As we were talking in class today (9/14/2011), I jotted down a note that has been rattling around in my brain. I think there is definitely more to this, and I am not sure where it may go, but I wanted to throw it out there for people to discuss.
If certitude leads to violence (Holmes) or death of morality (James), and certitude is a feature of a Platonic ideal of Truth (because if you "know" there is an absolute "Truth" to the universe, and you "know" you have "It", that would make you certain...) than attaining that Truth would be of the utmost importance, and how one got there (violence) would not matter, because it is the Truth. Whereas, in a "truth" based model, more like Holmes and James, an uncertainty principle (to borrow a term from Science) has no ultimate Truth to attain.
Therefore:
Truth = the ends justify the means
truth = the means justify the ends
Thoughts?
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ReplyDeleteIn an attempt to turn the argument on its head, I think of the Dali Lama fleeing Tibet in 1959 during the Lhasa Uprising. Monks, who had adopted the truth/doctrine of non-violence, took up arms in self-defense. In that case it seems that the monk’s truth/certitude of non-violence did not prevent violence on the part of the monks. Perhaps humans have an innate tendency toward violence. While certitude may lead to violence, not all violence is a product of certitude. Therefore certitude and violence cannot always be linked to each other. It seems to me that truth, with a capital T can have no connection to the human condition. Truth is limited to the world of physics. Holmes did not say that certitude leads to violence, those are Menands words in summation of Holmes’s war experience. I don’t see Menand’s comment as an espousal of Holmes’s “truth”, but rather a corollary to Holmes’s experience.
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