Living Truth and Its “Criteria”

Abstract

The article presents the author’s understanding of truth. The author argues that truth is only secondarily a property of judgment. Above all it is a single eternal, but also living Truth that comes true with a person. Truth is neither objective, “external” to human reality, otherwise human subjects could not know anything about it, nor an “internal” idea of reality, otherwise it could not be connected with reality itself. Truth is an event and life. Any attempts to reject the Truth, de­clare it relative, finite, or abandon it for the sake of some kind of surrogate, like a temporary convention of scientists, are internally contradictory. To say that the absolute and eternal Truth is inaccessible to a non-absolute and non-eternal person, alien and indifferent to him means to forget that a person is able to ask about the Truth and love it. The Truth cannot be understood otherwise than as absolute and human at the same time. Therefore, Truth is not some kind of thing we are looking for, the Truth reveals itself to us, it can and wants to find us, but it does not give guarantees in the form of pre-known criteria. To demand criteria, guarantees of Truth, means to define the Truth, to squeeze it into the framework of our understanding of it. It is not easy to be the one whom the Truth finds: for this one needs to sacrifice the most precious things out of love, give up yourself in order to live the Truth: such a sacrifice is a “criterion” of living Truth, its re­quirement for us.