An Edifying Discourse about a Question

Source: ‘A Sermon for St. Thomas’ a sermon by Herbert McCabe O.P., published in God Matters (Chapter 20).
Transfiguration by Gerald M. Somerville 2002-5.

‘What is truth?’
We begin with a question, not a statement or an affirmation. It is the opening theme of the present work, anticipating, like an overture, what its discussion is to be like and of what its absoluteness is like. The absoluteness of the present work lies in asking questions. The present work is not primarily concerned with providing answers. Its importance is in drawing attention to the fact that there is always a question to be asked to which an answer is either true or false.
‘Is it true or false?’ We must ask this not only about the pronouncements of others, but also about our own. This is the first requirement for a philosopher. Is the present work true or false? A philosopher must be interested in getting the answer right, and get it right by answering a question. This means really entertaining the question, recognizing that you could hold either position. When Pilate said to Jesus, ‘What is truth?’ he was merely being rhetorical. He was not really asking a question, for he had no intention of waiting for an answer. But when I ask in the present work, ‘Is the present work true or false?’ must I not also be rhetorical, in that I cannot seriously entertain, from the standpoint of the present work, the possibility of being false?
"Chesterton’s Father Brown said he could solve murders because he was spiritually trained to see that he could himself commit any abominable crime." (Direct quotation from Herbert McCabe’s sermon, p. 235.) " Likewise, a philosopher must recognize that the most outrageous absurdities are possible, and moreover, possible for them to have consequences for one’s own philosophizing. That exercise is the beginning of the question; the next part is answering it rightly. The question itself is not enough; a question is only for the sake of its answer. This is the truth as we can receive it; the answering of asked questions. For Philosophy, truth only exists in language, it has to be expressed, it has to exist, in (if you will pardon the vulgarity) propositions.
Asking questions means seeking to answer them. A work is absolute, though, not by what is done and achieved, but by its acceptance of failure. An absolute work is one which conforms to Regenerating Philosophy, and what Regenerating Philosophy is about is not shown in its successes, its completed explanations, but in its failure, its having to be completely re-written.
The absoluteness of the present work is shown, not in the questions it answers, but in the one where it fails, the question it does not and cannot answer and refuses to pretend to answer (and yet strives to make some contribution to answering). Just as it is argued in Regenerating Philosophy that to refuse to accept its need to be re-written would be to betray its whole project, all that it was written for, so in the present work to refuse to accept defeat about this one question would be to betray all that the present work is intended to do, its purpose. And this question is the very one we started with, ‘What is truth?’
The question ‘What is truth?’ is both the beginning and the end of all philosophy. Without some kind of answer, however vague and hazy, to that question, there can be no other questions to ask. And all the other questions and answers are only there to lead on to a full and adequate answer to that first question. And if that question is both the beginning and the end of all philosophy, so also is its answer. However uncertain we may be about what truth is, any conception of truth must be true to itself.
‘What is truth?’ It is the rational absoluteness of the present work that I here accept defeat in it. Unlike so many works that have been written, the present work can in no way answer this most important of all questions. The present work is devoted to the question ‘What is truth?’, and yet throughout I have stressed that the answer is not in the present work, that the answer is necessarily beyond the present work, that we are peering into the dark. The present work is true in so far as it is in Regenerating Philosophy (to be true is to be joined to Being as to the utterly unknown). The most we can do is peer in the right direction; and all Philosophy is about doing that. But we can never answer our basic question in any finite work. We will understand what truth is only when we have been taken beyond language and thinking, and Being brings us to share in its own discussion of itself (in its exposition).
The whole of the present work seems like straw, and I have tried to indicate this throughout it. This, then, is my conclusion to the present work:
1) first, that it is our job to ask questions, to immerse ourselves so far as we can in all the possibilities of both truth and error;
2) then we must be passionately concerned to get the answers right, our account must be as true as can be;
3) and finally, we must realize that truth is not what our account is.
We must recognize that the greatest and most penetrating philosophy is straw before the unfathomable mystery of the Project (poured into us) which will finally gather us [all explanations?] completely into Regenerating Philosophy, the Exposition Being has of itself. Then, only then, is our first question answered.

Back to TOP