Jason: The notion that we once assumed that the earth was flat overall, could that be an example of truism? Kind of? In a relative way? A lesser truth or a partial one? In way, depending on how you view the earth, it remains flat. Our point of view, frame of reference and outlook all provide different ways of perceiving phenomena, so how can there be only one version of truth.

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Hi Jason,

My position is materialist. I therefore hold that truth, for it to be truth, must reflect objective reality and can and should be tested in the practice, inevitably within the limits of our knowledge.

Objective reality is driven by contradiction. That same contradiction can be seen in the deepening development of truth (e.g. from a flat to a spherical earth) which Lenin wrote, in On the Question of Dialectics, ‘grows on the living tree of living, fertile, genuine, powerful, omnipotent, objective, absolute human knowledge’ – specifically, the old notion of ‘truth’ competes and recedes as the new notion emerges.

The example of the truth of the earth being flat, replaced by the deeper truth of the earth being a sphere is a good example.

The shift in our thinking was gradual, reflecting developments in our knowledge and activity – in exploration, navigation and trade and particularly in the development of scientific enquiry and equipment for greater accuracy in recording and measuring etc.

Hegel wrote beautifully about this emergence of the new from the old and the tension between them, leading to a qualitative leap, regarding his mystical Spirit:

‘…it is not difficult to see that ours is a birth-time and a period of transition to a new era. Spirit has broken with the world it has hitherto inhabited and imagined, and is of a mind to submerge it in the past, and in the labour of its own transformation. Spirit is indeed never at rest but always engaged in moving forward. But just as the first breath drawn by a child after its long, quiet nourishment breaks the gradualness of merely quantitative growth – there is a qualitative leap, and the child is born – so likewise the Spirit in its formation matures slowly and quietly into its new shape, dissolving bit by bit the structure of its previous world, whose tottering state is only hinted at by isolated symptoms. The frivolity and boredom which unsettle the established order, the vague foreboding of something unknown, these are the heralds of approaching change. The gradual crumbling that left unaltered the face of the whole is cut short by a sunburst which, in one flash, illuminates the features of the new world.’

G.W.F.Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Trans., A.V.Miller, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977, 6-7

Cheers,

Phil