Reality, Truth and Revelation

For whatever reasons, few realists have described themselves as such and most philosophical writing on realism has been against the beliefs of others. Whatever we believe is real, is something that we normally take for granted as true; it lies at the unspoken foundation of our worldview. This is why I believe it is important.

The process of change is hard. The altering of the foundations of my own beliefs is really hard. I used to be a naive realist. A materialist scientist. Intellectually I have discovered that such a belief is untenable. The strong realism of Plato, Aristotle, Goethe, Steiner and many, many others, based on my research, appears to be the most logically coherent alternative. I therefore want to change my belief.

Unlike Goethe I have no inner intuition of a linked matter and spirit, no inner certainty if this is true. The foundations of my new worldview are mere gossamer thin threads of logic, held together by a intermittent inner warmth of soul. Parmenides wrote that he was guided by the goddess Aletheia. Heidegger, in his Parmenides, wrote that she was truth, in the sense of disclosure, unconcealment. Christopher P. Long revises that description;

the question of truth has always been rooted in human[s] being together even as it increasingly came to designate the dynamic relationship between human beings and the things they encounter. … aletheia can be heard to name the attempt to articulate things as they show themselves to be. … But aletheia has always involved the human and, more specifically, it does not point the neutral and abstract happening of being; rather, aletheia is the site of the human encounter with being, that is, to the site of self-concealing appearing.

Late Heidegger and Aletheia
By Christopher Long, September 5, 2009

Perhaps, in the course of researching and writing this book – in my ‘attempt to articulate things as they show themselves to be‘ – Aletheia may reveal herself to me.

References

• Long, Christopher (2009) Late Heidegger and Aletheia, Christopher P. Long: https://cplong.org/2009/09/late-heidegger-and-aletheia/.
• Wikipedia Contributors (2024) Aletheia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aletheia.