溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
By What Do We Know That Truth Is True?
If there is no higher measure of truth, by what do we know the true as true?
The true is the standard both of itself and of the false.
Spinoza's answer — "truth is its own standard" — was one bold knot tied in the long question of the criterion of truth. Descartes sought that criterion in "clarity and distinctness," but ran into the circle of how we know what is clear and distinct. Spinoza tried to cut the circle with an internal criterion: the true bears witness to itself. From the other side, empiricists sought truth's standard not within ideas but in agreement with experience, leading later to the two-thousand-year debate of coherence and correspondence theories of truth. By what we measure truth still flows split over Spinoza's metaphor of light.
Amid a flood of information where telling the true is hard, Spinoza's question — by what we measure truth — makes us ask again at the root of discernment.
To measure truth you need a standard, and to measure that standard's truth you need another.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
To measure truth you need a standard, and to measure that standard's truth you need another. Spinoza cuts this infinite regress in one stroke — the true does not wait on an external standard but illumines itself. As light reveals both itself and darkness, one who holds a true idea knows at the same time that it is true. I am not fully convinced by this bold answer. But I sense that the endless search outside for a measure of truth must stop somewhere. Before the place of that stopping, I stand too.
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