next post, I want to talk about the band-aid we all use that makes life liveable in a world where our perception of truth/reality may not be reliable.