The Philosophy of getting well

*

“Getting well” and “telling the truth” have much in common, which is to hazard the faith that health and truth are both members of God’s family, brother and sister. They “get along”. They play together quietly.

Pilate asks Jesus: “What is truth?” The question for him seems to be more a form of chitchat than honest aporia. That was his choice. The word “truth” can appear in a sentence devoid of truth. But how do you tell?

An analytical philospher might offer the idea of a carefully constructed logical sentence with attributes as if organically expressed in the form of its construction. For instance, the attribute of being true. But this is a backward idea of truth. We know truth is not a meagre attribute that clings to a sentence because that gets the relative scale backwards. Truth is immense, unimaginably large, it pulls into its orbit everything that is true. It is a complete world from which anything even slightly untrue has been banished. It is not a tiny thing applied to a sentence but an immense, incomprehensible “thing” to which the sentence is helplessly drawn or in which the sentence (if untrue) is chewed up, swallowed and destroyed.

Comprising awareness as well, truth is not really a “thing”. There is intention (which I am scared to describe, as though one could even do so in these clinical antiseptic terms).

You can make a factually correct statement but if it does not survive the encounter with the hugeness that is truth, then that sentence is somehow fundamentally untrue, its role within experience to become untruth – and what’s more people do not realize how many of their factual statements unroll in isolation from truth and can hardly count as true. E.g., a putdown of some person (true as far as it goes) that doesn’t envision what that person could or should become. It is also the case that a person whose tongue is untrue becomes himself untrue.

And now for “getting well”. People chat about this without being able to imagine a convincing health, a health of conviction, which is not the single heartbeat, not the being able to walk around the block or have sex in middle age – but something a judgment can look at and recognize as health without changing its mind a second later. What would this health be outside God’s hands? What could it be, separated from truth?

Picture a person in grave denial about a grave illness – let the illness be partly of the spirit, with denial a symptom of that part. As this person grows in recognition her sudden sense of being sick is a step toward getting well. She feels infinitely worse than before – is that health? Was the denial health? It depends on whether there actually is a context for her that is called “health”, whether it truly still exists – which is about truth, not just health. If the context – God’s hands – does not hold her own recognition and denial, then there was no point in her recognizing what can’t be cured. But if those hands are there, then her former comfort wasn’t health but delusion. What her health consists in depends completely on what kind of world ultimately holds her. The underlying hands (there or not) are not a passing detail but the key to every detail.

Without a God to get well for, why get well? What would getting well even be?

So that’s the context that lets you admit and confront your pain, your dread, the rest of it. A context of safety, a pair of hands. Truth needs a safe place in order to *be* true.

*