Patch 1.1: Our take on truth

In the original discussion, the transition from Truth to the Moderation Doctrine had been a rather 'big' jump. While the concepts addressed in part 1 focus greatly on objectivity and subjectivity, part 2 suddenly jumps to the concepts of logic, intuition, Materialism and Idealism. This is owing to an inadequate address of the concepts between 'truth' and 'the Moderation Doctrine'. This excerpt is created independently to patch the conceptual information between part 1 and part 2. I hope that with this excerpt, we would have a better understanding of ourselves and truth.


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Truth is independent of the human cognition… We would have to correspond subjectivity with objectivity, lest we live in falsity.

In the last excerpt we have seen the nature of truth. We know that truth is independent of us, and that it is us that are dependent on truth instead, since we exist and are true beings. We also see a need to correspond our subjective beliefs to the objective truth should we not want to live in falsity or relativism. The human correspondence of the objective truth lies in knowledge.

Knowledge is defined in this context as the ‘justified true belief’. In this excerpt, we will attempt to explore our take (knowledge) of truth, on what we have understood, and what is implied. We would then highlight certain aspects of truth, and reserve them for a more detailed discussion in our later posts to see how these aspects affect our lives and beings.


1) Objectivity and Subjectivity

Humans have long acknowledged the existence of an objective truth since the dawn of civilization. The Greeks have come up, one after another, different theories on truth. Parmenides of Elea had personally noted in his poem ‘The way of Truth’ that reality is one, change is impossible, and existence is timeless, uniform and unchanging (absolutism). Heraclitus on the other hand, believes that truth was dynamic owing to the ever-changing nature of the universe (dynamic objectivity). It is interesting to note that many of these Greek philosophers advocated to the objective nature of truth, and associated the subjective belief of the individual as the correspondent of the objective truth.

The Jews, on the other hand, believed that Abraham was a monotheist ( a person who believes in an objective God) who arrived to this conclusion on purely philosophical grounds before receiving any prophetic revelation from God Himself. It was from this biblical philosophy that the existence of an Objective God had been realized; the Christian world in this way had stemmed out of Judaism- with an added biblical passage of Christ being ‘the way, the truth, and the life’. The Christian world eluded that since God is objective, henceforth His creation (being a subset of him) must be also true and holds objective characteristics.

It was from the combination of these two ancient philosophies that had strongly influenced much of western philosophy today. Just as the monotheist Abraham and the philosophies of Parmenides and Heraclitus on the objective nature of truth, western philosophy acknowledges very much in general the existence of objectivity today- known more classically as ‘realism’ and ‘nominalism’, realism is the doctrine that abstract entities corresponding to universal terms like 'man' have a real existence via the branches of philosophy known as metaphysics and in specific ontology. It is opposed to nominalism, the view that abstract or universal terms are words only, or denote mental states such as ideas, beliefs, or intentions.

While ‘realism’ and ‘nominalism’ are the more formal definitions of the concept of metaphysical objectivity and subjectivity, the conceptual representations of these words are often ambiguous and may constitute to other unintended doctrines, for the sake of clarity and unifications, we would be using ‘objectivity’ and ‘subjectivity’ instead of ‘realism’ and ‘nominalism’ throughout this project.


2) Epistemology and Ontology

Philosophy today is the study of general problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, truth, beauty, law, justice, validity, mind and language. Of philosophy, all these theoretical studies would be generally constituted under the branch of epistemology, or ‘the theory of knowledge’. Epistemology is generally concerned with the nature and scope of human knowledge, with much of its contents on knowing, belief, truth and justification. A branch of philosophy based on pure reason, the concepts of epistemology overlap with that of Rationalism, Pragmatism, Idealism, and Logic (I will dwell into these concepts in due time). Epistemology holds that knowledge is correspondent to the objective truth of the world, and that this knowledge is acquired either via Pragmatic Rationalism (theoretically), or via (formal) Empiricism (experientially). Do note that Rationalism is conceptually synonymous with Pragmatism and is founded under the Epistemology. Empiricism, on the other hand, would be classified under another branch of philosophy known as Ontology.

Ontology in philosophy is the study of nature of being (experiencing), existence and reality in general. While epistemology advocates the theoretical study of knowledge of truths, ontology holds that knowledge (and truths) can be acquired experientially, and this act is formally known as Empiricism. Ontology forms up the basis of the Metaphysics we know of today, and serves as a conceptual predecessor of Intuition, Materialism and intuitive feelings that we know of today.

It must be understood that since the human knowledge is taken to be the subjective correspondent of the objective truth ( see objectivism and subjectivism), it is logical to see that all truths within this world are learnt Epistemologically and Ontologically. The study of Ontology definitely scopes to the ‘experiential’, ‘ontological’ nature of knowledge, yet we know that this study is impossible without any form of ‘epistemological theory’. The human being requires derivatives of both concepts of knowledge acquisition to formulate and correspond his subjective beliefs to that of the objective truth- the synthesis of both ‘theory’ and ‘experience’ forms the rationalism that we know of today. I will dwell deeper into the conceptual derivatives of Epistemology and Ontology in the Moderation Doctrine and identity. But at the very least, we know for a fact that we ‘involved’ with both concepts should we want to understand more about truth, and the truth of ourselves.


3) Idealism and Materialism

Idealism is the epistemological doctrine that nothing can be directly known outside of the minds of thinking beings, it holds that while truth exists, it is only understood by the human being through ‘cognitive ideas’ or ‘abstract concepts’. Materialism (sometimes used in conjunction with ‘realism’) states that the only truth that can be truly proven to exist is matter (or the state of actual being). In other words, materialism holds that all truths are ‘physically real’ and can be acquired through ontological experience. As a theory, Materialism opposes Idealism and belongs to the class of monist ontology.

While Idealism and Materialism can be said to be the derivative concepts of Epistemology and Ontology respectively (see above), it must be understood that while truth (and the human perception of truth) is Epistemological and Ontological, it is also equally Idealistic and ‘Realistic’ in essence. We know that some truths can only by conceptualized and never put into the ‘material’ world, we also know that some states of being can never be fully broken down with concepts. Ideal gases and the concepts of zero and infinity are just an example of idealism, indeed- we can ‘experience’ the truth of these concepts in the ontological world, but these concepts itself cannot be adequately represented by sticks, stones, or gas particles. I will also discuss this in greater detail in my later excerpts.


4) Other concepts

Of course there are other aspects of philosophy that we do not have the time to cover in detail, and there other concepts i.e. Judgment, Existentialism and Multiplicity that we have yet to address. These concepts are usually derivative in nature from these six parent concepts, and their conceptual equivalent would be appropriately highlighted from time to time should the opportunity and need arises to address these concepts.


The above mentioned concepts would be, in summary, our take on truth. While truth exists objectively and independently of the human cognition, when we realize truth, or are in a state of knowing, truth becomes sub-categorized into a spectrum between Epistemology and Ontology, and Between Idealism and Materialism. I will dwell into greater detail the entailment of these concepts in my second part on the Moderation Doctrine to see how these abstract concepts are re-presented into more familiar concepts that we know of today, and how they form to become building blocks of our identity. In the next excerpt I would dwell in slight detail onto the advocators of truth, namely that of science and religion, and see how these two proponents come to be humanity’s two greatest form of address to this infinitely abstract concept that is simultaneously real at the same time.