TRUTH

It has been argued that our understanding of the world is primarily achieved through the imagination, that the intellect is never outside of the imagination, and that meaning is achieved by means of fictions. Adequate understanding, therefore, is not an intellectual perception of the world, but rather an intellectual acknowledgement of the fictional status of reality. The consequence of this on traditional theory of knowledge is that Spinoza “rejected every theory of original foundation of every meaning and every truth (the cogito) always functioning as a guarantee of every established order, be it scientific, moral, or in the last resort social (mediated through other elements

180 Kordela. Op. cit. P. 16.

181 Ibid. P. 9.

182 Ibid. P. 11.

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guaranteed by Truth).¹⁸³” To put it simply, Spinoza‟s philosophy entails nothing less than the rejection of existence of any objective Truth which can be known either a priori or through proper methodology.

To arrive at this conclusion of non-existence of capitalized Truth, one must take a journey.

To get it rolling: “A true idea must agree with that of which it is the idea (by Ax. 6); that is (as is self-evident) that which is contained objectively in the intellect must necessarily exist in Nature.”¹⁸⁴ An adequate idea is such that has the formal aspects of a true idea, meaning an adequate idea exists only abstractly. A true idea is an adequate idea that is confirmed to be true in the empirical field of objects. In other words, a true idea is such that expresses the correspondence of both thought and extension, i.e. mind and matter.

Therefore, to perceive something truly means to perceive it both not only through the intellect but also through the imagination, because the existence of objects in nature can only be perceived through the body, that is, through the imagination. At this point already it can be seen that Truth necessarily involves the imaginary, i.e. the fictional. But further, how do we know that something is true, that is exists both in our minds and in the „real‟?

According to Spinoza himself, “someone who has a true idea knows at the time that he has a true idea, and cannot doubt about the truth of the matter.”¹⁸⁵ There is nothing against which you can actually measure the truthfulness of your idea. Therefore, Truth is less a matter of measurement and more of an internal disposition:

And who, I ask, can know that he understands some thing, unless he first understands the thing? That is, who can know that he is certain of some thing, unless he is first certain of that thing? Then, what can exist which is clearer and more certain as a standard of truth than a true idea? Clearly, just as light manifests both itself and the darkness, so truth is the standard both of itself and of falsity.¹⁸⁶

It sounds paradoxical and contradictory but there is no other way to know Truth than by knowing it, that is, than by encountering it. In other words, Truth is not a cause but rather an effect of something else, namely, of itself. Truth involves, first and foremost, absolute certainty. Certainty itself is a disposition or an attitude to something. Therefore, Truth is not an revelation or representation of something that exists separately from our understanding but rather a mode of understanding itself.

That is why in the world there is never a single claim to the Truth but a multiplicity of them.

183 Althusser. Op. cit. P. 10.

184 Spinoza. Op. cit. EI Prop 30 Dem, p. 100.

185 Ibid. EII Prop 43, p. 150.

186 Ibid. EII Prop 43 Schol, p. 150.

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As Badiou would say, in Spinoza there exists “no heaven for truths.”¹⁸⁷ There is not a divine dispensing machine of Truth to which we at times have access (while God is not looking, perhaps).

Truth is a by-product of the mind which confirms itself: “For no one who has a true idea is ignorant of the fact that a true idea involves the highest certainty; for to have a true idea simply means knowing a thing perfectly, or, in the best way.”¹⁸⁸ Perfection, as has been discussed, is always a matter of the universal ideal which one forms according to the limits of his own imagination as dictated by one‟s internal preferences, that is, perfection is a fiction of the imagination. Therefore to know a thing perfectly means to have it agree completely with one‟s exemplar. In this way Truth is nothing but a complete agreement of one‟s idea to one‟s fiction – in other words, Truth is fiction itself.

Truth is fiction. But it is such fiction which has to be confirmed by the empirical experience of the senses, for, as has been said, a true idea must agree with its own object in nature. Thus Truth, while signifying nothing that would exist by itself outside of the human mind, is a fusion of mind and matter, intellect and the imagination, that produces an internal disposition of certainty, which itself is the efficient cause of Truth.

Here is another moment of significant importance in Spinozist theory – another break from the usual philosophical tradition: “The crucial point that differentiates Spinoza from all Platonism is that “truth” and “itself” entail a redoubling, so that the three terms are necessarily involved: truth, itself, and the false [or self, itself, and the other].¹⁸⁹” It is interesting that the Spinozist concept of truth, which is the absolute agreement of the mental and the physical to the individual fiction, that is the second important break from philosophical tradition, is itself a pinnacle of the previous break as expressed by the idea of parallelism. Because parallelism is the unison of the material and the spiritual, the mind and matter, the intellect and the imagination, and Truth is also the correspondence of an intellectual idea to an imaginary experience. To really understand what Truth is, one must first really understand how the mind and body function. No wonder, then, that nobody until Spinoza had grasped it.

If “truth is its own standard, “¹⁹⁰ whereby it is a fiction of which we are certain, then a question can be raised whether it deserves a capital letter. Truth is not something that pre-dates experience, nor is it that which causes understanding. To say that truth is what allows us to know would be to confuse the chain of causality because on the contrary, “the truth of a philosophy lies

187 Badiou, A. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Trans. by Peter Hallward. London, New York: Verso, 2002. P. 42-43.

188 Spinoza. Op. cit. EII prop 43 Schol, p. 150.

189 Kordela. Op. cit. P. 48.

190 Spinoza. Op. cit. EII Prop 43 Schol, p. 151.

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entirely in its effects.”¹⁹¹ Not just of a philosophy – truth in general is made apparent by the effects that it has. Althusser termed these effects as a new space for thought, Spinoza attributed the effects of truth to the unwavering certainty that one feels. Either way, it is by the faculty of understanding which combines fiction with the intellect that truths appear.