ON TRUTH AND SOPHISTICATION - Jersey Flight

"On the issue of 'exaggeration'; it is claimed that truth must always represent the simpler or primitive level, while what is more remote can only be a further arbitrary addition. This view assumes that the world is the same as the facade it presents. Philosophy should diametrically contest this idea. The kind of thinking which shuns the effort to overcome inveterate ideas is nothing but the mere reproduction of what we say and think without more ado. Philosophy should help us to avoid becoming stupid." Adorno, An Introduction to Dialectics pg.3, Polity Press 2017

The idea that truth must be simple is an assertion that exempts the student from comprehending an interconnected reality. If truth be complex, but the student demands a priori that it be simple, what marvel shall it be if he never comes to comprehend it?

Those who reject a sophisticated premise, simply because it requires more work to understand it, are prejudiced and pre-formed toward the identity of truth itself. Such a person begins (from the outset, before any dialectic has even taken place) with an ontological assumption of what truth must be. For when it does not appear in the desired, simple form, the student denounces it, not because he has comprehended it, but because it contradicts his ideal. This is a sure road to the cultivation of error and simplicity. Such a mindset continually drives the student away from all sections of reality which are not immediately accessible; he is driven toward the comfort of an emotive idealism.    

This, above all else, is what makes me an intellectual: my desire to labor toward an understanding of the phenomena of reality (in all its troublesome complexity), not as an ideal form of simplicity, but to grasp it as it is, even if I suffer under the weight of its causal details. 

What about the man who can't comprehend and so he continually makes qualifying assertions, in order to reduce and restructure the complexity which he fails to comprehend? What is this a manifestation of: the desperation of a mind which cannot comprehend, trying to make the unfamiliar familiar, trying to turn sophistication into simplicity in an attempt to understand it. This he does because he cannot comprehend the thing as it is stated. Reduction, in this sense, is an attempt to understand, but it is merely an attempt to understand what it already perceives in comfort. Expansion comes by means of uncomfortably drifting beyond the familiar, in comprehending what was not previously understood. Although understanding must use what is familiar to achieve comprehension, it does not subject the sophistication of the thesis to the desecration of the familiar (mere comfort). The use of the familiar, to comprehend what is higher, is only destructive when it is utilized [in the negative] as a repudiation, instead of a tool to aid in understanding.

 It ought to be noted that all our knowledge is only in part, but to conclude from this that we cannot attain to a greater grasp of the world, is itself a metaphysical error which can only serve to foster ignorance. So long as life has breath it ought to be fluctuating toward the highest possible mastery of comprehension. Because consciousness can increase, not only mastery over nature, but mastery over social organization towards the aim of human development, man should always be striving for a qualitative increase in consciousness.  


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