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What do we want more than anything else? What is our deepest desire? How many of us can honestly respond: the truth? “What we want most is the truth about the universe, about other people, and especially about ourselves”? Is truth what we really want most deeply? Or would we not be better off if we were spared from it? Søren Kierkegaard wrote: “It is far from being the case that men in general regard relationship with the truth as the highest good, and it is far from being the case that they, Socratically, regard being under a delusion as the greatest misfortune.”49 Why is it that we are not always interested in truth and instead often seek refuge in illusions?

Perhaps the reason is that the desire for truth is not the only passion governing our conscious and instinctive lives. Only a little reflection is needed to remind us that we are composed of a morass of drives, desires, longings, cravings, wishes, and hopes. Curiously, the inhabitants of this jungle of desires are often in conflict with one another. One part of us might want sensual gratification, another security, another power, another meaning, and another approval. Furthermore, one desire may be superimposed upon another, so that their disentanglement seems nearly impossible. It is often hard to determine which of the desires is dominant or to which of our various inclinations we should entrust the course of our lives. Often we experiment with a variety of our urges before we commit ourselves to any one of them as our fundamental option. Perhaps a serious pursuit of truth is one of the last of our desires to be accepted as a dynamic force in our lives because there is so much competition from other urges that are quite content to live with illusions.

And yet, the message of our great religious, literary, and philosophical classics is that there is really only one desire that we can completely trust to lead us to genuine happiness, namely our thirst for the truth. Only when we subordinate our other inclinations to the eros for truth will we find what we are really looking for. But how dominant is this desire in our own conscious existence? Perhaps the passion to get to the truth has not yet assumed a central role in our lives. “I want the truth” may be only a tentative, barely audible utterance, buried under many layers of longing that are not at all interested in the truth. We may, at times, wonder why the prophets, visionaries and philosophers have made so much of the pursuit of truth, especially if there is little inclination for it in our own lives.

What is the truth? Can it be defined? Or do we not implicitly appeal to it even in trying to define it, so that any attempted definition is circular? It would be an interesting experiment if you would pause at this point and attempt to define “truth.” The classical definition of truth is “the correspondence of mind with reality.” But what is reality? Can it be defined? The term truth often refers not only to the cognitional stance of one who is in touch with “reality,” but it may also be used interchangeably with reality itself. That is, truth may be understood either epistemologically (as referring to the correspondence of our minds to reality) or metaphysically (as the name for that reality our minds are in touch with). In one sense, truth means the attunement of the mind to being, to the real, to the true. In the following, however, I shall use the term “truth” primarily in the metaphysical sense—namely, as “being,” the “real,” or the “true”—which is intended as the goal of our desire for reality. In other words, I shall use the terms truth, being, and reality interchangeably.

It seems that in the case of truth, we are once again dealing with a “horizon” that evades our efforts at intellectual control and adequate definition. If anything, truth would define us more than we would define it. The encounter with truth is more a case of our being grasped by it than of our actively grasping it.

Perhaps, therefore, we can speak of the truth only in a “heuristic” sense, that is, as something we are seeking but which never allows itself to be completely ensnared by our instruments of discovery. We can speak of truth more as the “objective” or goal of a certain kind of wanting within us than as a possession firmly within our grasp. Yet even though we cannot possess the truth or get our minds around it, we can at least recognize clearly, among the multiplicity of our wants, a desire for the truth, even if it is not yet a powerful impulse. A brief reflection on your own thinking process will confirm the presence of this desire in your consciousness.

You may just now have asked: “Is it really the case that something in me wants the truth?” You need no further or more immediate evidence that you do have some such desire. The simple fact that you ask such a question is evidence enough.

It is in the asking of such questions, indeed of any questions at all, that we have the most obvious evidence of our undeniable longing for the truth. We may call this longing simply the desire to know. It may not yet be highly developed within us. It may be only a whisper that is easily ignored, an occasional impulse readily repressed. And yet, it may well be the deepest and most ineradicable part of ourselves, the very essence of our being. It may turn out that of all our longings and wild wishings our desire to know is the only one whose ardor we can give into with completely trusting abandonment. Maybe only an uninhibited following of our desire to know the truth can bring us into a genuine encounter with depth, future, freedom, and beauty.

And yet we may already have given up the quest for truth, saying to ourselves: “There is no final truth; truth is relative to each person’s subjective preferences; truth is a useful social convention; truth cannot be found.” If we have been tempted to such conclusions, we may perhaps take comfort in the fact that some famous philosophers have also taught these same “truths.” But we must also note that other great minds—most of them, in fact—have demonstrated the self-contradiction in such dogmas.

Suppose, for example, someone says that it is not possible to know the truth. This translates into: “It is a truth that it is not possible to know the truth.” Such a statement is self-contradictory because it appeals to our capacity to know the truth (at least the truth of the above statement) even in the very act of denying that we have such a capacity. It overlooks the fact that we implicitly appeal to our trust in the truth every time we raise a doubt about something or every time we say: “It is the case that such and such is so.” We could never hope to convince others even that relativism is a truthful philosophical position unless we assumed in advance that these others were capable of recognizing the “truth” of our skepticism. Hence, even if we may at times have explicitly despaired of ever finding the truth, we have not been able to eradicate either our desire for it or our implicit appeal to criteria of truth every time we use the verb “to be.”

Every act of judging or questioning presupposes the possibility of our finding the truth. Without an implicit “faith” that intelligibility and truth can be found, we would not have the courage either to seek understanding or to make judgments about the world around us. If deep within us some cynical voice dominated our consciousness by saying “there is no intelligibility or truth to be found in the world or yourself,” then we would never even so much as ask a question. Yet by the fact that we do ask questions and make judgments (even, for example, “it is a truth that there is no intelligibility or truth”) we give ample evidence that we cannot eradicate our primordial trust in the intelligibility and truth of reality. Like it or not, we are irremediably tied to truth—even as we take flight from it. We have already seen that the same applies in our relation to depth, futurity, freedom, and beauty.

I stated earlier that the direct evidence for the fact of your having a desire to know lies in the simple fact that you find yourself spontaneously asking questions. If you find yourself questioning this, then it is because you have a desire to know. If you are asking what the meaning of these peculiar reflections is, or if there is any truth to them, then this spontaneous questioning is also evidence of your desire to know. You have a desire to know the truth, and it sharply reveals itself in your asking of these simple questions.

But there are different types of questions. Some of our questions inquire as to what a thing is or ask about its meaning, intelligibility, or significance. This type of questioning is resolved when we are given an “insight” into the essence of something. If you find yourself asking what the author of this book is trying to get across in these sentences, then this is an example of the first type of question. It may be called a “question for understanding.” It will reach its goal when you find yourself saying: “aha, I now see the point.”

But the gaining of understanding is not the end of the questioning process. Not every insight is in touch with reality; there can be illusory along with realistic understanding. So a second type of question spontaneously arises, leading you to ask whether your insights or those of others are true. For example, in reading this chapter, if you reach the point of saying, “I see the point the author is trying to make,” an uneasiness will eventually emerge that will be given expression in this fashion: “Yes, I see the point, but is the point well taken? Is it faithful to the facts of my own experience? Is it based in reality? Is it true?” This type of questioning provides evidence that you are not content with mere insight and understanding. You want truthful insight and correct understanding. Thus you ask: is it really so? Does this or that viewpoint correspond with reality? Is it a fact?

We may call this second type a “question for reflection” or simply a “critical question.” It is especially our critical questions that give evidence of our desire to know and of our fundamental discontent with mere understanding. We want to make sure that our insights, hypotheses, and theories are true to reality. Otherwise we remain unsatisfied with them. This restlessness in the face of mere “thinking” leads us to undertake “verificational” experiments, in order to test whether our insight and understanding fit the real world or whether perhaps they are out of touch with reality. Our discontent with mere thinking—no matter how ingenious such thinking may be—is what leads us toward “knowledge.” Our sense that knowing is more significant than simply thinking is the result of our allowing ourselves to be motivated by a “desire to know.”50

We have all had the experience of listening to very clever people and of reading very learned books. We often assume that their brilliance amounts to veracity and so we sometimes fail to raise further questions about them. It is very easy to be overwhelmed by the genius of an argument or the brightness of an idea. But if our critical sense is sufficiently awakened, we realize, as Bernard Lonergan puts it, that “not every bright idea is a true idea.”51 There is always the need to ask whether “bright ideas” are in touch with reality. We must heed the imperative in our mind that tells us: “be critical; do not settle for mere understanding.” Science is perhaps the most obvious example of this need to challenge hypothetical insight with critical questions.

Again, it takes only a little reflection on our own experience to notice how difficult it can be at times to follow this critical imperative and wean ourselves away from fallacious or shallow understanding. This is the case with respect to our knowledge of others and of reality in general, but especially with respect to self-knowledge. Because the desire to know is not the only motivation in our conscious lives (and perhaps not even the dominant one), we may easily allow some other impulse to construct self-images that have little to do with what we really are. And we may find these fictitious self-images so appealing to our desire for power, gratification, or approval that they divert us from attaining appropriate insight into ourselves.

Our propensity for self-deception is one of the most interesting and most philosophically troubling characteristics of our human nature. Why should conscious beings, whose questions constantly reveal the fact of an underlying desire to know as an ineradicable aspect of their consciousness, also have such a tendency to repress this desire to know when it seeks self-knowledge?

At least part of the reason for the flight from insight into ourselves lies in the fact that, in addition to having an ineradicable desire to know, we also need acceptance and approval. And it appears at times that we will pay almost any price to be held in high, positive regard by significant others. We will go to the point of denying even to ourselves those aspects of our lives and characters that we suspect might not be approved of by others. And so we will hide these “unacceptable” features not only from them but from ourselves as well. Self-deception occurs when, in trying to fulfill criteria of worth established by our immediate social environment, some part of us simply fails to live up to its standards. Rather than admit the presence in us of an “unsocialized” component, we often deny its presence and pretend that we fit comfortably within the circle drawn by familial, national, academic, ecclesiastical, or other societal conditions of self-esteem. The “unacceptable” side of ourselves does not simply go away, however, and our latent interest in the truth feebly attempts to bring it into explicit recognition. But our need for immediate approval provokes us to take strong internal measures to keep it out of explicit consciousness. Thus, in the context of social conditions of personal value, our pure desire to know comes into conflict with our desire for acceptance when the area of knowledge to be explored is that of the self. This divided condition makes us wonder, then, whether we can find truth at all without first giving up our desire for approval by others.

Are these two desires—the desire for acceptance and the desire for truth—condemned to perpetual mutual combat, or is there not some way in which they can be reconciled? Is there any sense in which the need to be loved can coexist with our need to know the truth?

Some philosophers, both ancient and modern, have despaired of such a union. They tell us that if we honestly follow our desire for the truth, we will ultimately have to admit that reality as such is either hostile or indifferent to us. They point especially to the facts of suffering and death as evidence that, in the final analysis, we are not cared for.52 They admit that we have a powerful longing for affection and love, but they also advise us to reach some compromise between the demand for acceptance and the ultimate opaqueness of “reality” to any such desire. This view may be called “absurdist” since it sees an irrational flaw at the heart of reality, dividing it dualistically into two incommensurable elements: human consciousness, with its desire for acceptance, on the one side, and the universe, with its refusal to satisfy this desire, on the other. The incongruity of these two sides of reality—namely humans and the universe—means that reality as a whole does not make sense. It is absurd.53

One must question, then, whether our deep need for a sense of self-worth can ever be satisfied as long as our sense of reality is an absurdist one. One must also ask, if we truly believe that the universe is, in its depths, unaccepting toward us, can our desire to know ever really emerge as the dominant motivational force in our lives? The absurdist reply is that the hostility of the universe toward us is the very occasion for our exercising an honesty and courage, which gives us an even deeper sense of self-esteem than we could have had in a beneficent universe. Facing the challenge of living without hope requires a heroism which allows us to feel better about ourselves to the extent that we face courageously the insurmountable challenge of an absurd universe. Thus, in order for us to be honest about ourselves, there is no need for an ultimate or transcendent context of love. All we need is to summon up from within ourselves the courage to “face the facts.”

The tragic or absurdist interpretation which holds that our courage comes only from “within” us is a position which promotes itself as the only honest interpretation of the facts of human existence. Its apparent heroism and honesty has made the tragic vision an attractive one, for at least some people, for centuries. On the surface, it seems to be an exemplary instance of following the desire for truth, no matter how much it hurts. At first sight, this “tragic” interpretation appears to avoid self-deception and to face the truth by renouncing the need for love, approval, and acceptance. The self can stand on its own in complete lucidity about its situation in the world without the support of the universe or even of other people.

And yet, on closer examination, the tragic alternative, in its denying the basic dependency and interdependency of all things, is itself also conducive to self-deception. It seems to fall short of complete honesty inasmuch as it fails to acknowledge the necessity of sources of courage beyond the individual’s own heroism. The tragic hero who announces the absurdity of the world stands up courageously against the alleged hostility of society and the universe, which often explains the appeal tragic heroes have to the rebellious tendencies within us. But the absurdist hero is oblivious to the sustenance our courage receives from our environment, and this is where a certain dishonesty begins.

48. Previously published in Haught, What is God?, 92–114. Reprinted with permission.

49. Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 175.

50. See Lonergan, Insight.

51. Lonergan, “Cognitional Structure,” 221–39.

52. See Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents and Camus, Myth of Sisyphus.

53. For the most explicit formulation of an “absurdist” perspective, see Camus, Myth of Sisyphus.