Feeling our way toward the truth
Truth is relative? Or is one’s interpretation of the truth relative? Maybe it just depends….
Sometime back when most of the interesting stuff in that part of the world we would later come to call Europe was being written in Greek, Plato, once described by a college acquaintance as “that Greek guy who talked about, like, shadow puppets on his cave wall or whatever”, wrote a philosophical dialogue called Protagoras, or, The Sophists.Though called a dialogue, the cast of characters included not just Plato and an interlocutor, but also Socrates, Hippocrates (not that one, a younger, unrelated one), Alcibiades (young, rich, handsome, ambitious), Protagoras (aka “the smartest Sophist around”), and Plato, along with a couple dozen or so other hangers-on and the like.
What the dialogue Protagoras is perhaps best known for is the argument, presented by Protagoras on behalf of all Sophists, everywhere, basically stating (at least according to what could be described as a Reader’s Digest/Marvel Comics version of the work) that “truth is relative”—that there isn’t really a universal truth that everyone can agree on, but rather truths of the personal sort, arising from an individual’s perceptions of the world through the perspective unique to the individual, in that time and place. What’s true for Xanthippus isn’t necessarily true for Paralus (except that they had the same dad), and vice versa, etc., etc.
The idea, never completely abandoned, became popularized again in the 20th century in the form that one now might associate with philosophy-a-la-Twitter, or social media sophistry in general. I suppose one shouldn’t be surprised that many in a society that includes some who take seriously health tips about vaginal steaming from Gwyneth Paltrow, and others who are dyed-in-the-wool fans of a NYC real estate tycoon (just ask him) and reality show headliner with his own, constantly changing versions of “truth” who somehow got elected president, might not be inclined to do much deep thinking about what the phrase ‘truth is relative’ might mean, instead just kinda rolling with the Sophist-lite-flavored seltzer water of thought. At any rate, the phrase, “Truth is relative” is seldom uttered, read, or considered at any level (though always spoken as sonorously as possible) other than those of bumper stickers, bathroom graffiti, and drunken undergraduates wanting to make the point so as to allow for justification of, well, whatever it was they were just saying—but it doesn’t matter, ‘cause truth is relative, dude, now let’s have another beer. Sort of a ‘Ferris Bueller Teaches Philosophy 101’. It’s also the sort of underpinning found providing the basis for things like Picasso’s artistic “genius” and his proclamation that “art is a lie that makes us realize the truth”. Which, Picasso being the sort of guy to refer to himself as “Yo el rey” and mean it, means his truth, of course. The fact that he never makes clear just what that is doesn’t matter.
One of the myriad manifestations of the idea is often presented by use (often misguided or misunderstood) of what one might call the Parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant. It’s commonly used to emphasize how each of us, based on our perspectives and experience, develop our own understandings of things, and no one person’s conception of the elephant is “right” or necessarily any more (or less) true than anyone else’s. It comes in many versions, all of which have to pay extra when they fly, what with all the baggage. But it can be useful. Here’s my version:
In a village live six blind men, who each during the day sit on their favorite street corners and collect alms from passers-by. Each evening they gather together to eat in a community soup kitchen and share their stories of the day.
One evening, one of the blind men reported to the others that he had heard that the local rajah had a new elephant. A few of the other men chimed in, saying they, too, had heard of the rajah’s new animal.
“What kind of animal is this thing, this elephant?”, one blind man asked of the group.
“I have heard it is much like a mouse,” said another. “Perhaps a little larger, though.”
“A mouse?!!” exclaimed a different voice. “Hmmph. Not at all. An elephant is a sort of crocodile.”
One of the men burst out laughing. “A crocodile!?! Someone has told you a wild story full of falsehood, my friend! An elephant is nothing like a crocodile. An elephant is like a buffalo.”
Soon there was a great hubbub while the blind men argued about what elephants were like, all based on the most reliable reports from very knowledgeable authorities about elephants. Mouse, crocodile, buffalo, gazelle, eagle, lion, and more—all sorts of claims were made, arguments presented and protested, until the uproar upset all the others in the soup kitchen, including the staff who ran the place.
Finally, Sister Lillian, who was in charge of the soup kitchen, banged a wooden spoon on an empty pot until the blind men all quieted.
“Listen to me, you silly old men. You’re all blind, so none of you has ever seen an elephant. From the claims you have all been making, it’s clear to me that none of you has ever even been near or touched an elephant. You have heard stories—stories made up by others to give the story-tellers entertainment in fibbing to blind men, getting them to believe silly things. It’s all ridiculous; therefore, I will ask the rajah to bring his new elephant here tomorrow, so each of you may feel it, touch it, listen to it, even speak to it, if you want. Then each of you will share with the group what you think of the elephant, and we will see who really understands what an elephant is.”
Everyone agreed this was a good plan, and so arrangements were made.
The following morning, instead of going to their favorite street corners to beg, the blind men gathered outside the community kitchen. They stood about talking and drinking tea provided by the kitchen staff while they waited. After a few minutes, Sister Lillian came out to speak to them.
“Good morning to you all, you who cannot see but describe pictures of what you do not know. Now you will have your chance to get to know an elephant. The rajah has sent over his elephant, brought to us by the elephant keeper he has hired to train and care for the elephant, an animal very special to the rajah.
“This is how you will each visit with the elephant: One at a time, each of you will be taken around to the back of the building here, where the elephant and its keeper already are waiting. The trainer, the keeper, will help you place your hands on the elephant, and you may feel the animal, listen to it, even talk to it, if you like. But you may not ask any questions of the elephant’s keeper, nor of anyone else who may be nearby. You may only learn about the elephant from the elephant.
“When each of you has had a chance to meet and learn about elephants from a real, live elephant, you will each share with the group what you have learned, and we will discover who really knows the elephant.”
All the blind men agreed that this would be a good way to learn, directly from the elephant, without information filtered, modified, or interpreted by others, just what an elephant is.
One by one, the men without sight were taken around the building to encounter the elephant. As each blind man approached, the elephant’s keeper guided their outstretched hands until they touched the elephant, and then the keeper drew back, letting the man, by use of all senses but sight, discover the elephant. After a minute or two, the blind men were led back around the building, there to wait and, when all had taken their turn, share their knowledge of the elephant.
The first blind man taken to the elephant proceeded with his arms outstretched. He stepped forward, and his hands found the side of the elephant’s chest. It was firm, though the leathery skin was warm and wrinkly. The blind man moved his hands about on the elephant’s torso, finding no end. The elephant stood quietly, still except for its slow, even breathing that lifted the man’s hands. Finally the old blind man nodded, and he was led away.
The second blind man was guided to the elephant with his hands outstretched as well. As he reached forward, his left hand encountered the elephant’s trunk, which then curled up and over his forearm. The blind man was startled by this, and began to withdraw his arm, but stopped when the elephant’s keeper patted his shoulder in reassurance. Then, with both hands, the blind man felt along the trunk, feeling its roundness, its motion, its ability to grip and tug. The elephant grunted and emitted a soft, gentle machine-like growl from deep within its chest. Then the second man was taken away.
The third blind man, then the fourth, fifth, and sixth all visited with the elephant in much the same way. The third man’s hands found and palpated the elephant’s foreleg, even down to its foot, which widened out from the pillar of the leg as it seemed almost to plunge into the ground. The fourth man found his hands on one of the elephant’s giant ears. The leathery skin of the ear rippled like heavy cloth and the elephant flapped its ears once, nearly knocking the man over, startling them both. The elephant gave a short trumpeting call and rocked back and forth, more gently flapping its ears. The blind man stood with his hand to his chin, then went back around the building. When the fifth man approached, the elephant had turned, and had its tail toward the approaching man, whose grasp encountered the swinging rope-like tail with its club-like end with its thick hairs. The sixth blind man, hands out in front, closed on the elephant as the animal’s head was lowered, a tusk arcing across the path of the man as he stepped forward. His hands bumped into the tusk, and for some time he ran his hands back and forth along it, feeling the tip, its length, as long as his arm, and its hard, smooth mass. The elephant snorted, quietly. Then the last blind man was done, and he was led around to the front, and joined the others gathered with Sister Lillian in the soup kitchen.
Sister Lillian and other kitchen staff helped the blind men to seats at a long table, where they could have tea and cakes while they talked. After tea had been poured for all, she sat at the end of the table and addressed the blind men.
“You men have been coming here to the community kitchen for years, both for the bodily sustenance we can provide and for the opportunity to sit, talk, and, yes, occasionally, argue, like you all were doing about elephants just yesterday. Let us see if now you have better ideas about what elephants are like. Who would like to start? Tell us in a few words what you observed by touch, or by hearing, and what you now think elephants are like.”
The first blind man stood, his chair scraping on the concrete floor, his hands cradling his cup of tea.
“I stand not so you all can see me better. You’re all blind, like me, so it doesn’t matter if I stand or sit. But just to pay respects to Sister Lillian and thank her for the opportunity I have had today to discover what an elephant is really like.
“With my hands I felt the elephant today.” He set the cup of tea on the table, then stretched his arms out, hands up as if he was feeling something large in front of him. “It was massive, like a wall, a wall of a room; firm, covered with a wrinkled hide, and warm. As I stood there with my hands on the elephant, it moved, rhythmically, slowly out towards me, then back in, and out, and in. It reminded me of how a bellows moves, and there was a soft sound of air moving in and out, too. An elephant is like a living bellows inside a room.”
“Thank you,” said Sister Lillian. “That is an interesting description of the elephant. You, with the bread, you were the second man to visit the elephant. Tell us what you found.”
The second blind man set his chunk of bread on the table. He brushed his hands together to remove crumbs, and wiped around his mouth. Then he spoke.
“The elephant was a surprising, even shocking, creature. I am not sure how massive it was, but I can tell you this: it had a long arm, really like a tentacle of an octopus or squid, very long, able to reach out and grab my arm, then wrap around it, and with the tentacle it explored along my arm, then my chest. It was both sensitive and strong. Once, years ago, my cousin, a fisherman, told me about a large octopus they had caught out in the bay. The octopus had strong, sensitive tentacles, too. This elephant is like an octopus, with its tentacles. Oh, and it growled, but not like it was angry. More like a slightly grouchy uncle who wants his tea. So the elephant is a kind of grouchy octopus.”
Sister Lillian thanked him, and prompted the third man to speak.
“It cannot be that we were in contact with the same animal. A bellows-wall? An octopus? Not at all what I discovered. The elephant that I put my hands on was like a trunk of a large magnolia tree. Almost as big around as the water cistern out front, where we get drinks of water during the day. And it was very solid. When it got close to the ground, I could feel that the big round pillar flared out like roots spreading from the trunk of a tree. There was a rustling noise above, like a breeze through leaves, maybe, but nothing more. An elephant, I say, is like a grand tree.”
The fourth blind man also stood to speak.
“I, too, shall stand to speak, so all of you can hear me well. I have no idea what these others were feeling, but it was not the elephant I encountered. My hands found a large, very large, really gigantic, leathery wing. It hung in the air, and then flapped hard, then softer, back and forth, like a butterfly resting on a flower. And there was this: right after it flapped its wing hard, it made a loud squawking call like a parrot. So it is clear: an elephant is like a huge parrot.” And the fourth blind man sat.
“The elephant I felt was also different from these others,” said the fifth blind man. “The elephant was like a thick rope, waving back and forth, with a broadened, club-like part at the end, and thick, heavy hairs hanging down from it there. At first I was confused—the elephant is a rope? Maybe a whip of some kind? But then I realized, no, the elephant is like a monkey!”
Finally, the sixth blind man spoke. “The elephant is nothing like what the others have described. Through my hands, the elephant seemed to me like a spear, a large, heavy spear, smooth and round and hard like ironwood, carefully polished. Maybe these other bits that have been described are to hurl the part of the elephant that is like a spear, I don’t know. But the elephant is definitely a mighty and dangerous weapon.”
With this the sixth, and last, of the blind men finished describing the elephant. One likened the elephant to a room with a bellows. The second, an octopus. Others followed: a tree, with a large trunk; a huge parrot with massive wings; a monkey, and a war-weapon spear.
Sister Lillian laughed.
“Why is she laughing?” one blind man exclaimed. We each told her about the elephant, as she asked. Now she must tell who is right.”
“It’s obvious my description is right. The elephant can be compared only to a huge, giant octopus, with arms of incredible strength.” This blind man waved his hand. “The rest of this is nonsense.”
“Nonsense!?” another shouted. “I’ll show you nonsense when you feel my fist, you—“
“You don’t know anything! Sit down! The elephant, like a monkey sometimes does, is making a fool out of all of—“
“Idiots! I’m with a group of idiots! I can’t believe—“
Bedlam erupted in the soup kitchen, with blind men waving their arms and their walking sticks, pounding on the table, yelling over each other, and more. Tea was spilled, and at least one sweet cake became a projectile.
A tremendous blast of noise, like from a rough-edged trumpet, erupted from near the door. The blind men were shocked. A couple stumbled over chairs and each other. Another tried to sit down, but missed the chair and fell backwards onto the floor, then sat up, legs pulled up to his chest. One just stood, stilled by the sound’s impact. One used a hand to find a chair and slipped onto the seat. The sixth blind man wiped his hand across and then down through his beard until he clasped the point of his beard between his fingers. His free arm braced against the table. None spoke.
For a moment, there was silence, then a heavy, slow shuffling sound. A snort, and a short, low, deep rumble like a rock slide on a hill very far away.
A man’s voice presented itself. Calm and confident.
“Thank you for quieting yourselves. There’s no way I could have shouted over you. Please excuse the noise we made to get your attention.”
“I am Mukasa, the rajah’s elephant-keeper. I came here from Africa, at the rajah’s bidding, to care for his new animal, his lovely elephant. For many years in Africa I lived near elephants, and worked in a preserve where elephants were protected and cared for by the desire and command of our tribe and tribe’s leaders. I cared for them, fed them, treated them when they were sick.
“Because of these many years filled with experiences living and working with elephants every day, I now know much about them. Someday I hope to be able to say, ‘I really and truly know the elephant.’ But though I know much, I don’t really know elephants yet.
“I listened to each of you blind men describe your encounter with the rajah’s elephant, whose name, by the way, is Mitraganesh. We usually just say Mitra.” There was a pause, and the blind men heard someone, Mukasa, they thought, make a patting sound, like he was patting dust from his clothes. “Your descriptions were vivid, and made me think of my Mitra in new ways. But not a one of you described the elephant.
“You each described one bit, one piece of the whole, just one part of an incredible, complex, fascinating, living animal. No description of a single part tells us about the entire thing, all together. Could you describe a wheel, and thus know the bus? Can you hear the nightingale’s song, and by this think you know the nightingale? If you feel a snake’s bite, do you know the snake? When you open a door, do you somehow know the whole building?”
Mukasa strode over to the table and sat down. “Please, all of you, sit, and let us discuss the elephant.”
Staff of the soup kitchen assisted the blind men in righting the chairs that had toppled, and helped them to seats at the table. Then, with Sister Lillian gesturing to them to do so, they began pouring tea. A tray of little sweet cakes appeared. There was quiet talk amongst the blind men, and then, in a pause, the eldest of them stood.
“Because I’m older and either wiser or more gullible, or more tired and easily convinced, the others have asked me to speak for us blind men for a moment.
“We heard what our visitor, Mukasa, has told us, and we admit to embarrassment at having failed to recognize the errors we were making even as we made them. They are so obvious, but we apparently needed to relearn some old lessons. Maybe there are a few more, too, to be rediscovered. Let us talk about Mitra the elephant and what we can learn from our collected observations. Mukasa, if you would, please, can you explain how one of us, some old fool, I think it was, thought the elephant was like some sort of bellows?”
Mukasa laughed. “Certainly. First let us think about what your observations can tell us. That the elephant felt to you like a wall is not surprising to me, who could see that your hands were moving about along the huge chest, side, and flank of Mitra. He stood still while you felt him breathe. Because he is so large, his inhalations and exhalations are large, too. A big animal takes big breaths! Were I to take him to a blacksmith’s shop, he could probably take over the job of the bellows many times over. So what you described was not wrong. You know what it feels like to have your hands move with the chest of a breathing elephant. There are few who really know that.
“And where is the second man—ah, there you are. When you came to Mitra, you did not encounter something similar to what many animals have, but something more or less unique—an elephant’s trunk, which, to be fair, is a strange thing no matter how one considers it. So you had a challenge. What seemed to you like a very long arm or tentacle, like that of an octopus, is really, or at least basically, the elephant’s very long nose. An elephant’s nose looks like somebody grabbed it and pulled it out from the animal’s face, and kept pulling, and pulling. It’s very long—longer than the animal’s legs, longer than their body, even. And it’s as big around as my arm, and even bigger where it comes off the face, above the mouth, which is almost completely hidden underneath. The nose is filled with muscle, and very sensitive, too. With the tip of the trunk, an elephant can pick up a stick from the ground, grasp a clump of grass as we might with a hand, or feel for things along the ground, even where it cannot see. It’s also very strong—had Mitra wanted to, he could have lifted you up in the air with his trunk! An elephant’s trunk is so amazing that I don’t know how to compare it to anything else. But I suppose thinking of it as like a tentacle of an octopus is at least as good as anything else. Unlike octopus tentacles, however, an elephant has just the one trunk. The elephant uses it to eat, to move things about, carry things, and even to drink—an elephant will suck water up into its trunk, and then squirt it into its own mouth. And yes, that same elephant might squirt the water at you, too, if he or she is feeling frisky or naughty!”
And so it went. Mukasa helped the blind men understand how the parts of the elephant that they had encountered were all important, and in various ways often rare or unique features in the animal world. No other animal has ears like an elephant, for instance, and it’s not hard to imagine that those huge ears could work as wings—the blind men were amazed when Mukasa told them that some people had made a motion picture story for children about a flying elephant. A couple thought it had been a real thing, but Mukasa was quick to explain that the story was all made up, imagined, and little more than a cute story for children. They talked about elephant tusks, how they are ever-growing modified teeth that can protrude to prodigious lengths as the elephant grows and gets older. The blind men learned that the elephant, like the table at which they sat, has four legs, and that the legs are incredibly big and strong, and they must be, to support such a large animal—for elephants can weigh as much as a bus! And at the bottom of each leg is a large but amazingly sensitive foot. So sensitive that an elephant can actually hear through its feet! Then Mukasa was amazed when the blind men told him that they, too, could, in a fashion, hear through their feet. They could “hear” the low rumbles of trucks and traffic from the road, and music, too, can sometimes flow through the floor and into their feet. The blind men suggested he try it the next time he was in a nightclub, or in a temple with music, and he said he would. They talked about elephant tails and monkey tails and the tails of buffalo, gazelles, and even fish and crocodiles.
“I hope each one of you men understands that you have now, in your minds, what we might call a mental picture—a concept, I suppose we should say—of an elephant. And although we have shared many thoughts and observations about elephants, and learned much, each one of us, myself included, has his own concept of an elephant.”
“Yes,” said one of the blind men. “You’re saying that ‘truth is relative’, as my nieces and nephews like to remind me. Everyone has their own truth, it seems.”
“Well,” Mukasa said, “I prefer to say everyone has their own version of the truth, which can only differ so much from the concepts of others, because, after all, even though we all have our concepts of what the elephant named Mitra is like, it’s important to remember that there is such a thing as an elephant, and there is one named Mitra. We have difficulty understanding elephants in their entirety because they are complex, and they vary a bit from one individual to the next, and they live and grow and change and have families and fights and become sad and make up and we can never really know them completely. The same thing will be true for the next thing we encounter, whatever it might be.
“But for now, let us go outside, where we will encounter Mitra again, and you can all learn more about elephants. That noise at the beginning, to get your attention? That was Mitra. Here, let me have him do it again….”
The image makes me feel sad, too.
Elephants have always been my favorite animal, with all their complexities, intelligence, social structure and beauty. I mourn for those in captivity, but also for those persecuted in the wild. They are an irreplaceable gift of Nature.