Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor wrote, "it is more than usual to find the attitude among Catholics that since we possess the truth in the Church, we can use this truth as an instrument of judgment on any discipline at any time without regard for the nature of that discipline itself."
It is a temptation for Catholics, like myself, to become locked into the idea that we "possess" the truth and that truth is an instrument that we can use as a weapon, a weapon we possess and others do not. As a Catholic, I believe that Catholics do in a sense have the truth, but this does not mean that the totality of truth is reducible to our feeble minds and our fragile concepts. Truth is infinite; we are finite, and even mysteries such as human nature, freedom, love, justice, and beauty allude our attempts at total understanding. Yet I know of one Catholic philosopher who said to his students, "Don't call it my philosophy, just call it true philosophy."
This temptation to become locked into the metaphor of possession in conceiving our relationship to truth can affect and shape the way we read philosophy (or any subject). When I first became interested in philosophy and began taking classes in the discipline, I was quick to find the "true perennial philosophy" from which I could judge all others. For me, reading philosophers was an exercise in showing how they lived up to my standard of what true philosophy was (this varied). If I read thinkers like Marx, Nietzsche, or Peter Singer, the goal was to show why they were wrong. Sure, they may have had a good insight here or there, but I could simply take that particular insight and attach it to my true philosophy, assuming the rare occasion that the insight was not already made or implied in my true philosophy.
Then I met the mind of Gabriel Marcel, a 20th century Catholic philosopher who lead me to the dark side. Marcel shattered my idea that truth was something I could possess in its totality. He spoke of truth as a mystery, which unlike a problem, could never be fully solved. Philosophy dealt with both, but mysteries especially. For Marcel, truth is a mystery because we are situated in time and space, in a particular culture and in particular ways of thinking. For this reason, it is impossible to completely stand back from things and see them in complete objectivity as they are in themselves. Our understanding of truth could never be fully objective; there is always a subjective aspect to our understanding. And that's okay! It's not relativism.
I also realized around this time that what separated philosophers from each other was not only the answers that they gave, as if all philosophers were answering the same questions, but also the questions that they raised and their particular projects. There could be no one true perennial philosophy, because the truth of philosophy was mysterious, objective and subjective, and particular to the particular questions raised by each philosopher.
Paul Ricoeur, a friend of Marcel, preferred the metaphors of hope and light when speaking of truth. He wrote that he hoped he and all philosophers were in the bounds of truth or within the light of truth. This hope did not prevent him from criticizing thinkers when he thought them in error, but he always began and remained in dialogue with a philosopher in hope that they both bathed in the light of truth. He wanted to understand and learn from them, and he did this not by alienating them with the truth he already possessed, but by trying to understand them as they understood themselves. He sought to understand their questions, their projects, their ways of thinking. He approached even thinkers he strongly disagreed with in a spirit of humility.
For Ricoeur, truth is bigger than he is. Truth is not something he can possess exclusively. Truth cannot be contained by any human formula. No one may write the perennial philosophy, he said.
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