III. Aletheian Realism: The Metaphysical Foundation
Every philosophy rests on metaphysical foundations, whether acknowledged or not. The Enlightenment claimed to have no metaphysics, and to operate on pure reason and empirical observation alone. This was merely another level of its characteristic deception. The Enlightenment’s commitments to the autonomy of reason, the mechanical nature of the universe, the distinction between objective facts and subjective values were metaphysical through and through. They were simply unexamined metaphysics, held dogmatically while the Enlightenment’s philosophers congratulated themselves on having transcended dogma.
Veriphysics makes its metaphysical foundations explicit. It rests on what may be called Aletheian Realism: the conjunction of a particular understanding of truth with a commitment to the reality and knowability of the world.
The term aletheia is Greek, usually translated as “truth.” But the etymology of the term suggests something richer: a-letheia, un-concealment, the condition of being revealed rather than hidden. Truth, in this understanding, is not primarily a property of propositions but a fundamental feature of reality itself. Things are true insofar as they are unconcealed, disclosed, available to be known. The mind does not construct truth; it discovers it. Truth exists in its own right, prior to inquiry, as inquiry is merely the process by which elements of the truth become manifest to the inquirer.
This understanding stands opposed to the Enlightenment’s characteristic theories of truth. The correspondence theory, in its Enlightenment form, treated truth as a relation between propositions and facts, verified by method. The coherence theory treated truth as internal consistency within a system of beliefs. The pragmatic theory treated truth as what works, what enables successful prediction and action. Each of these theories makes truth dependent on human activity, dependent upon our propositions, our systems, and our purposes. Aletheian Realism reverses the dependency. Truth is what already is, therefore our propositions, systems, and purposes are only true insofar as they conform to it.
Realism, the second component, affirms that the world exists independently of our knowledge of it and that our knowledge genuinely discloses the world’s nature. This is the Aristotelian inheritance: universals are grounded in particulars, known through abstraction from sense experience, real features of things rather than mere names or mental constructs. Against nominalism, which reduces kinds to convenient labels, Aletheian Realism holds that the natural kinds are real and that the distinction between gold and iron, between oak and maple, between man and beast, reflects the proper structure of reality, not merely the conventions of language. Against idealism, which makes the world dependent on mind, Aletheian Realism holds that the world would exist and preserve its character even if no mind perceived it. It does not depend upon either the observer or the speaker.
But Aletheian Realism is not naive realism. It does not claim that human knowledge is infallible, complete, or perspectiveless. It acknowledges that we know from particular positions, through particular faculties, with particular limitations. The glass through which we see is real, and it shapes and constrains what we perceive. But what we perceive through it is also real. The task of inquiry is to clarify the glass, to correct for its distortions, to bring the image seen through it into sharper focus, not to imagine that we can dispense with the glass altogether and see as God sees.
This brings us to the concept of participation. The Platonic tradition, Christianized by the Church Fathers and the Scholastics, understood human knowledge as a participation in divine knowledge. God knows all things perfectly, immediately, exhaustively. Human beings know some things, imperfectly, mediately, partially. But the partial knowledge is not disconnected from the perfect knowledge; it participates in it. The truths we grasp are fragments of the Truth that God is. Our knowledge is not merely analogous to divine knowledge; it is a finite sharing in it, made possible by the fact that we are created in the image of a God who knows.
This participatory understanding grounds both confidence and humility. Confidence: we really know. Our knowledge is not illusion, not projection, not social construction. It is genuine apprehension of genuine reality. Humility: we do not know exhaustively. Our knowledge is partial, corrigible, open to refinement. The darkness of the glass through which we see is not total, but it is real. The fullness of sight awaits a condition we have not yet attained, a state to which we have not yet ascended.
The medieval doctrine of the transcendentals completes the picture. Being, truth, goodness, and beauty are convertible. What is, is true, is intrinsically good, and is ultimately beautiful. These are not separate properties accidentally conjoined but different aspects of a single reality, distinguishable in thought and perception, but united in essence. The Enlightenment’s separation of fact and value, its insistence that science tells us what is while ethics tells us what ought to be, and never the twain shall meet, was a metaphysical error with catastrophic consequences. This distinction made values arbitrary, subjective, and groundless. It rendered facts meaningless, objective, and devoid of significance. Aletheian Realism reunites what should never have been severed. To know the truth about a thing is already to know something about its goodness; to apprehend reality is already to be oriented toward its value and its beauty. Knowledge is inherently normative.
The Enlightenment’s separation of fact and virtue was not progress, it was a mistake.
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