Truth:
According to one commentator, J.R.R. Tolkien believed, at times, that his own literary work was not a purely creative act—but, rather, the reconstruction of a pre-existent history from traces or impressions left in the structure of language:
However fanciful Tolkien’s creation of Middle-earth was, he did not think that he was entirely making it up. He was ‘reconstructing’, he was harmonizing contradictions in his source-texts, sometimes he was supplying entirely new concepts (like hobbits), but he was also reaching back to an imaginative world which he believed had once really existed, at least in a collective imagination: and for this he had a very great deal of admittedly scattered evidence.
In other words, Tolkien believed that he was articulating a pre-existent truth through language.
So what? Who cares about the opinions of some eccentric Oxford Don (however artistically gifted)?
Well, I find this element of Tolkien’s thought interesting, because I think that such truth is precisely what psychoanalysis aims at.
As far as I can tell, the psychoanalytic symptom is produced, at least in part, by the patient’s belief that such a symptom pre-exists their search for it. In fact, psychoanalysts argue that the symptom is produced by the very act of searching for it.
But equally paradoxical—for the same reason—is Tolkien’s endeavor above. What is the real status of this world which he believed he was uncovering? Was it in fact a collective dream which was laying latent in human culture until Tolkien uncovered it? Or did it not really exist at all (was it not even latent) until Tolkien created it—which wholesale creation he could only effectively perform so long as he believed that he was really just uncovering a pre-existing truth?
Again—if we choose to believe the latter interpretation (i.e: that Tolkien only created inasmuch as he believed that he wasn’t creating as much as discovering), then what Tolkien was doing is analogous or even identical to the Lacanian notion of the symptom.
In psychoanalysis, the symptom is said to emerge through transference, the patient’s imposition of the truth of their own psyche onto some other person.
But wait, I thought that the patient wants to get rid of their symptom? That’s why they’re seeking therapy, isn’t it? In other words: don’t they come to analysis because they already have a symptom?
They do, but the idea they have of their own symptom is not the whole of it. The symptom is a meaningful expression of a certain psychic conflict, but its meaning must be interpreted. The paradox which this essay will examine is whether or how something can be created through its own interpretation.
Transference basically involves the analysand saying: “You, analyst, you are the one who knows what my suffering means, and you even know what I want. So tell me!” In the process of interrogating their analyst (who of course only “knows” inasmuch as the patient tends to believe that they know and treats them accordingly), the patient gradually comes to know what it is they truly want. But in the process, they construct a meaning for the thing (or lack of a thing) which is bothering them.
But what is this about “wanting?” I thought that the patient was seeking relief for a symptom.
Yes, but all that the symptom is is a conflict between the patient’s conscious and unconscious desires (and the corresponding conscious and unconscious satisfactions). A salutary step in psychoanalysis involves an adjustment of these two domains such that they are less in conflict. I think that one could describe this in terms of clearing away the clutter of inauthentic desire.
Let us set desire aside and return to the main question of this essay. You spoke of truth as being “constructed.” But this is a contradiction: truth is not constructed by the one who comes to know it; rather, truth is essentially external to the knower. It makes no sense to speak of the truth of an event as something created retroactively. What would be the ontological status of such a thing before it was known? A thing either exists or it does not.
Here is an interesting metaphor by Lacan about how this process (of uncovering/constructing the symptom) works. Language, to Lacan, can be likened to a vase:
[The vase] creates the void and thereby introduces the possibility of filling it. Emptiness and fullness are introduced into a world that by itself knows not of them. It is on the basis of this fabricated signifier, this vase, that emptiness and fullness as such enter the world, neither more nor less, and with the same sense.
What an interesting idea! This retroject’s something of our modern information theory (namely, that the smallest unit of meaning is the bit, which denotes either presence or absence, one or zero) into some of the oldest surviving works of human culture.
It is also easy to see how this physical analogy applies to language. Just by describing things, we not only shape what is, but what is not.
Take the example of someone who has a traumatic experience. They shy away from it, they repress it, such that it never enters into the chain of meaning. Trauma is a place where the soul’s regular weft of meaning has suffered a rift.
By retrojecting language into that confusion, that “place” where there is no speech, we can structure it and keep it from terrorizing its inhabitant.
But again, is such a retroactive meaning really true? Or does such a process involve a “noble lie” in which an experience which was never meaningful must necessarily be interpreted as having a pre-existing meaning in order to become meaningful (and thus stabilize the mind)?
In other words: are there truths which it is necessary not to believe in order to remain mentally healthy (e.g: that one’s past experiences of meaninglessness were in fact meaningful)? Or is it rather that truth itself always has this retroactive, constructive structure? There are problems with both views which render them unacceptable to me.
It seems, then, that we have arrived at a state of aporia.
Death:
When asked what the Lord of the Rings was essentially about, Tolkien gave a reply which, at first blush, seems rather morbid: “I should say, if asked, the tale is not really about Power and Dominion: that only sets the wheels going; it is about Death and the desire for deathlessness.”
But what does this have to do with what we were talking about?
I propose that the contemplation of death might lead us to some insight on this paradoxical idea of a truth which doesn’t exist until you believe that it’s already there, or a retroactive truth.
How so?
Death is the punctum of existence, both in the sense that it is the “period” which marks the “sentence” of life as definitively ended—as complete—but also in the sense that death is the teleological point of life. The aim of life is to achieve a happy death, and a good death requires one to have had a happy life. Death fixes the meaning of one’s life. Thus death is the ultimate event which creates retroactive truth.
We can never know the meaning of our life, at least not while we are still alive, because our life is not yet ended.
“It is really true what philosophy tells us, that life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forwards. A proposition which, the more it is subjected to careful thought, the more it ends up concluding precisely that life at any given moment cannot really ever be fully understood; exactly because there is no single moment where time stops completely in order for me to take position [to do this]: going backwards.” - Kierkegaard
When lightning strikes, it first extends various tendrils, each of which seeks the earth. The first one which makes contact with the earth becomes the “retroactive” path of the lightning, traveling upwards from the earth into the sky. The various potentials are only resolved when one of them makes contact with the earth, “concludes.”
So what are you saying?
Maybe the absolute necessity of death is so great that it “beats” even the truth. Rather, in a sense, death is the one thing more truthful than truth. Desire, love, owes all its validity to a sense of truth. But truth itself only has value for us inasmuch as we have some knowledge of death. Eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge leads to death; the two are inextricable.
Then what was Tolkien doing when he wrote?
Perhaps the first world war, which effectively marked the end of European civilization, was a kind of death. And the benefit of this death was that, like a period in a sentence, it allowed one to give a sense to all that which had come before it.
Did such a sense not exist before?
Perhaps it did, but it was less clear, because the “sentence” hadn’t yet ended. Perhaps in some timeless place, the story of our life and death—and all truth—is already told. But because such information is inaccessible to us, anything more than the demonstration of its bare existence deserves little interest. For our purposes, “nothing is written.” What is more interesting and close at hand is how to make use of death, once it has happened. We can’t access the truth which concerns us, but death is inescapable.
So, to be a little more formal: prior to the first world war, the ultimate meaning of European culture was unclear. In that it was true, then, that there would have been some time when such meaning would be fixed, the truth of that culture’s meaning pre-existed its death—but such truth was not accessible to anybody until the death had occurred, and made it clear. And even then, in order to access it, one had to study the past of European culture in light of its conclusion, picking up the few most precious baubles in the vast span and arranging them in the order which seemed most right.
Life:
Or, to take another tack: maybe it is not the most meaningless (really, meaning-destroying) events in a person’s life—moments of death—which must be overwritten by the delusional imposition of constructive truths in order for the psyche to maintain some health. Maybe, on the contrary, such events are too meaningful, such that our freedom consists in making the choice of a path through their density—the selection of a fixed meaning. Freud wrote that dreams were “overdetermined,” and one can say the same of great works of art. One can never come to the end of explaining them.
What are they, then? And what was Tolkien doing? And how can something be too true? We take truth as being univocal, unambiguous. Athens is the capital of Greece; surely, therefore, it isn’t Madrid!
Well, maybe it is not too true, but too meaningful? And yet, before meaning is collapsed into truth, it is actually meaningless.
For Hegel, sense-certainty, perception, consciousness, is all subordinate to reason. Reason’s power is that it takes the confusion of sensation and fixes it with a definite meaning. In other words: the fact that a picture is worth a thousand words means that a picture is inferior to the brief sentence which can serve to describe it.
Why, then, do certain works of art and certain dreams give us such a strong impression of being so rich with meaning? I.e: if the application of our reason to art is only going to “boil it down” to a relatively simple meaning, is such an initial impression delusory?
Is it not notable that different people can interpret a work of art in different ways? Even a person can interpret their own dreams, their own life in different ways over the course of their life.
Perhaps the answer to this riddle is that the truth can never be entirely disassociated from a given person. When people abuse this insight one-sidedly, it takes the form of relativism, but the opposite tendency, a kind of “over-objectivism” or “truth-impersonalism,” is also false.
But again: what is a dream, or a work of art? How can a thing “contain” so many truths?
Perhaps both beings are the instantiations of truth in potentia. Less timorously: “When truth is merely potential, not active, then it takes this form. Our duty, then, is to move such truth from potency into action. Our individual perspective will lead us to resolve the potential truth in our own unique way. When such truths conflict between people (or at different times in the life of a single person), it is simply because the differing interpretations have resolved what is essentially ambiguous (or bearing polyvalent truth potential) in different ways. This is not a strike against anybody’s interpretation—rather, the more truthful interpretations must be more idiosyncratic, because they will be those most inextricable from one’s person.”
But what about the interpretation of real events? Your idea is all well and good in the world of art—but in reality, how can an event have no meaning before it is interpreted? You have proposed two possibilities: that death is what determines the meaning, and also that life, freedom, is what determines the meaning—that we have the freedom to make a choice of interpretation. But how can one make a choice of interpretation except on the basis of truth?
We must not forget that freedom is the power to do what is right. It is the opposite of arbitrary. Thus, if death creates the potential for meaning, freedom is the power to choose that meaning. Life is the power to choose death. Yet such a choice is not at all repeatable, generalizable—except inasmuch as it is unrepeatable, ungeneralizable. In other words: our choice of meaning, to be true, must be idiosyncratic, personal.
To provide an example: a woman dies. One has lost his mother, another has lost his wife. What does such an event really mean? All that we can say is that it means something different, depending on one’s point of view.
In clearer language: the meaning of an event, whether individual or collective, can only be determined once it has concluded. At this point, we have the choice to make a more or less truthful interpretation. More truthful interpretations give more testimony to what has ended, what has died. And the most truthful interpretations give such a testimony according most closely to one’s own point of view. What is clearest is what one actually sees, not what one imagines that others see.
This is a pessimistic view, because it implies that interpretation cannot produce anything new, any future.
Indeed, the only real progress that we can make is the impossibility of any progress: our acceptance of death.