We are still speaking about truth, and I would like to recall once again Aristotle’s statement: if something is so and you say that it is so, then that is truth; if something is so and you say that it is not so, then that is untruth, and you can also reverse that. Now, with simple facts, of course, this is still reasonably easy to follow, but as soon as something becomes a little more complicated, it also becomes more difficult to say that something is so and that this corresponds to its actually being so. If I say there is a chestnut tree in my garden, yes, that can be verified, but when I tell a detailed story and someone retells it, then it is much more difficult, firstly to retell it exactly and secondly to verify whether it was actually said that way.<\/p>\n
There lies a very great problem. Of course we all sometimes watch videos on YouTube, talk shows; you are doing that now too, as you sit watching me, and what naturally strikes one is that there are an incredible number of different opinions. The task for the human being is to find the truth in all those opinions.<\/p>\n
But yes, then you really do have to begin a certain training with yourself. What I notice in the years in which I have been giving lectures and speaking with very many people is that what I say often comes back to me, something like, yes, but Mieke said, or something of the kind, or someone comes and says to me, you once said that, and what then often happens is that I do not recognise at all that I could ever have said that. Yes, of course I say so too, but what, in the meantime, has happened to what I originally said, and to the way it now comes back to me?<\/p>\n
Then I have to say, yes, what you are saying now is not true. Then they say, yes, but you said it yourself. No, that cannot be, and so on and so forth.<\/p>\n
I always remember a question from Toon Hermans, who at one point said to me, you are a doctor, you sit in your consulting room, you talk with people, do you also listen to what they say? I naturally found that a rather strange question. I think that as a doctor you at least intend to listen to people, although when you go to the doctor as a patient you often do not have the feeling that you are being listened to, but that is by the way.<\/p>\n
I have always done my best to really listen to people. So I said to him, yes, of course I listen to people, at any rate I do my best to do so. And then he said, well, you should not do that, you should look.<\/p>\n
Because what you see, that is true, but what people say, yes, the question always remains whether that is true. I had a somewhat different view of that, but I understand very well what he meant, because in speaking you try to put into words a very complicated whole of facts, whereas what is sitting there opposite you, yes, that is of course a fact. And that too is very complicated, but it is nevertheless much more what it is.<\/p>\n
And so, at the time when I wrote the little book Learn to Think, I also began with visual perception. That you try, after a day, to sit down and ask yourself about a single event, an encounter with a person, to ask yourself, what did I actually see there? Later you can also say, what did I hear and what was that hearing like, but in the first instance, what did I actually see, and then you try to form an image of what you actually saw.<\/p>\n
And that is generally a rather shocking experience, namely, unless you are someone who is truly a genius at observing, it is usually the case that you then have to establish that there is a great deal you did not see. Was that person wearing glasses, did he or she look healthy or not, what colour sweater or jacket or dress was he or she wearing, what were the hand movements like, were they still, calm, or were they very agitated? A whole complex of visual perceptions of which you have to admit to yourself that a large part is missing.<\/p>\n
This is even more strongly the case when you do the same with what you have heard someone say. And of course it is generally not so easy to establish everything that is missing there or has already changed in the meantime, but an attempt, as it were, to retell what the other person said, as precisely as possible, is usually also a great failure. That really has to be practised; you really must\u2014or of course you do not have to do anything\u2014but if you do not want to go through life as an unconscious liar, then you nevertheless have to do something with yourself through which you become more and more capable of really retelling precisely what someone tells you, as it was told, and not your own interpretation of it.<\/p>\n
How much of what someone tells you do you miss? A great deal. And so there are the accounts of people who have been somewhere and who, for example, have attended a reception with a speech, and if you were then to ask twenty people, now tell me what it was like and what you heard, then it is shocking how different it is and how genuinely divergent. Look, you can still imagine that one person hears a different part from another, but does hear what was actually said; yet that is often not the case, it is often supplemented with something you draw from yourself.<\/p>\n
That becomes more pronounced the longer what you hear goes on. It is well known that our power of concentration is not infinite; you cannot ask someone to listen with concentration to a speaker for an hour and a half, that does not work. So from time to time you have to let your focus become scattered, you let go of it for a moment, and then you miss something.<\/p>\n
Nothing to be done about it. And one person misses this and another misses that, so when it is all brought together it is generally once again the whole, but when you miss a piece and do not notice that you yourself are filling in what you missed, then you really get a distorted picture. That is the untruth with which we are constantly dealing, produced by ourselves and produced by our fellow human beings, so that you cannot take what someone tells you as absolutely the truth, indeed as Toon Hermans said, because we human beings, simply because we are untrained, are not capable of reproducing something that is a complicated perception, especially when it lasts longer, exactly as it was.<\/p>\n
Look, with a little film, of course, you do have that. That is also the great temptation of our time and also an enormous help, that you can record everything. When I give a lecture now, it is recorded, and afterwards you can always know what you said; if you yourself no longer know, then at least the device still knows.<\/p>\n
But of course that was not the case in the past. Then the lecturer delivered the account, and if that was not recorded but was, for example, preserved in notes, then there was a very great possibility that it would not entirely correspond to what was actually said. There is, for example, a very large amount of information about what Rudolf Steiner said in private conversations, and yes, you must always bear in mind that the private individual who heard it stands in between, and perhaps wanted to hear something particular and therefore heard it, although it was not said. Those are all ordinary human processes.<\/p>\n
That does not even have anything to do with conscious lying, but has to do with the fact that we stand in life more or less untrained and that we are not capable of being present in such a very exact way, of continually having presence of mind, through which you can reproduce exactly what appears before you and what you hear, what is being said. So that was something, this train of thought, that connected with what I said last time, and I say it now because it really is a challenge, all those spoken words on YouTube, news\u2014there you already have it, what is true there, what is presented as news, but then the interpretations of it, yes, that is quite a challenge, amid the enormous multiplicity that exists, still to see the wood while seeing all those trees; that is actually simply impossible. And so I have also stopped following many of those conversations on YouTube, many of those statements, because you really do not know what you are dealing with.<\/p>\n
I keep to\u2014I naturally also speak for YouTube, that is clear, I am doing that now\u2014but I prefer to keep to this theme, namely the process of truth. Let us try to gain a better grasp of it, so that in everyday life too you become more and more capable of taking what presents itself to you as it is. And when you then tell others about it, that you can also say it as it is. And that you do not say it as it is not. That you do not continually have to break that rule, that age-old rule of Aristotle. When you say that something is so, and it is not so, then you are not speaking the truth, and vice versa. And that goes on continually. You can of course say, well, all right, you are excessively precise about that. In everyday life, of course, it is quite impossible always to be so precise about it. But actually we should try, in that respect, to become as exact as artificial recordings. They do manage that. They know how to reproduce very precisely what was there, but without consciousness.<\/p>\n
It is precisely consciousness that leads us away from that. That is what I wanted to add to my account of truth. And perhaps next time there will once again be something new to add to it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We are still speaking about truth, and I would like to recall once again Aristotle’s statement: if something is so and you say that it is so, then that is truth; if something is so and you say that it is not so, then that is untruth, and you can also reverse that. Now, with simple facts, of course, this is still reasonably easy to follow, but as soon as something becomes a little more complicated, it also becomes more difficult to say that something is so and that this corresponds to its actually being so. If I say there is a chestnut tree in my garden, yes, that can be verified, but when I tell a detailed story and someone retells it, then it is much more difficult, firstly to retell it exactly and secondly to verify whether it was actually said that way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":9918,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ongecategoriseerd"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/miekemosmuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/miekemosmuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/miekemosmuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miekemosmuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miekemosmuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9924"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/miekemosmuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9924\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9925,"href":"https:\/\/miekemosmuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9924\/revisions\/9925"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miekemosmuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/miekemosmuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miekemosmuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miekemosmuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}