The Truth-bearing Mind

Perhaps Aristotle is right when he says that the truth expressed by poetry is profounder than the truth expressed by history because it is a more general truth and more universally applicable.

When one considers the profound knowledge of human nature which we find for instance in Shakespeare’s plays or Tolstoi’s novels, we can see what it is that Aristotle means. If we had to choose between reading Shakespeare or Freud in order to obtain and understanding of human nature there are few of us who would choose Freud. Systematic philosophy or science is not necessarily a better way of describing ourselves and the world. It depends upon the quality of the vision of the scientist or the poet. If the view is one-sided or distorted, then however it is expressed it will be a limited view.

The mind is our instrument of experience and the quality of our vision depends on the state of our mind. The mind can be full of imagination and fantasy but it can also be truth-bearing and it is about the conditions which make it truth-bearing that we are concerned here.

The mind is sometimes thought of as a glorified computer, comprising an intellectual unit concerned with reasoning and logic, backed, as they say, by a memory-bank containing the records of past experience, and powered by a number of biological drives, such as hunger, the sex-urge, ambition, and the urge to dominate others, and so forth. If this were really an adequate picture of the mind, then the mind would be only programmable and not truth-bearing. The results of thinking would be, and could only be, simply to work out in practice the set of prejudices, beliefs, and expectations which had been programmed into memory by past experience.