On the matter of the classical Islamic view of the morality of truth and lies, it is perhaps not inappropriate to quote here something that I had occasion to write elsewhere in commenting on a work of Muhammad ibn ʾAbd al-Karīm al-Shahrastānā (1076-1153) who, in a particular passage, ‘contends that a false sentence is not intrinsically better or worse, morally, than a true one. Some truths, he says, are not very pretty. (Keats was inspired by an urn to remind us that this view is un-Grecian.) There are some who would agree with this, holding that it is not lies themselves, but the telling of lies, that is wrong. Our author goes further: for him, the telling of lies, even, is not intrinsically moral or immoral. What is wrong, hellishly so, is for me to tell a lie - or for you to do so. And the reason for this is that God has created us and has commanded us not to lie.’ In GeorgeA. Makdisi (ed.) Arabic and Islamic Studies in Honor of Hamilton A. R. Gibb (Leiden: Brill 1965), p598.
2.
And what eternity is all about, too, in a sense. The reality of the objective world, although it is prior to our personal orientation to that reality, in the end will vanish while the way that you and I have responded to that reality is of a transcending significance which, to use the poetic imagery, will survive, will cosmically outlast the world. The mundane world is independent of man and is not to be subordinated to his whims. Yet ultimately, in this vision, man if he relates himself truly to reality is greater than the world.
3.
I say ‘trilateral’ because in the case of, for instance, a statement three things are involved: the man who makes the statement, the statement itself, and the facts that it purports to describe. (In a game, cheating similarly involves three things: the cheater, his action, and the rules of the game.) I leave aside for the moment the question (in the end, perhaps exceedingly important) of whether we should in fact include a fourth element in the complex: the person spoken to, the other player. The common view that the truth of a statement is a function of the relation between it and the overt facts
4.
Qawm kānū sadaqū bi-alsinatihim, wa-lam yusaddiqū qawlahum bi-fiʾlihim. Literally: ‘A people who used to give sidq with their tongues, but did not give tasdīq to what they said by their action.’ Abū jaʾfar Muhammad ibn Jarīr al-Tabarī, Jāmiʾ al-Bayān fī Tafsīr al-Qurʿān, ad 49:14.
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The Islamic epistemological point that Muslims learn what the final truth is about man's duty and destiny through the divine disclosure of it (in their case, in the Qur'ān) was of course taken for granted in the theological treatises, and eventually colours the further discussion of faith a little, though surprisingly little. As my presentation has perhaps made clear and as a book on which I am working will more explicitly document, a sizeable portion of many passages in Islamic theology about faith could be introduced word for word in Christian discussions of the matter almost without modification, and with considerable profit. And the same might be true to some degree, in humanist discussions. Originally the intention was that this present paper was to have been entitled ‘Where Lies Religious Truth?’ and was to develop specifically the view that the locus of religious truth is persons. The argument would have elaborated the consideration of the tasdīq conceptualization, for the Islamic case, and would have endeavoured to systematize theoretically the personalist-truth notions set forth in my recent work Questions of Religious Truth (London: Gollancz 1967). In tackling this, however, I found myself increasingly disquieted by the notion that any truth about men, whether religious or other, can be localized in a proposition; and I found myself writing instead this present, less satisfactory but I suppose more provocative, paper. Perhaps a sober position might finally be that truth or falsity, in this realm, is a function not of a proposition only but of it and of the person who makes it, but that there is perhaps a range of types of proposition, with the personalist element being lowest (or merely most universal?) when the proposition refers to natural science matters, higher when it refers to social science matters, very high in various special cases, and highest in the religious realm. For another day, perhaps.
6.
I am not arguing here that with the propositional-truth notion one cannot cope with personalisms as a special case - just as I trust that my critics will not suppose that with the personalist view being proposed it would be impossible to accommodate, again as a rather special case, certain impersonal objectivisms. The question is rather one of where one puts primacy. And especially, of where one puts aspiration - not merely individually but socially, institutionally (as we consider infra p20, about Harvard's aspiration). With the diffidence of an outsider iu these matters, I venture to ponder some of Austin's handling of this particular issue in my next note.
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An outsider dare not but be tentative and diffident in these matters; I dare venture into this area at all only because I see the issues as not strictly within philosophy - at least, not philosophy as contemporarily understood - but rather as having to do with the relation between philosophy and culture, and that between culture and human life (understood historically, but in a way transcending western, and especially modern western, particularities, for those who wish to remain empirical; understood in ultimate or absolute or religious terms, for those who allow these).
8.
First, then, is it fanciful to raise a perhaps innocent inquiry regarding Wittgenstein's famous problem of games? The philosopher may ask what all those things called ‘game’ have in common, and find nothing; may press one's modern fellows to search and scrutinize and look at games to see what indeed they have in common; may be perhaps a whit disparaging when, although they cannot find such a thing objectively there, they yet continue to feel uneasily that ‘they must have something in common because we call them all games.’ Might he have missed something at once both simple and important? May it not be that what all games have in common is the simple fact that men call them all games? What characterizes them all, despite their diversity, is that we human beings are related to them in a particular way. And this relationship is profoundly important. Modern men do not see it because they are looking in the wrong place. The ruthless insistence that the proper way, the only way, to understand the world is to see it apart from man's relation to it, may not be so legitimate as some have thought. This principle of ‘objectivity’ may lead, or have led, to something reasonably called truth in the natural sciences, but I ponder the possibility that it may lead to error in the ‘behavioural’ sciences and in all our apprehension of things that pertain to man. On another occasion I have defined ‘objectivity’ as the proper way to handle objects intellectually; but to treat men, or anything involving men, as if they were objects is to misunderstand them.
9.
Might one propose: Nothing that men do can be adequately understood objectively? Might one further raise a question also about Austin, and even perhaps speculate whether his views do not in some fashion lend surreptitious support to such a proposal? Although here again I feel highly diffident in exposing my uncouthness in the unfamiliar field of modern philosophy, I venture to trespass in that field if only to profit from expert comment. An outsider's questions may sound inept, but through them the questioner, at least, may win some light. With regard to Austin's essay ‘Truth,’ my unsophisticated feeling is that he comes close to being a moralist and personalist, but would shy away from formulating his position so. His notion of ‘statement,’ for example (as distinct from a sentence), which seems certainly non-empirical, non-'objective,’ appears strikingly supernatural unless it be interpreted as an implicitly personalist conception. Indeed it is of something said ‘by a certain person’ (p87), and when two persons use the same sentence it may make two statements, one for each (p88). Moreover he was clearly fascinated with promises, and stressed the moral-personal dimension even of knowing (eg, in ‘Other Minds’). On some points, however, he was unwilling to be personalist: for example for him ‘that cat may be on the mat’ (I prefer ‘I love you’ as a paradigm for truth or falsity!) ‘is not a statement’ and cannot be true or false (p100); is it, however, unreasonable much to prefer the Arabic dictionaries’ notion that when a man says something of that kind, he may be lying or he may be telling the truth?
10.
Moreover, an outsider wonders whether Austin is being perhaps a trifle facile when he tosses off the point that the sentence ‘It is mine’ may make different statements, depending on who utters it. He does not seem to be concerned with how profoundly personalist he is thereby constituting his concept of ‘statement’ to be. Whether ‘It is mine’ is true or false depends both on who says it, and on certain objective matters. It seems worth pondering whether religious pronouncements are not of this kind (and, I am even suggesting, perhaps in the end all pronouncements). Some thinkers, having discovered that religious sentences (and in this they are like more conspicuously personal sentences, such as ‘I am twenty years old’) are not true or false in themselves, considered objectively, have gone on to assert that they are then meaningless - or that they merely express emotions. Now the sentence ‘I am twenty years old’ is, I suppose, strictly meaningless, considered in and of itself (also: ‘He is twenty years old’). It becomes a meaningful statement when considered in relation to particular persons; the truth of it, however, still depends on its relation, then, to matters in the objective, empirical world. (Without developing the point, I think that it could be argued that even scientific statements are meaningless in and of themselves; their truth comes into significance when related to persons, but in their case the persons are not particular persons but all mankind, in principle - at least, provided that they understand the language being used.) Religious formulations, so far as I can see, are perhaps analogous, in relation not so strictly to particular individuals, although that remains, but first to communities. In the course of teaching Islamic and Hindu ideas, I have had the experience of observing how they seem at first ‘meaningless’ to outsiders; although it is obviously absurd to judge meaningless simply what one cannot understand. References: Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophische Untersuchungen/Philosophical Investigations trans. G. Anscombe E.M. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1967) para 66. [p31: I have not followed exactly the English translation p31e], J. L. Austin Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1961) ‘Other Minds’ pp44-84 Truth’ pp85-101.
11.
This point, so far as religious formulations are concerned (and specifically the proposition ‘The Qur'ān is the word of God’), is explored in my Questions of Religious Truth.
12.
Neither would it be false. (A statement is not a lie, even if the man who makes it does so without believing it - or even with intent to deceive - if the content of the statement happens nonetheless to be correct.) Curiously, a journal article that is not true, in the above sense, for the author, may yet become true for certain readers if it both states facts correctly and becomes incorporated with integrity into a given reader's life and personality.
13.
To my astonishment, this particular paragraph in the text aroused, in preliminary discussions (though not at the Birmingham conference itself), the most acute resistance of anything in the entire thesis. In fact, several colleagues pleaded with me to withdraw it. I was surprised at this reaction, since I had imagined that almost everyone feels that we must do something to curtail the ‘publish or perish’ stance that is helping to vitiate modern academic life, and that falls so burdensomely especially on the young; and must do something too to curtail the sheer amount of academic publication, some of it trivial, with which we are inundated. Surely it is not too heretical to suggest that a society is sinful that talks (and encourages talking) in order to be heard. Should we not aim at a society, or at least at a university community, that has the sincerity to talk, or at least to value talking, only when it has something to say, something it feels is worth saying? Most academics recognize intellectually and feel emotionally the sorry inhumanity of modern commercial advertising in its unctuous insincerity, but sometimes we are insensitive to the academic advertising that can colour our learned societies and our journals. The graduating medical student takes an oath to use his skill only for the welfare of mankind; some sort of counterpart to the Hippocratic oath for the humanities would pledge us never to publish an article primarily for our own advantage. (Rumour has it that in the natural sciences also a good deal of research nowadays is competitive, not disinterested.) At the very least, we should recognize that we are all sinners. At the very, very least, we should recognize that it is not easy to speak to truth. It is not the case that science and the objective method have made available to us a path to truth that by-passes personal morality, that by-passes persons.
14.
This introduces the fourth component in what would become, then, a quadrilateral relationship in which truth is involved; see note 3, above.
15.
Relevant to the last two considerations is the concept of ‘discipline.’ This is not precisely defined, and there are a few aspects of the notion that are perhaps valuable, and could be salvaged. Yet one of the questions that I find myself asking - and I am not unaware that this is bold - is whether in general this concept, increasingly dominant in western intellectual life, has not with its concomitants constituted a formidable disruption. It has largely replaced ‘subject-matter’ as the operative conception in much university study; and particularly perhaps in the United States it ramifies into and controls a frighteningly large part of what a university does and how it does it. I realize, accordingly, that to question it may appear not merely radical but ridiculous, inane. I do so, however, seriously and responsibly. I have come deeply to feel that the transition from ‘subject’ to ‘discipline’ may have constituted a major step in that profoundly wrong turn that has been taken by western intellectual life somewhere along the line, in the course of the last many decades. Again, this concept may be legitimate in the natural sciences, but in the study of human affairs it is, I think that I discern, intellectually an error. To write only for one's peers in a discipline is to write not only jargon but - in principle -falsehood; or at least, not truth.
16.
In this case the personal morality might be not simply or perhaps even primarily the personal integrity in relation to his work of the individual researcher (although that would be interesting to discuss) but, given the universalist quality of scientific statements, rather or also the group morality of mankind.
