A discussion we had in seminar that really stuck with me was the one about truth. We went off on a tangent trying to determine whether or not the truth is objective or subjective. This really stuck with me. I thought about it for a while and each time I’d come up with a theory, I’d compare it with something we’d already read to see if I had reached any particularly new conclusions. This is the conclusion that makes the most sense to me right now, without fully allying with a concept we’ve already studied:

I think that the truth is both subjective and objective. It’s confusing to think about, but the objectivity and subjectivity of any concept within our capabilities to discuss seems to always fall into a causality dilemma (like the chicken and the egg). So for you understand why I think this, I have to explain why I think the truth (or any concept) is objective and subjective at the same time. We start with a concept that is understood enough to gestate and further define, like the concept of fun. When fun is defined as something that is entertaining or pleasurable, this defined concept of fun is objective. However, because different people perceive the world differently, when the concept of fun is internalized, it comes to mean different things. For some it means reading, other drinking, others jogging etc. Even though all of these actions are definitively different, they are also still considered fun. So that, if, in the same room, a person was reading and another was dancing and a third was drinking, everyone in that room would be having fun. When everyone in The Fun Room is having fun, the definition of fun is relative to each person but also objectively defined as doing what it is they find entertaining or enjoyable. On a wider scale, if we look at initial objective definition of fun (the defined concept), we have to acknowledge that at one point this objective definition was a subjective one. Someone once decided that pleasurable or enjoyable things should be called “fun” and so they were when everyone adopted the objective definition and applied it subjectively.

This is hard to look at in terms of the truth because “truth” is a much broader concept. But I like to think about the truth in this way so that I don’t have to stay up all night (lol). But if everyone in the same room feels like they know the truth, then everyone in that room subjectively knows their internalized form of an objective definition of the truth. I can see how this seems the same as Plato’s idea of the Forms, but I don’t think it is. Believing in the forms implies that all things have a “correct” objectively defined concept. I don’t think this is true because I believe that any objective definition was at one point subjective and then made objective by popular consensus of it.

I’m not a philosopher (at all), so this probably has a lot of inconsistencies and details overlooked. Feel free to distort my conception of the world, though. Totally will not put me into crisis mode.