CHAPTER 17 TRUTH OR NOTHING

The chapter starts with Henrik Ibsens not-so acknowledged play

entitled Ghosts (basta wala siya na acknowledge during his time,
murag Van Gogh ang drama). The play is all about the story of a young
artist named Oswald Alving, who returns from Paris to spend the winter
with his widowed mother. Nevertheless, Oswald becomes aware that
his deceased father that he greatly admired had been a scoundrel and
had lived a wasteful life. He also discovered that hes beginning to go
insane because of syphilis inherited from his father.
And so, Oswald Alvings mother has defined the ghosts within us. It is
not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that
exists again in us, but all sorts of old ideas and all kinds of old dead
beliefs And we are so miserably afraid of the light, all of us. The
ghosts are the dead conventions and beliefs that led her to deny love
and conceal the truth and that kept her from living.
Oswald Alving urges his mother to give him a lethal dose of morphine
because I never asked you for life. And what kind of life was it that
you gave me? I dont want it. You shall take it back!
Egg-boxing

Kenneth Clarks biographies were such a contrast to his public image,

being known for his encyclopedic wisdom, his urbane sophistication,
his elegant manner. He was one of the most admired, discussed and
envied men of his generation as he pursued as his mission to bring art
to the masses.
But few knew the other side of his personality and the immense cost to
him of keeping hidden, even from himself, his strain of melancholy and
his childhood sense of neglect.
Sutherland, an eminent painter, tried later to capture Clark in a
portrait. But he was never satisfied and finally gave up, just as other
artists did who tried to paint him. Clark was too mercurial (lively) to be
pinned down.
One reviewer of The Other Half (Clarks second autobiography) stated,
As the picture of a man who has never to the end dared to face up to
the other half of himself, this is a spine-chilling book.
Egg-boxing way of compartmentalizing various aspects of ones life.
It allowed Clark to keep safely separate such things as his darker
childhood memories and his involvement with several mistresses
The Awkward Problem
 The impetus toward faith in Clarks life came from elsewhere his deep
love of nature, his passion for art and his eventual conviction that the
nobility of civilization could not survive with deep roots
There are recurring religious experiences Clark (which he never
doubted) that had lead him to two undeniable conclusions he had
felt the finger of God and he had equally and decisively declined to
respond to it that the memory of the experience finally paled.
actually guys, wala ko kabalo kung asa ang gina-mean ni Os Guinness
dire na awkward problem kay ang mga statement kay naka-focus sa
religious experiences ni Clark
Proposed problem: Wala jud siya nagpa-convert guys. Ingon siya, I
was looking for something. So I was and still I am. Pero ingon ang
priest na nagmisa sa iyang memorial na nagpa-convert daw siya a
week before he died.
But asawa ni Clark says: my husbands commitment of faith had been
secret but longstanding. At the close of his life, he had grasped the
hand of God that he earlier brushed aside.
Your Knees or Your Heels?

Fourth phase of the quest: We are free people, and there are two
options before us to fall on our knees or to turn on our heels.
Either we may seek to conform our desires to the truth, which leads us
to conviction, or we may seek to conform the truth to our desires,
which leads to evasions.
Danger point the moment when people fully recognize the
desperate conclusion of nihilism, that theres no meaning in life
The blunt challenge of ones choice flies in the face of the modern
myth that human beings are by nature truth seekers whose sole motto,
in Max Webers words, is truth or nothing.
I cannot do it. Theres no room for me in that. That would be my
death. I dont want to live for God. I will not. I want to live for me. My
own sake! Charlene, was a religious person with a religious
worldview, who had actually taught her religious beliefs professionally
two years.
To fall on our heels conviction; to endure because of ones strong faith
TRUTH??
To turn on our heels evasion; lahiun nimo ang truth depende sa imong
gusto paniwalaan?; fit reality into your scheme
Truth Twisting
Biography can overwhelm philosophy in the best of us.
 All of us truth twisters too. Aldous Huxley: (1) I had motives for not
wanting the world to have meaning. Consequently, I assumed that
it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying
reason for this assumption. (2) It is our will that then decides how and
upon what subject we shall use our intelligence
Providing reasons other than the real reason coined by Huxley as BAD
FAITH
A philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned
exclusively with a problem in methaphysics.

Short Term versus Long

The strategy of conforming the truth to our desires, although easier

and more attractive in the short term, is harder in the long run.
The strategy of conforming our desires to the truth is harder in the
short term but easier in the long