The attempt to conscript meaning onto things through language means that there are no real truths.

Intuitively, truth should be self-evident and One. Yet the tensions aroused by truth as a question were already evident in ancient Greek philosophy, with Plato’s eternal and objective ‘idea’ (Plato 380 bc/1871) – I call this ‘Ideal truth’ – pitted against the subjectivism implied in Protagoras’s dictum that “man is the measure of all things”.1 Aristotle’s ‘substances’ (Aristotle 350 bc/1953) in the framework of realistic epistemology offered an alternative, sense-based, anchorage for objective truth that came to be called ‘Correspondent truth’. Kant and Hegel, introducing the ideas of phenomena and ongoing dialectic, challenged the possibility of an absolute truth. They paved the way to the linguistic turn, which positioned meaning, conceptual and symbolic schemes as prior to fact (Habermas 2003), thus further challenging our ability to know objective reality or even define its basic characteristics (Russell 1961). 282 The Anxieties of Truth And yet, the linguistic turn did not end in a stoic relinquishing of ‘truth’ as a basic constituent of the mind’s work. Indeed, latter-day thinkers, for whom the linguistic turn was pivotal, also continued to debate the concept of truth and show its complex nature in novel ways (Rorty 1989). Even in the face of the wide range of epistemological, logical and ethical arguments, the quest for truth continued, defining and re-defining its status and method, taking into account its problematic nature and criticizing earlier arguments. The vital continuing search for truth begs the question of its intractability. What drives this search? What are its origins? The history of philosophical thought suggests that the answer to this question is clearly of a psychological nature: human beings have a need for certainty, security, control and the elimination of doubt. Nietzsche’s (1886/2009) critique of metaphysics is accepted as a prime modern origin of the line of thought that led to the dismantling of our naïve belief in metaphysics inasmuch as it aspires for absolute truth on the one hand and explores the immense human attachment to absolute truth on the other. In Nietzsche’s view, the quest for truth is driven by our fears. When we aim for objectivity, we buy ourselves stability and direction, but we sacrifce our integrity and the vitality of our thought (Nietzsche 1886/2009, cl. 10). The ‘Will to Truth’ is characteristic of a more general psychological tendency for self-deception. Man lacks the courage and integrity needed to contain his natural curiosity (ibid., cl. 227). Humanity, ever attached to a thoroughly flawed idea called ‘truth’, actively represses its creativity and life forces. The American Pragmatic view, influenced by Nietzsche’s thought, posited that the concern of truth was to advance the welfare of the individual. Thinkers such as Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey and Richard Rorty saw truth as a means to an end of improving humanity’s lot (James 1907/2004; Rorty 1989). On the other side of the ocean, Heidegger (1996) saw truth as reflecting man’s need to control the world in general and death in particular. Levinas (1969) and Derrida (1978) both associated metaphysics with violence, seeing truth as a result and paradigmatic example of an illusory purity that man tried to place as a guarantee of his identity and superiority, with the result of a looming xenophobia. The postmodern critique was formulated: generalization, categorization and truth are forms of symbolic violence the subject imposes on the objects of her thought. Notwithstanding the diferences in content, all of the above views suggest that the pertinence of truth is of a psychological nature: Human beings have a need for certainty, constancy and mental control. Contrary to naïve intuition, and many philosophical positions, this implies that what truth satisfies are not states of affairs, but rather states of mind. If until now the search for truth involved three orders – reality, propositions and the constraints of human consciousness – we now add a fourth order: that of the psychological needs of the subject-as-thinker. These needs preserve the concept of truth, allowing it to rise like a phoenix from the ashes of discarded modern thought, retaining its traditional definitions and granting it contemporary meanings. Alongside the two essentialist truths – the ‘Ideal’ truth and the truth of correspondence with reality (‘Correspondent’ truth), both of which claim the existence of an order independent of consciousness – four additional conceptions of truth, which, in Hempel’s words, entailed an “essential softening of the truth” (Hempel 1935/1994), remain vital in philosophic thought. I refer to these conceptions as Coherent, Intersubjective, Pragmatic and Subjective-Existential truths. I present here brief these paradigmatic notions of truth, for clarity denoting them with capital letters (Ideal, Correspondent, etc.).2 The Correspondent conception of truth, introduced by Aristotle (Aristotle 350 bc/1953), maintains that truth values are established by correspondence between a proposition and an external mind-independent fact. Correspondent truth is anchored in a realistic epistemology, 283 Shlomit Yadlin-Gadot which maintains that the world has a mind-independent existence that the subject is able to know by means of his senses (Hetherington 2012). The Coherent conception of truth as, for example, in Spinoza’s thinking (Spinoza 1677/1989), determines truth values by examining the compatibility of a belief with a whole system of beliefs. This truth is often associated with ‘idealistic’ epistemology that posits a single, abstract and unconditional principle, unknown in itself, yet determining the unity of the world (Hetherington 2012). The Ideal conception of truth, as in Plato’s thought (Plato 380 bc/1871), determines truth values by the compatibility between particular beliefs or empirically perceived cases and their corresponding eternal decrees or forms. It is situated in the realm of ‘objective idealism’ that claims the existence of a mind-independent order inaccessible to the senses and partially known by means of laborious mental processes (Russell 1961). Subjective Idealism shares the premise of absolute and objective idealism, that all known reality resides within the mind. But whereas the latter assumes a principle external to the system that creates and unifes it, the former assumes the ‘I’ or the Ego as the constituting source of reality. Subjective and Intersubjective truths are embedded in the assumptions of subjective idealism (Orange et al. 1998). The Subjective-Existential conception of truth, seeds of which can be found in the work of Kierkegaard, perceives truth as highly personal, embodying the subject’s experienced authenticity. Here, experience is prior to any essence or generalization (Elleray 2007). The Intersubjective conception of truth regards objectivity as established by interpersonal agreement, sometimes explicit, often implicit. This truth refects the logic of intersubjective epistemologies, whereby the world achieves its true transcendence through the presence of a foreign subjectivity (Husserl 1983). Pragmatic truth concerns the usefulness and practicality of an idea in the context of the believer’s life. A true belief is one that has been proven valid by the compatibility between its predictions and its results. Here, truth is process based and tomorrow, today’s truth may be no more than an opinion (James 1912/2010, 1907/2004).