FROM THE EDITORS – A Promise of Truth (D.Ch.)

Every word gives a promise of truth. This «natural» epistemological attitude pervades human life, determining its cultural continuity and the formation of social bonds, as well as giving sense to human creativity. The essence of this «natural epistemology» inherently present in human life consists in the expectation that the words that are being heard, indeed every message that comes from another human being, are a vehicle of truth and provide some information about how «things are,» thus enabling a better orientation in the surrounding world in all its dimensions. The human being trusts in the objective sense of words in the belief that even if they cannot provide truth about a given subject, they at least make getting closer to truth possible or are helpful in establishing what the conditions of finding out this truth are, and in deciding what still remains unknown. Even in the face of deceit, also systematic or even systemic one, the latter kind pervading totalitarian systems, the human being clings to the conviction that deceit is some sort of disturbance, that it is something that should not be the case, that it should not happen (nota bene it is not without reason that totalitarian systems first of all seek to assume control over the free word). In the contemporary world, this indefeasible trust in the words that are being said is manifested, for instance, in the steadfastness about the way people participate in political life: despite the widespread mistrust of the words spoken by politicians, despite being repeatedly deceived by them and despite their indignation about the deceptiveness in public life, they do not stop seeking and voting for the ones whose words – in their opinion – are most truthful, and they do not allow the possibility that all the politicians always lie. Another evident proof of this natural human trust in the words being heard is the easiness with which we respond to advertisements. Although we are perfectly aware that they use persuasion techniques and appeal to our weaknesses, although we distance ourselves from them, we nevertheless tend to treat them as a source of information and not infrequently find ourselves thinking: Maybe there is something true about what they say?

One might say that the human epistemological trust in words is simultaneously epistemological naivety, a certain weakness indeed, and that we learn from the culture of both the West and the East that one should rather be inclined in everyday life to adopt a more refined epistemological attitude, such as, for instance, skepticism or methodic doubt. Yet even the most sophisticated and most theoretically advanced projects put forward by philosophers who wish to promote a greater epistemological «maturity» ultimately turn out incapable of shaking the natural conviction that the words being heard convey truth. Even Freud, Marx and Nietzsche, the famous “masters of suspicion”1 about the word, were unable to succeed in this respect. While their observations broadened human knowledge of the reality as such and provided new ways of perceiving it, they failed in their attempts to undermine human trust in the word; at most they uncovered the so far unnoticed conditions of its interpretation. Postmodernism, which in turn attempted deconstruction of the word and advocated reading it merely as a narration type, stopped at the level of theory, also formulated by means of words.

Both the conviction that not every word coming from a politician is a lie and the belief that one can learn something from advertisements seem to point that among the consequences of this «natural» human epistemological attitude is perceiving the word as a certain good. In this perspective, the «word,» as if a special lens, appears to capture the transcendentals: being, truth, goodness and beauty. The reason is that the word permeates various forms of expression – we often say that paintings or movies, or works of art to which we traditionally apply the category of beauty, «speak.» Also music «speaks.» The human being either reads words into them or wants to express their message by means of words, because the word is a basic unit of meaning and a tool by means of which one’s image of the world can be put in order. While the popular question pupils are asked at school: «What did the poet want to say by means of it?» is frequently subject to jokes, it springs from the conviction that the word has an objective, intentional reference, that it «means,» and thus communicates meaning.

However, the objective dimension of the word the human being finds so difficult to resist by no means diminishes its subjective perception – it is not without reason that we speak about the power of the metaphor, about “spots of indeterminacy”2 in works of art, about their openness to diverse interpretations. Yet the subjectivity of the word can be preserved only against the background of its objective sense of a sign. Thus also silence can be most telling and in certain situations it has the power of the word. In the Gospels, Jesus Christ, to whom the scribes and Pharisees brought a woman, humiliated by a crowd of men who had caught her in the very act of committing adultery, does not use words only, but writes on the ground with his finger. We have no clue whether those were words or what they exactly meant, but apparently they were understood by each of the irate accusers in the context of his own life. That is why the crowd dispersed. And it was only then that Christ spoke to the woman (cf. J 8: 1-11).

The belief in the value of the word, which is always some modality of truth, is inherent in the human being in spite of the fact that, absurdly, the word frequently finds itself unable to give proper names to things. The word may also be a weapon against evil, thus revealing the dignity of the human being as person. Fr. Tadeusz Styczeń would probably say that human dignity is revealed in any and every situation in which a human person – through his or her «yes» or «no» – takes the side of truth and opposes falsehood.3 The value of the word is adequately grasped by the expression «to give one’s word,» which is common to very many languages, the sense of this phrase being: I testify with all my being that things are so and so.

The juncture between the word and truth becomes particularly apparent in religion – it is not incidental that major world religions gather people precisely around the word, and are even called religions of the word, while the ethics they preach comes grom «hearing the word.» Thus one might say that being religious is an attempt to give the proper response to the word a human being considers as absolute. The only proper response though turns out to be the one of one’s life. The essence of such a response, as well as the dialogical dimension of religion, have been grasped, with an uncommon sensitivity, in a painting called A Winter Landscape by Caspar David Friedrich, who portrays, against the background of a cold landscape in which wilderness and silence predominate, a small silhouette of a crippled man who has abandoned his crutches in the snow in order to crawl up to a lonely cross and offer his prayer to God, trustful that his suffering has a meaning encompassed in the sense of world. Christianity, being a religion of the word, is also a religion of promise that there is a sense to the world, that the words with which human beings strive to render this fact make sense too, and that human beings are capable of formulating such words. In the Prologue to the Gospel according to John, the Word comes to people and entrusts itself to their care, showing them – through itself – the sense of the world and letting them take charge of it.

The word also delineates the borders of sense, simultaneously delineating the borders of human thought: What cannot be thought cannot be said. This particular issue was studied thoroughly by Michel Foucault in his work on the “archaeology of the word,” inspired by a passage in Borges, who in turn quotes “a certain Chinese encyclopaedia.” In the encyclopaedia in question it is written that animals are divided into: belonging to the Emperor; embalmed; tame; sucking pigs; sirens; fabulous; stray dogs; included in the present classification; frenzied; innumerable; drawn with a very fine camelhair brush; et cetera; having just broken the water pitcher; that from a long way off look like flies. „In the wonderment of this taxonomy – writes Foucault – the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own stark impossibility of thinking t h a t.”6 Thus also Foucault declares the belief that, at its root, the word gives a name to the order of the world in all its modalities, itself remaining a reflection of this order. Otherwise the order of thought is broken and the human mind becomes helpless having found itself lost in a cognitive chaos. Radical precision of the word on the level of sentence was allegedly postulated by the Austrian writer Karl Kraus, who said – on his deathbed – when he heard the news that the Japanese had gone into Manchuria: “None of this would have happened, if people had only been more strict about the use of the comma.”7 Can the corruption of language really be the cause of evil? We invite the readers of Ethos to reflect on this question while studying the articles collected in the present volume, which grasp various dimensions of the word: the word as the foundation of human existence, the word as «reflection» of the reality, the word facing the Absolute, the limits beyond which the word becomes helpless, the word in debate, the word in homily and in advertisement, the word facing creative imagination, the word that teaches, and the word facing evil. We have also included the profiles of some chosen thinkers to whom the word became their workshop and who, in their texts, presented a particular humility towards it, convinced that by serving the word, they serve truth.

We hope that while reading the articles on the word, our readers will be able to overcome for a moment the pressure of images, so characteristic of contemporary culture, and will think of a deeper presence in our life of a living, clear and apt word which knows when to give way to silence, as the Japanese poet Taigi does in his haiku poem:

Look how beautiful
the surface of the snow is,
illuminated by the sun.