Which Way I Am Facing?

There is a question most of us are careful never to ask out loud, because it unsettles the ground we are standing on. We want to know whether anything we think is true. Not whether it is ours, of course it is ours, but whether being ours has anything at all to do with being true. Perhaps everything we hold is only a small private country built out of childhood and wiring, and we have mistaken the walls of that country for the edges of the world. It is the kind of question a person should sit with before he answers it. So I opened a notebook, put C.S. Lewis on the left-hand page and my own arguing on the right, and began.

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I began with the plant, because it was in front of me. My daughter gave it to me, and I have somehow kept it alive, the crooked little trunk, the leaves running green to yellow. That it is there, I do not doubt. When the doubt comes, it does not settle on the plant. It settles one layer back, on the mind that is doing the looking, and that is the tender place. The question is never really about the plant. It is whether the one who sees it can be trusted to see.

Lewis begins in that same quiet room. Perhaps, he grants, our thoughts touch nothing real; perhaps thinking is only chemistry moving in the dark. And then he turns the doubt to face itself. "Is the thought that no thoughts are true, itself true?" If we say yes, we have already let one thought be true, and the whole doubt loses its footing. It is the man who stands up and swears he never tells the truth: if he means it, he is lying. We cannot doubt everything, because the doubting is one more thing we are trusting while we do it. Something in us does reach what is real. What that something is, and how far it can go, is exactly what the rest of the argument has to find out.

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There is one kind of knowing most of us never think to question, and it is science. Everything else we are willing to call opinion; science feels like the floor under the house. But a floor rests on beams, and the beams are worth looking at.

A laboratory only ever reaches the world by reasoning. The eyes are windows, nothing more. They pass the raw thing through, a color in a tube, a needle on a dial, and it is the mind, further in, that says an atom did this. A camera sees the same blue we see and knows nothing, because it has the looking and none of the understanding. "All knowledge whatever depends on the validity of inference," Lewis writes. The knowing was never in the eye. It was in the reason the eye had been quietly serving the whole time. Even the ground we trust most is standing on the very thing we were trying to doubt.

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It is here that a person stops nodding and starts to argue, and the argument is with himself, which is the only honest kind. We know how a mind is made. Mine was made of everything I did not choose: childhood, gladness, grief, the wiring I was born inside. A man who cannot see green looks at my plant and sees a color I will never see. One man holds the head of the elephant and says snake, another holds the tail and says rope, and both are certain. So who is right? For a while the easy answer keeps us company: truth is only what our own window lets through.

But that answer will not hold, and it is worth being clear about why. Agreement has never once made a thing true; only what is real makes it true. The earth would go on being round though every last one of us swore it was flat. The elephant is a puzzle only because a real animal is standing behind the two half-answers. Take the animal away and no one is right or wrong, because there is nothing left to be right or wrong about. Our hold on the truth is partial. It can be corrected. It is good until something truer comes and takes it down. But being taken down means something only if there is a real truth doing the taking. The truth does not move. We are the ones who move, slowly, and not always willingly, and we catch up to it.

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Then Lewis says the hard thing, the thing that does not set down easily. If the mind is only matter, he argues, that "rules out any materialistic account of thinking." One piece of matter cannot be true about another piece of matter. The Gulf Stream warms the Irish Sea, but it has never drawn a map of itself. Blind matter gives off effects; it does not sit down and tell the truth about the world. A cabbage does not rise from the dirt and clear its throat to lecture on botany.

The other side deserves a fair hearing, because a man who is only fair to his own side is not learning. Are the mind and the stone not made of the same few elements, the mind only holding more of them, more wiring, more design? Could a complicated enough piece of matter not learn to read another? Lewis does not fully shut that door, and there is good company leaning on it. Elizabeth Anscombe put the objection to his face, and he went home and rewrote the chapter. That is not a mark against him. It is better to stand with a man honest enough to be corrected than with one who was never touched.

And still, something will not fit inside the machine. A calculator hands over two and two and understands nothing; nothing ever arrives for it, and it cannot tell whether it is right. When something finally arrives for a person, it does not feel like a thing he made. It feels like a thing he was given, true before he got there to meet it. That feeling is hard to weigh. But the machine has never had one second of it, and we have had it all our lives.

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So where does the argument leave us? Not holding a proof. Holding a direction. There is more truth than we have, more than the sum of everything already gathered, and we do not invent it. We catch up to it, and we do it together, by climbing onto the shoulders of the ones who reasoned before us and standing there so the search can go a little further. Newton reasoned something out three hundred years ago; it is still true, and we get to stand on it and reach past where he could reach. None of that means anything unless reason really lays hold of a truth that belongs to everyone, the same truth for a farmer and a physicist and a monk on his knees. Here Lewis takes the step past where the road runs out. The reason we are all leaning on, he says, cannot in the end be merely human. It is "cosmic or super-cosmic," something we answer to and did not make. That is not a country a man can claim to be standing inside. But it is possible to know which way the face is turned.

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I will not close the door Lewis left open. Whether a complicated enough arrangement of matter could ever be true about other matter is a question I have not answered; I have only learned to carry it. Anscombe made him rewrite a chapter. Someone, someday, will make me rewrite this, and that is not the failure of the essay. That is the essay.

The plant on the desk is not finished either. It is still turning, a little further each day, toward a light it will never reach and never stop reaching for. It would be no bad thing to be found doing the same, still leaning, still facing the one direction that has been drawing us the whole time.