Playing Around with a Summa

 I have always wanted to do a Summa Theologia myself. Here is how I would start it.

Question 1

Does it matter what we believe?

 

Objection 1. It would seem that it does not matter what we believe. For belief is an interior disposition, and what is inward harms no one. Therefore, one belief is as good as another, since beliefs belong to the realm of private opinion, not truth.

Objection 2. Furthermore, beliefs are shaped by upbringing, culture, and unconscious forces. Since no one chooses their beliefs freely, but inherits them from circumstance, it makes no sense to say that one belief matters more than another.

Objection 3. Furthermore, in a pluralistic world, asserting that some beliefs are true and others false is an act of intolerance. To treat all beliefs as equally valid is to respect difference; to rank them is to impose power. Therefore, it is better to say that what we believe does not matter, so long as we live peacefully.

 

On the contrary, history and daily life show that beliefs have immense consequences. People kill, die, forgive, resist, build, and destroy on account of what they believe. If beliefs did not matter, why would tyrants fear them, martyrs die for them, or laws be shaped by them?

 

I answer that it matters profoundly what we believe, because belief is not a neutral or private matter, but the root of action, perception, and love. Beliefs shape our sense of what is real, what is right, and what is worth living and dying for. To believe is to see, and to see is to act.

Consider: a woman who believes her unborn child is a person will refuse abortion, even at great cost; another, who believes the fetus is not yet a person, may end the pregnancy without moral conflict. A man who believes in divine judgment may restrain revenge, while one who believes in no higher law may see violence as his only justice.

Beliefs divide peoples and unite them. A patriot dies for his country; a Marxist betrays his nation for his class. A religious believer may endure suffering in hope; a nihilist may embrace despair or destruction. A Christian may forgive a murderer; another may demand death. Each person acts from what he believes to be real and ultimate.

Even ordinary choices are shaped by belief: the one who trusts medical science may take a vaccine and live; the one who believes in conspiracy may refuse and die. The teacher who believes education forms the soul will teach differently than one who believes it is for social advancement alone.

Beliefs do not merely decorate the mind; they govern the heart. They order our loves, our fears, our loyalties, and our sacrifices. To believe is to live a certain way, and to live is always to believe something.

 

To the first objection, it must be said: Though beliefs are inward, they bear outward fruit. No tree is judged by its roots alone, but by the fruit it bears. Private convictions shape public acts.

To the second objection, we reply: While beliefs are shaped by context, they are not entirely determined. Human beings are capable of self-reflection, of repentance, of recognizing truth beyond conditioning. That we are shaped by context does not mean we are prisoners of it.

To the third objection, it must be said: Tolerance is a social good, but not a substitute for truth. The claim that "all beliefs are equal" is itself a belief, one that shapes action and excludes others. Even the refusal to judge is a form of judgment. Thus, the postmodern view that beliefs do not matter proves itself false, for it too is a belief. And it, too, matters.

 

 

Question 2

Even granting that beliefs matter, can core beliefs be matters of truth and justification? Or are they all ultimately ungrounded in reality?

 

Objection 1. It seems that core beliefs cannot be justified or known to be true. For any attempt to justify them already presupposes other beliefs, often of the same kind. Therefore, such justification is circular, and no core belief can be known as objectively grounded.

 

Objection 2. Furthermore, there exists no neutral or universal standpoint from which to evaluate conflicting core beliefs. All reasoning takes place within a tradition, worldview, or linguistic framework. Thus, what counts as justification within one system may appear nonsensical from another. Therefore, claims to truth are bound to perspective and cannot rise above it.

 

Objection 3. Moreover, the history of belief shows constant conflict between systems (religions, ideologies, moral frameworks). If no common ground exists to resolve these disputes, it follows that all core beliefs are ultimately expressions of culture, temperament, or desire – not beliefs with a claim to truth.

 

On the contrary, if no core beliefs can be justified, then the belief that “no core beliefs can be justified” also lacks justification for it too rests on assumptions about truth, reason, and knowledge. Yet this belief presents itself as universally valid. Therefore, the position refutes itself by claiming what it denies to others.

 

I answer that core beliefs can be matters of truth and justification, though not in the sense of absolute proof from a position of neutrality. Rather, they are justified within the lived coherence of a worldview, a system of thought that makes sense of experience, resists contradiction, accounts for other positions, and sustains a vision of the good, the true, and the real.

 

It is true that no one argues from nowhere. All thinking begins within a horizon – a tradition, a language, a life-world. But this does not mean that all horizons are equal, or that no meaningful comparison is possible. A worldview may be more internally coherent, more life-giving, more open to correction, or more responsive to the full range of human experience than another. The absence of neutrality does not imply the absence of judgment. We may not stand outside all traditions, but we can reflect within and across them.

 

Moreover, even those who deny truth or justification act as though some things are more real, more right, or more grounded than others. The relativist condemns injustice; the worldview-skeptic trusts science; the deconstructionist defends meaning against violence. These too are core beliefs, lived out with conviction. If all is perspective, then so is that claim, which consequently loses its power to compel.

 

Therefore, while core beliefs are not justified like theorems in geometry, they can be tested in life, in dialogue, in history, in conscience. Some collapse under pressure. Others endure, illuminate, and transform. In this way, truth remains a goal, not a possession, which, however, just not make it a fiction.

 

To the first objection, we respond: Circularity is not always vicious. Foundational beliefs form the conditions of intelligibility. One must begin somewhere, but one can still reflect, compare, and reform. Justification does not require an infinite regress.

 

To the second, we reply: While no view is entirely neutral, some are more self-aware, more open to criticism, and more capable of understanding others without collapsing into relativism. The fusion of horizons is not impossible, though it is never complete.

 

To the third, we say: That beliefs have conflicted throughout history does not imply they are all groundless. Error is the shadow of truth-seeking. The existence of disagreement shows the seriousness of the questions, not their meaninglessness.   

 

 

Question 3

Question: Can we live with fallibilism about our core beliefs while still holding and acting on them with conviction?

 

Objection 1. It seems we cannot. For if we admit our core beliefs about morality, religion, or the nature of reality might be wrong, we undermine our right to act on them as if they were true. To proceed with conviction in the face of uncertainty is either self-deception or bad faith.

 

Objection 2. Furthermore, if we acknowledge that our deepest moral and metaphysical beliefs may be mistaken, then we must suspend judgment in all serious matters. But suspension paralyzes. To say “I could be wrong” is to say “I should hesitate.” And to hesitate in the face of evil or injustice is to become complicit.

 

Objection 3. Moreover, people do act with passionate certainty. The mother loves her child; the man forgives or fights; the martyr dies in faith. These are not acts born of fallibilism, but of unwavering conviction. To reinterpret them as provisional or revisable is to misrepresent the lived reality of belief.

 

On the contrary, the very fact that we continue to act, decide, and love under conditions of uncertainty shows that fallibilism is compatible with commitment. To be human is to act in hope without omniscience, to risk love without proof, and to affirm value without absolute certainty.

 

I answer that we must distinguish between epistemic fallibilism and existential conviction. Fallibilism holds that we might be mistaken even in our deepest beliefs. It is not that we lack reasons for holding them but that no human knowledge is immune to revision or deeper insight. Yet human life demands action, and action demands orientation. Therefore, we must live as if certain not because we are infallible, but because the alternative is to be paralyzed by doubt or cynicism.

 

This tension is resolved not by abandoning fallibilism, nor by feigning certainty, but by recognizing that core beliefs are often rooted in lived experience rather than philosophical argument. There are things we know with the clarity of the heart before we can prove them with the rigor of the mind. That murder is wrong, that love is good, that a child is more than a cluster of instincts: these are truths known in the doing, in the encounter, in the being with.

 

To say “I love my children” is not to posit a theory, but to live a truth, a truth intelligible only from within love. From this flows the conviction: my children are intelligible objects of love, not just organisms. This conviction is not held in spite of fallibilism, but through it: I know I might be wrong about many things, but not about this. And if I am, then the whole structure of life collapses. Thus, core experiences serve as anchors in the sea of fallibility and test our consciously held belief systems (religions, philosophies, etc.)

 

Certainty must not be confused with arrogance, nor fallibilism with nihilism. The wise person lives between the extremes: firm in what life and conscience disclose most clearly, yet humble before the mystery and limits of human knowing.

 

To the first objection, we say: Acting with conviction does not require claiming infallibility. One can act firmly while remaining open to correction. Ultimately, our certainty in an intellectually held belief system (e.g. Christianity) is the confidence that only it can ultimately explain what a person cannot sanely deny, e.g. things like loving children, being appalled over a murder or rape, etc.

 

To the second, we reply: Suspension of judgment in some areas is a virtue; in others, a vice. Where action is demanded as in cases of justice, mercy, or protection, one must act on the best light one has, guided by those experiences of life that go deepest. Fallibilism is no excuse for moral apathy.

 

To the third, we say: Yes, people often act with certainty. But this certainty arises not from logical infallibility, but from deep alignment with experience, conscience, and relational trust. It is a certainty born of love and meaning rather than epistemic absolutism. To reinterpret it with care is to understand it more truly.

 

 A Sketch of a Longer Project

 

Analogy and Open Concepts

    A good knife cuts well. A good teacher instructs with clarity and care. A good paper makes a clear argument. A good dive is clean, precise, and well executed. A good person acts justly, generously, and with integrity. A good meal is nourishing and satisfying. A good law promotes justice and order. In each case, the word "good" applies but it does not mean the same in every case; the meaning shifts when it is attributed to or predicated of different kinds of objects. A good knife is good as a tool. A good teacher is good as a guide and mentor. A good paper is good as a piece of student work. A good dive is good as a performance. A good person is good in character. A good meal is good as nourishment. A good law is good in its moral and civic function. The meaning of "good" changes. It stretches. It adjusts to the kind of thing being judged. The uses are analogical: they are different yet not completely different. There is an underlying core shared by all these diverse uses. Otherwise, the meaning of ‘good’ would be equivocal in the different cases, like ‘pride’ applied by a father to a son and ‘pride’ as referring to a family of lions.

     Another round of examples. A real diamond is made of carbon. A real friend stays with you in difficulty. A real answer addresses the question. A real city is more than a theme park. A real problem cannot be ignored. A real danger poses an actual threat. A real promise binds the one who makes it. In each case, "real" affirms something. But it affirms something different depending on the object. Words like "good" and "real" are not technical terms. They do not have a single, fixed meaning. Their meaning shifts across uses. This is not a flaw, as many logicians have understood it (giving rise to Nominalism, which recognizes only univocal and equivocal uses of words). This is just how language works. Language stretches because reality is itself many-layered and never absolutely apprehended, and so analogical stretch concepts are what allow us to express new insights.

   In contrast, technical terms in math and science have fixed meanings. A triangle has three sides. A square has four equal sides and four right angles. These meanings do not stretch. They are set by definition. Words like "good" are different. They are not closed. They are open. An open concept cannot be defined once and for all. Its meaning cannot be fixed in advance of all future uses. It grows with experience and reflection. The philosopher Morris Weitz called such terms open concepts. He used the example of art. He argued that art has no closed definition. Each new artwork can change our understanding of what art is. The same is true of most moral and philosophical terms.

  A further point. Jose Ortega y Gasset said that real language allows meaning to grow. A system of terms fixed in advance is not a real language; it is a pseudo-language since it cannot respond to life. He wrote:

A language is a system of verbal signs through which individuals may understand each other without a previous accord, while a terminology is only intelligible if the one who is writing or speaking and the one who is reading or listening have previously and individually come to an agreement as to the meaning of the signs.

The logic of open concepts or stretching makes this possible. For example, in my youth a necessary condition of marriage was that only a man and a woman could be married. This depended on a further concept, homosexual, defined as a sexual compulsion and perversion, i.e., by implication unfree and loveless. The experience of life pushed against this conception when it could no longer be denied that homosexuals were capable of love and commitment. Thus the concept of marriage stretched to include the possibility of same sex marriage for many people (not all). Or Joyce stretched the concept of a novel beyond its expression by Victorian writers. This to illustrate how a concept can deepen (or go inflate, depending on your view) in response to experience. If, however, my pre-conceptions are too existential for my life to be open to change, then I will rigidly deny the reality of any new experience that calls them into question. Ulysses is not a real novel; same sex marriage is not true marriage, etc. This attitude is antithetical to philosophy, and I think religion, though opinions differ on that.

  

Emerson on Metaphor

   Another related thought. Ralph Waldo Emerson said that poetry is “language used at full stretch”; that language is “fossilized poetry.” Words carry traces of metaphor, reaching beyond fixed use, stretching to disclose some aspect of the world. (Or failing to do so.) Emerson’s point is central to understanding how open concepts work. Language begins in metaphor. When we first encounter something strange or deep, we do not define it. We name it by comparison, by likeness. We call God a rock, a father, a light, a shepherd. We call time a thief, life a journey, grief a wound. These are not just poetic images. They disclose aspects of the things themselves (perhaps concealing other aspects). They give form to experience that is otherwise mute. Truth and meaning begin in this stretch. Metaphors give us access to layers of reality that literal language cannot hold. A metaphor is not merely subjective. It is a bridge. It connects what we know with what we do not yet know how to say. It shows what is real, but not yet conceptually mastered. “Poetically man dwells” is the title of an essay by Heidegger. The contrast would be man as a nominalist logician, assigning to each object an arbitrarily chosen sign.

     Granted, metaphors can also mislead. They can even become a cage. The conceptual metaphor "argument is war" shapes how we think. We speak of attacking, defending, shooting down. We treat disagreement as battle. This closes down inquiry. It encourages victory, not truth. If instead we think of argument as a journey or dialogue, we open space for mutual discovery. Other metaphors distort as well. "Time is money" makes us see time only as a resource, not as a gift. "The mind is a machine" reduces thought to output. "Nature is a machine" encourages exploitation. These metaphors shape experience. Like thoughts and emotional responses, metaphors can be true or false in a sense, more or less revealing or fitting to reality.  While metaphors can reduce as much as they reveal, good metaphors stretch language because reality stretches us.

    

 

Wittgenstein’s Family Resemblance Metaphor

     This connects to a related point in the philosophy of language. Ludwig Wittgenstein used the example of the word "game" to show how many ordinary concepts work. There is no single feature shared by all games. Instead, there is a network of overlapping similarities. He called this a family resemblance. The same holds for many value-laden words. Their meaning comes from patterns of use, not fixed criteria.

     Family resemblance helps us see the stretch. It draws attention to the way concepts evolve through use, shaped by patterns of life, by thinking and inquiry. This insight can be joined with the logic of analogy and metaphor. Concepts like "good," "true," or "real" can deepen over time, or grow shallow, depending on how they are used and how faithfully they respond to the structure of experience. When they deepen, they do not drift arbitrarily. They reveal new aspects of a core meaning. This is the measure of a good metaphor and meaningful stretch. These shifts in meaning emerge not from social convention alone, but from the effort to remain in touch with reality from the perspective of being-in-the-world.

    What seems right is that concepts can deepen (or become more shallow), based largely on the logic of analogy and metaphor, originating in forms of life but also thinking and inquiry, which while remaining rooted in a form of life is never bound to it (a point Wittgenstein does not stress enough). So I think there is connection between family resemblance and Emerson’s insight. And while I agree that concepts can not only stretch but break, even as the same word continues to be used (arguably as with ‘game’), as long as the concept doesn't break something of the core meaning is involved in all the shifts of meaning, though the shifts of meaning might reveal different aspects of the core meaning. And flowing from responses to reality, to 'being in the world.' Words like "good" or "true" can stretch because they are rooted in a common direction: they disclose something real.

      W. Norris Clarke (The One and the Many, 2001) emphasizes that the analogy is not merely a linguistic or conceptual tool but is rooted in the very structure of reality. Clarke argues that all finite beings participate in the act of existence (esse) in diverse ways, reflecting a shared but analogously manifested reality. This participation underscores a unity among beings, grounded in their existence, while also accounting for their diversity. Clarke writes: “Total diversities, with nothing whatsoever in common between them, are incomparable, in fact unthinkable.” Even amidst the vast diversity of beings, there is a foundational commonality rooted in their existence, which is understood analogically. This provides a bridge between concepts and the ontological structures they (always relatively deeply) make present.

     Thus Wittgenstein’s family resemblance thought uncovers the pattern. But the pattern needs a center. Without a core meaning, family resemblance collapses into Nominalism (words are only labels). We end up with a word used in many ways but referring to nothing stable. Nominalism denies any shared meaning (essence) behind different uses. It treats all differences as mere convention. But analogical concepts resist this as they point to a real unity in difference. They name what diverse realities share by participation in something more fundamental. "Good" and "true” and many key philosophical concepts retain a center of gravity. They apply across cases because reality shows itself like this. Our words reach to match it. That is why open concepts matter, however much logicians dislike them.

 

Quine’s Holism

     I would like to bring in Quine’s holism to further this line of thought. In “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, Quine argues that knowledge is not made up of individual propositions tested one by one. Instead, it forms a web of belief: central concepts (like logic, identity, causality) are more resistant to change; peripheral ones (particular empirical claims) are easier to revise. When faced with new experiences that challenge our beliefs, we can revise the web at many different points, not just the part in direct contact with the observation. His illustrative example: You could, if you wanted, treat Mount Olympus and its gods as real, if you were willing to make enough adjustments elsewhere in your system of belief. This explains how people can interpret the same data very differently, namely, because they have different conceptual frameworks into which the data is being integrated.

      Quine is making a radical epistemological point: there is no sharp boundary between analytic truths (true by definition) and synthetic truths (true by how the world is). All of our knowledge, including math, logic, science, metaphysics, is part of an interconnected web of belief. What holds it together for him is not direct contact with “pure data” – reality –  but coherence and pragmatic success. Therefore, if we receive a piece of sensory data (say, a thunderstorm over Mount Olympus), we don’t automatically reject or accept a belief (e.g., “Zeus hurled a lightning bolt”). Whether we accept that belief depends on how it fits into our broader conceptual system. So, Quine writes (paraphrased): You could preserve belief in the Greek gods, even treat them as real, if you are willing to make enough adjustments to your surrounding beliefs about physics, history, anthropology, etc. In other words, to treat Zeus as real today, you would have to reinterpret or reject large parts of modern science, meteorology, and historiography. There’s no one privileged place in the web of belief that is immune to revision, not even logic or math in extreme cases. So no belief is beyond revision; what matters is whether the revised system remains coherent and workable.

      I want to save an important insight here from the metaphysical implications Quine himself (not illogically) draws from it. I want to show how it illuminates conceptual deepening rather than mere adjustment. Where Quine focuses on substitution and readjustment to preserve coherence, the line of thought I am pursuing adds the dimension of deepening i.e., disclosure of reality. A web of belief is not just logically structured as it was for the nominalist Quine; it is also formed by metaphors, analogies, and core meanings that stretch across many domains. Shifts in meaning are not just defensive (to save the system), but sometimes truth-seeking, born of the desire to respond to new aspects of reality.

    Take the example of marriage: 'Is my friend married (a lesbian union)?' I say she is; my friend says she isn’t, because as an evangelical Christian for him a necessary condition for a union to be a marriage is that it be between a man and a woman. Homosexuality, moreover, is seen as disordered and contrary to nature, perhaps reflecting to depictions in Genesis (the Sodomites who wanted to rape the angels who appeared as men) or St. Paul’s negative response to Greek-pagan homosexual practices. Now here the truth depends on the meaning of marriage and homosexuality, and that meaning is only intelligible in a larger web of beliefs; both my friend and I would have to make major changes in our belief webs to change our position. Quine is not suggesting we should believe in Zeus. He’s showing that meaning and truth, logically, are system-dependent. You change the system, you change what is acceptable as real.

    Quine’s idea that all of what we take to be real or factual rests on conceptual assumptions that themselves are not factual or clearly real. So even the fact that we have two hands could be doubted if we are willing to doubt the reality of all our experience (perhaps we are brains in vats). The marriage example, the person I was thinking of would have to doubt assumptions – for him deep convictions – to change the view of marriage: that the Bible is the word of God; that it interprets itself; that homosexuality is a perversion according to the Bible. Since changing those deeper beliefs is not something he can consider, he holds on to the traditional concept of marriage even though it causes him to condemn a beloved niece. Another might feel condemning the niece would be wrong and thus force changes in their deeper web of beliefs: one can agree that homosexuality can be love-less and pornographic (as can heterosexual sex!): the Bible instances portray it as such (desiring to rape the angel in Sodom!). Thus one can condemn rapacious or love-less (unnatural) sex while acknowledging the fact that homosexuals are also natural (exist in every culture) and are capable of love and commitment – I know of such cases. While homosexual marriage might not be the paradigm, it is still a form of marriage as long as it is based on erotic love (which is different from friendship-love but no less love) and life-long commitment. Like the paradigm apples are red, but yellow apples are still apples.

       Hence, some Christians can embrace homosexual marriage by feeling forced to adjust their understanding of homosexuality and the Biblical references. Quine, I believe, just cares about what is logically possible. I feel the change of marriage to include the possibility of love between homosexual people reflects a deepening of the concept that has come from a confrontation with reality – like my friend’s marriage and the pain of demeaning it.  In Quine’s terms, we can either reject revealing experience by hardening our conceptual web – homosexuals can’t love or marry because that would contradict my preconception or tradition’s preconception; or respond in this case as my deeper moral beliefs tell me to – with generosity – and adjust ideas in my conceptual web that were not so much wrong as too narrow. And not just pragmatically to maintain coherence but because the adjustment corresponds to reality.

      In this way, the concept has stretched, not by abandoning its core, though the core meaning did shift i.e., it stretched by reexamining what the core truly is based on a challenge on the surface. This shift does not necessarily represent a break with tradition but can be interpreted as a deepening of the tradition. Instead of defining marriage by gender roles or reproductive potential, some argue we are now seeing more clearly that marriage is about covenantal union, faithful presence, and the shared journey of life. This reinterpretation can be viewed as an analogical extension of the original meaning, a recognition that the inner essence of marriage (relational fidelity, mutual gift, moral seriousness) may take forms that were once culturally invisible. The concept of marriage remains meaningful because it is tethered to a lived center. The metaphor of marriage (as union, as bond, as promise) remains intact. But it opens up, disclosing new possibilities that are coherent with its inner structure. This also demonstrates the difference between arbitrary redefinition and analogical development. The former severs a term from its roots. The latter allows the term to respond faithfully to deeper insight into the nature of love, personhood, and relational dignity. This process is also arguable, which seems to be part of it.

     Another example. Jesus’ transformation of the Old Testament picture of God. Jesus doesn’t reject the God of Abraham but reveals the deeper heart of that God as revealed in the Beatitudes, the story of the woman caught in adultery, the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son, the call from the cross to forgive the tormenters: “Be merciful, as your Father in heaven is merciful.” The web stretches but does not break because the reinterpretation is truth-directed, analogically continuous, and tied to lived experience (healing, forgiveness, love of enemies).

   Where Quine sees belief revision as a pragmatic exercise in preserving coherence under the pressure of experience, the line of thought I am developing enriches this with a more ontologically responsive logic. Reinterpretation is not just functional; it can be morally and existentially truer. The “web” stretches not just for consistency, but for fidelity to Being, in the Emersonian and Thomistic sense. Quine's web of belief is the form; the train of thought I am developing – of analogical truth and open concepts – is the content that fills and reorients the form toward a fuller encounter with reality. Quine’s holism explains how conceptual shifts are possible without the collapse of meaning. The approach I am exploring explains why some conceptual shifts are better: namely, because they deepen our grasp of what is real, through analogy, metaphor, and lived contact with truth. Quine provides a map of how we navigate conceptual change. I would offer a deeper account of why we do it and what it means to do it well.

 

The Hermeneutic Circle

     Understanding unfolds in lived experience. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s emphasis on the role of 'Vor-urteile' (prejudgments) and 'foregrounding' in interpretation aligns closely with Quine’s idea of holism. For Gadamer, we never approach a text or event neutrally; we always bring our prior understandings, expectations, and historical situatedness – how could it be otherwise? These do not necessarily distort our view, though they can; in any case, they make understanding possible. They are like tickets to admission. Similarly, Quine’s insight that no belief is tested in isolation, but always within a larger web of beliefs, reinforces the idea that our interpretive framework is holistic and shaped by inherited and situated knowledge.

      The hermeneutic circle refers to the way we come to understand meaning: we interpret the parts in light of the whole, and the whole in light of the parts, as the marriage example above illustrates. This is not a flaw in our knowing but a necessary expression of our finitude. As Quine’s holism explains, our beliefs and concepts are interwoven, shaped not by isolated observations but by our whole conceptual web. Wittgenstein, too, though cautious about metaphysics, recognized that meaning arises in the flow of life, in patterns of use – what he called family resemblance. But as we’ve argued, this resemblance is not merely pragmatic. It is analogical: at its best, rooted in a shared orientation toward reality

   When we say that words like “good,” “true,” or “real” stretch but do not break, we affirm that something like a core meaning (Emerson might say a poetic insight) is being deepened across time and context. Analogy becomes the very medium through which being reveals itself. In this light, the hermeneutic circle is a dynamic, living movement in which truth does not float free of experience but emerges through the interplay of person and world, tradition and insight, perception and reformulation. In all meaningful human matters – texts, relationships, art, ethics, education, politics – we do not approach things as neutral observers but as engaged interpreters, already shaped by our biography, relationships, genes, language, history, social-and-economic structures,  technology, and much more. Just try to get out of yourself and read a poem or think about a problem of justice as though you were not the one reading or thinking! That doesn’t mean, however, we are imprisoned in our subjectivity – as though our minds were enclosed in a submarine with no window onto the sea but only instrument panels with no way to compare our readings with the reality of the sea itself. It does mean that truth in this realm discloses itself (never absolutely) through dialogue, through a back-and-forth movement between self and world, self and others, present and past, known and unknown, inner life and outer form. This, far from being a flaw that cuts us off reality ala certain political movements and cults, is the necessary structure of all understanding that involves understanding.

    The kind of reality being disclosed is not brute fact but meaningful being: a poem, a gesture of love, a law, a musical phrase, a moral act, political justice or injustice. These realities do not show themselves automatically to everyone, like the weather; they must be received, interpreted, understood. And such understanding requires the active participation of each of us: our attention, thinking, honesty, memory, and sometimes suffering. It matters who we are, what character we have, what our educational and social-cultural background is, and what we care about. In this sense, Heidegger wrote: “Die Wissenschaft denkt nicht” (science does not think). Which is precisely why it is attractive to many: it seems to promise a path to knowledge that doesn’t ask anything of our inner lives, no risk, no transformation, no self-involvement. It also puts our “subjective” inner lives beyond thought and thus possible criticism. The appeal of applying science to the realm of meaning. But in matters of meaning – education, art, justice, love, vocation – that path is closed. You cannot outsource your thinking to a machine, a formula, or an algorithm.

 

Seeing from Within and Without: Truth and the Hermeneutic Circle

    The hermeneutic circle pictures how meaning discloses itself to finite, embodied beings. Whether reading a text, interpreting a historical event, or trying to understand another person, no human being ever comes to these things presuppositionless. We necessarily come with a background, a history, a set of assumptions. But the goal is not to remain inside our perspective; it is to work through it, to be corrected and deepened by the reality we engage.

     In “Meditation in a Toolshed,” C. S. Lewis distinguishes between two ways of knowing: “looking at” something versus “looking along” it. He illustrates this with a simple image: standing in a dark toolshed, he sees a beam of sunlight entering through a crack. When he looks at the beam, he sees dust motes lit up by the sun. But when he steps into the light and looks along the beam, he sees the world outside, leaves and the sun itself. The same beam yields two entirely different kinds of vision. This becomes a metaphor for how we can either analyze an experience from the outside or enter into it and see the world through it.

    Lewis challenges the common assumption that only “looking at” something gives true knowledge. For example, a scientist might describe love merely as a mix of neurochemicals like dopamine and oxytocin, or faith as an evolutionary adaptation. That kind of explanation might be useful, but it does not capture what love or faith mean to the person who is in love or who believes. When we look along love, we encounter its depth — sacrifice, longing, joy. When we look along faith, we may see a moral vision or sense of presence that cannot be reduced to neurons firing. A pathologist cannot tell us much about how to think well about death. An obstetrician not much about how to understand new life. Lewis’s point is not to reject analysis, but to insist that inner experience, too, can reveal truth. To deny this kind of knowledge just because it is personal or experiential is to blind ourselves to what may be most real.

     Thus Lewis argues that while objective, detached analysis has its place, it cannot be the only path to truth. Some things can only be known by stepping into them. If we insist on standing outside every experience, explaining everything away, we may miss the very reality those experiences are trying to reveal. Just as we cannot understand sunlight only by watching it illuminate dust in the dark, so too we cannot understand love, beauty, or faith without ever daring to look along their beams.

     Lewis is equally clear that looking along is not infallible. He gives the example of a person who sincerely believes a rain dance causes rain, based on their cultural experience. They are looking along the practice but what they see is not necessarily true. This shows us something important: both the inside and the outside views are fallible. You can be wrong from within: for example, being deluded by emotion, tradition, ego. And you can be wrong from without: missing the meaning of what you observe by standing too far away, treating people as objects or symptoms.

    C. S. Lewis’s distinction between “looking at” and “looking along” an experience closely parallels Hans-Georg Gadamer’s understanding of interpretation and the hermeneutic circle. Gadamer, as stated, argues that understanding is not a matter of standing outside a text, tradition, or experience to analyze it “objectively,” but of entering into it from within one’s own historical and personal context. He emphasizes that all understanding is shaped by our prejudices (Vorurteile) – not irrational biases, but the pre-judgments that make understanding possible in the first place. Gadamer’s notion of the hermeneutic circle is another way to capture Lewis’s idea that the full meaning of an experience only becomes visible when we inhabit it. Just as stepping into the beam opens up a larger world beyond the shed, so entering into dialogue with a text or tradition reveals deeper meaning than analysis alone can provide. In both views, meaning is not something we extract by standing above or outside an experience, but something we uncover by participating in it. Lewis and Gadamer thus converge in rejecting a purely reductive, external view of truth: they insist that true understanding often requires a kind of involvement, a fusion between observer and subject, that opens up a world richer than detached observation alone can grasp.

 

Thomas Weiskel and the Sublime

    I want to draw on a further source: Thomas Weiskel’s treatment of the sublime. In the first stage of Weiskel’s sublime, one begins with a stable network of assumptions: marriage is understood as a lifelong union between a man and a woman, often oriented toward procreation. This belief is embedded in a wider conceptual web (Quine) and supported by inherited Vor-urteile (Gadamer) – prejudgments shaped by religious, social, and legal traditions. But then comes the confrontation with lived experience: the person one loves and trusts most – say, one’s niece – marries someone of the same sex. This personal reality challenges the existing framework, and the old concepts no longer explain or accommodate the full moral and emotional depth of what is now encountered. Weiskel’s second stage – the crisis of meaning – sets in. The conceptual web strains; the prejudgments reveal their limits. One either rejects the experience or allows it to reshape the larger pattern. Quine would describe this as a revision of the web: not just substituting one belief, but adjusting the relationships among many beliefs (about love, dignity, fidelity, moral normativity). Gadamer would speak of a fusion of horizons: a willingness to listen, to let the reality of this person and this union address and transform the interpreter’s world. In Weiskel’s third stage, metaphor and meaning are reestablished on a deeper level: marriage is not abandoned, but re-seen, now grounded more explicitly in covenantal fidelity and personal union. A new, more adequate concept arises, neither a mere innovation nor a rupture, but an analogical deepening, integrating what was once excluded. Of course, as in the case of my friend, the surface challenge may be rejected to preserve the conceptual web or to keep the circle closed – at the risk of closing off important realities.

     Another example. I am thinking of something Frodo said in Lothlórien in the Lord of the Rings (Book II/Chapter 6):

As Frodo prepared to follow him, he laid his hand on the tree. Never before had he been so keenly aware of the life within it. He felt the delight of the wood and the touch of it neither as forester nor as carpenter. It was the life of the living tree itself.

This encounter with the tree in Lothlórien follows a similar structure. He begins with ordinary categories – trees as resources, as part of the forest world known to foresters and carpenters. These function like Quine’s peripheral beliefs or Gadamer’s fore-structures of understanding: implicit assumptions through which the world is routinely interpreted. But when Frodo lays his hand on the tree and becomes vividly aware of its life – its own being, not merely its use – he is drawn into what Weiskel calls stage two of the sublime: a moment of epistemic rupture, where the existing categories fall silent. The experience is real, affectively powerful, and yet conceptually disorienting. The tree is no longer just an object in the world; it becomes a presence, a sign of life that resists reduction. According to Quine, the web of belief must now be restructured to make room for this new data, not by denying it, but by adjusting deeper assumptions about what it means to be alive, to perceive, to relate to non-human life. Gadamer would see this as a moment when the text of the world – the tree in this case – “reads” the interpreter, and a fusion of horizons becomes possible. Frodo, in ceasing to treat the tree instrumentally, opens himself to a different kind of relation: not of mastery but of attunement. In Weiskel’s third stage, this new relation is stabilized through metaphor and feeling: the tree becomes a symbol of the life of the world, of silent and irreducible being. It is not merely a change of mood but a transformation in understanding, a reorientation of both language and perception. The conceptual web expands. The hermeneutic circle widens. The tree is now not just seen but known, not just understood but received. (A capitalist, of course, could maintain his belief in a meaningless nature by reinterpreting the experience as sentimental.) Each deepening of conceptual understanding requires a disruptive experience that calls everyday understandings into question, and is resolved with a fresh (analogical, metaphoric) reconstitution of the concept at a deeper level – unless one is shut off from the sublime.

 

Works Cited

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays and Lectures. Edited by Joel Porte, Library of America, 1983.
(See “The Poet” for the quote on poetry as “language at full stretch.”)

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik. 6th ed., Mohr Siebeck, 1990.

Heidegger, Martin. Was heißt Denken? Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1954.

Lewis, C. S. “Meditation in a Toolshed.” God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, edited by Walter Hooper, Eerdmans, 1970, pp. 212–215.

Norris, W. Clark. The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics. Marquette University Press, 2006.

Ortega y Gasset, José. The Misery and the Splendor of Translation. Translated by Elizabeth Gamble Miller, University of Illinois Press, 2000.

Quine, W. V. O. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” Classics of Analytic Philosophy, edited by Robert R. Ammerman, Hackett Publishing Company, 1990, pp. 309–328.

Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. 

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophische Untersuchungen / Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte, 3rd ed., 50th Anniversary Commemorative Edition, Wiley–Blackwell, 2001.

 A paper for my students

Truth Beyond Science: Why Moral, Aesthetic, and Human Questions Are Still About Truth

  

    For historical reasons too complex to go into now, many people today have grown up believing that if something can’t be measured, tested, or repeated in a lab, it isn’t really “true.” It’s just “subjective,” meaning a matter of personal taste or emotions; that it's just in our heads, that it says nothing about the world but only ourselves. So there is no point in trying to inquire about such matters (apart from doing a psychoanalysis of the person). According to this view, only mathematical, scientific, or empirical knowledge gives us access to truth. Everything else – the whole human realm of meaning, the entire inner, subjective life – is reduced to private feeling, cultural bias, or personal taste. If something cannot be tested in a lab, measured, or put in data form in a “study,” it seems to them like “just opinion.” This view has a name: logical positivism. And my claim is that it’s false, not just wrong, but deeply self-limiting; it cuts us off from understanding some of the most important human truths.

 

Some Truths Are Not Measurable, But Still Real

·         You know that friendship is better than betrayal. You usually know when someone is a true friend.

·         You may recognize that Beethoven’s 9th Symphony expresses something noble.

·         You understand that children should be loved and protected, not manipulated or used.

·         You feel that a good teacher awakens something in you, not just transfers information.

·         Loyalty to friends or family is a virtue (all things being equal), betrayal a violation of an important relationship.

None of these truths can be weighed, timed, or photographed. But that doesn’t make them “just subjective” without a relation to the real world.

 

Category Mistakes

To deny the claim, for example, that in some circumstances music significantly contributes to a young person’s character and personality because it lacks empirical support is a category mistake: it is like criticizing a painting for not sounding right, or a song for not being logically valid. Science answers some kinds of questions very well. But not all kinds.

 a. Science vs. Moral Understanding

    Science can tell you how the brain reacts to pornography. Science cannot tell you whether pornography reduces human beings to something utterly unlovable and degrades the joy and beauty of sex.  That requires moral reasoning and insight, not brain scans.

 b. Science vs. Art and Meaning

      Science can measure the frequencies of music, the activity in the brain when music plays. Science cannot explain why a piece of music moves you to tears, lifts your spirit, or shapes your view of the world. Physics can analyze the sound waves but is deaf to the music that emerges from them. That is the work of aesthetic judgment and our lives with music.

 c. Science vs. Vocation and Authority

      Science can study behavior in the workplace or analyze communication patterns. Science cannot tell you what it means to be called to a vocation, or what makes someone a true teacher or authority. Those are philosophical and spiritual questions, not biological ones.

 d. Science vs. Fairy Tales and Imagination

     Science can help analyze how children respond cognitively to stories. Science cannot evaluate whether a fairy tale teaches courage, hope, or moral clarity. That insight comes from literary understanding and moral imagination, not data analysis.

 e. Science vs. Virtue and Pedagogy

    Science can give data about classroom performance. Science cannot answer what kind of education makes a human being good, just, or wise. That is the domain of ethics and philosophy, not psychology.

 f. Science vs. musical Erziehung

     Science can study the effects of music on stress levels. Science cannot tell you how music helps form character, trains the emotions, or opens the heart to what is noble and loving. These are questions of human nature and virtue, not mechanics.

       Treating all questions as either questions for science or sentimental mush doesn’t account for how we do thinking about non-scientific questions because it assumes only one kind of knowledge counts – the measurable or coldly observable kind. But we don’t live our lives that way. We fall in love, admire greatness, tell stories, sing songs, suffer loss, choose right over wrong, and not according to the data but by judgment, emotion, our communities (if any), and reflecting (sometimes critically) on our experience. If someone who is confronted with the claims in any of the articles of this course says, “But where is the scientific proof?” they’re asking the wrong kind of question. It's like looking for the meaning of a novel by measuring the ink on the page. You’ll miss everything that matters.

 

Studies

  Many students feel compelled to cite allegedly empirical studies as evident for a non-empirical thesis, studies often wholly driven by narrow conceptualizations of the key term such that the 'empirical results' were predetermined by the stipulated, narrow definition of the term – analogous to defining swans as white birds, and then failing to count the black swans as swans because they don't fit the stipulated definition? This problem of empirical research being shaped and limited by a narrow, pre-set definition can be found in many studies of “effective teaching” or “student achievement” in modern education research. Here is a paradigm example (constructed to illustrate).

 

Measuring Teacher Effectiveness by Standardized Test Scores

 The Setup:

An empirical study aims to identify “what makes a good teacher.” The researchers define a “good teacher” as one whose students show significant gains on standardized tests over the course of the year. They then collect data, track test score improvements, and conclude that teachers who use certain methods (e.g., more test-prep strategies, structured practice, time-on-task routines) are “more effective.”

 The Problem:

This study seems scientific. It involves data, control groups, and measurable outcomes. But it’s conceptually circular. The researchers have already decided what counts as “good teaching”: raising test scores. So the only teachers who will be considered “good” are those who do the things that raise test scores. That’s like defining swans as “white birds,” and then reporting the discovery that all swans are white because your definition excluded black swans from the start.

    The study fails to recognize other crucial aspects of good teaching that don’t show up on standardized tests, such as: 

·         Helping students grow in curiosity, moral courage, or love of learning

·         Creating a classroom environment that fosters respect, dialogue, or self-discipline

·         Encouraging long-term habits of thinking that won’t appear in short-term test gains

·         Teaching subjects (like art, music, or ethics) that don’t have standardized tests

 A teacher who enlarges a student’s vision of life might be labeled ineffective in this model simply because test scores didn’t rise enough. Only what is quantifiable and can thus be measured is allowed to count as a criterion to avoid having to bring oneself into the judgment.

  

Truth in the Realm of Meaning and Value

  In science, a statement is true if it matches the observable world: ‘E=MC²’ or ‘Water boils at 100ºC at sea level’ or ‘Your glucose level is 7.2 mmol/L.’ But in the moral, aesthetic, and human world – the realm of meaning – the meaning of truth shifts meaning without ceasing to be truth. While all truth is, as Aristotle said, ‘the saying of what is that it is,’ the kind of thing being judged shapes how truth appears to us. When an educator says certain stories form character and others distort it, they’re not expressing a mood they happen to have; they are rather making a judgment about human development. When we say a teacher is truly a good teacher or a paper is a good paper, we’re talking about real differences between them and not-so-good ones. These judgments are not just "my opinion." They are part of a tradition of shared human reasoning, of trial and error, of poetic and philosophical exploration that seeks the real just as science does, but by different methods.

    There are applications of the concept of ‘truth’ other than empirical (observationally verifiable) or mathematical truth:

 a. A Reading of Hamlet

    Unlike mathematical truths (which are fixed and closed), a great literary work like Hamlet is open, ambiguous, and layered. There can be more than one true interpretation, because the play itself presents human experience in tension, not formula. Thus truth here involves understanding and insight. Just like translations of the work, some readings are deeper or more faithful than others. But multiple true readings may coexist. Here true means: “that make good sense of the play”; “that show true insight into the play.”

 b. Explanation of a Child’s Poor School Performance

  As we know, human behavior has multiple causes: physical, emotional, relational, cultural, economic, etc. There may be several plausible and partially true explanations, unlike a single numerical result. Thus truth here is situational, practical, and often revealed through care and observation, not statistics alone. Intellectual caution (humility) is often called for given the enormous complexity of the reality involved.

 c. Judgment About the Character of the President

   Character is not a number. It is shown over time, in patterns of words and actions. Judgments about it are truth-claims, but they are evaluative, not measurable. Thus truth in this realm must be reasoned and supported by evidence, but it cannot be reduced to data. It requires practical wisdom, not just calculation or cold observation.

 d. Judgment That a Prelude by Bach Is Movingly Beautiful

    Beauty is a complex judgment. The judgment’s claim to truth lies in the fittingness of form and feeling, and in how a good listener responds to the music’s structure and spirit. (Some listeners are deaf to certain kinds of music. I suppose we are all deaf to one kind of music or another.) Thus beauty’s truth is perceived, recognized, and deepened by tradition, not measured, not an observable fact.

 e. Conviction That Your Child Is Lovable and Deserves Care

    This is not a provable empirical fact but a moral truth grounded in the nature of persons and the reality of love. Hence, to affirm this is to speak a truth about being, about the worth of persons, and the demands of love. It is a truth known through relationship, conscience, and reason rather than coldly observable states of affairs or quantities. In all these cases and many more, truth is still the ‘saying of what is’ – the adequacy of the thought to the world. But there is not just one kind of reality in the world, namely, that kind that can be quantified or coldly observed. And about some kinds of reality, we can be more certain than others. These differences do not make moral or artistic truths vague or relative (in an absolute sense); they make them suited to the kind of reality they reveal.

 

What the Positivists Missed

     The logical positivists said that moral and aesthetic claims are meaningless because they aren’t empirically verifiable. But this is like saying compassion is meaningless or unreal because you can’t put it under a microscope. The pathologist can’t help us think well about our mortality. The truth is: the most meaningful parts of life demand interpretation, judgment, reflection, etc., and not just measurement or neutral observation. Their truth isn’t mathematical or scientific. Such things are known through living, through practice, through art and story and conversation. Imagine we were incapable of really learning anything about parenting, education, ethics, a work of art, politics, history, religion except what was compatible with the science at any given moment. Everything that gives life meaning and depth would be just subjective mush in the end. That is a kind of thought-suicide.

     To say that matters of justice, pedagogy, good ways to live, the understanding of great art (including what great art is) are about truth is not to say they are scientific. It is to say, with all due respect for science: that truth is bigger than science; reality is bigger than what discloses itself to science. In our experience of love or beauty, moral repulsion or compassion – the list could go on for some time – we transcend the picture of the universe according to science. We have two choices: 1) to concede that our experience of meaning is part of nature; is real; that, therefore, meaning is a part of reality, or 2) reduce our subjective lives to illusions, as though Nature were like AI from the movie The Matrix and has pulled down an illusory world over our eyes to promote its blind purposes (reproduction of the species or whatever). True, you can’t prove either one since we can’t leap out of our experience of the world to compare it to the world unexperienced. But option 2 seems a form of insanity.

 

The Fear of the Personal

      It is a central challenge for thoughtful students today: to understand that truth in the realm of meaning cannot be known apart from the personal, and that this does not make it subjective in the sense of arbitrary or irrational. It means only that the subject – the person, you – is/are a part of the process of understanding, as the so-called hermeneutic circle makes clear.

     The hermeneutic circle refers to the way we come to understand meaning: we interpret the parts in light of the whole, and the whole in light of the parts. In all meaningful human matters – texts, relationships, art, ethics, education, politics – we do not approach things as neutral observers but as engaged interpreters, already shaped by our biography, relationships, genes, language, history, social-and-economic structures, uses of technology, and much more. Just try to get out of yourself and read a poem or think about a problem of justice as though you were not the one reading or thinking! That doesn’t mean, however, we are imprisoned in our subjectivity – as though our minds were enclosed in a submarine with no window onto the sea but only instrument panels with no way to compare our readings with the reality of the sea itself.  It does mean that truth in this realm discloses itself (never absolutely) through dialogue, through a back-and-forth movement between self and world, self and others, present and past, known and unknown, inner life and outer form. This, far from being a flaw that cuts us off reality ala certain political movements and cults, is the necessary structure of all understanding that involves understanding.

    The kind of reality being disclosed is not brute fact but meaningful being: a poem, a gesture of love, a law, a musical phrase, a moral act, political justice or injustice. These realities do not show themselves automatically to everyone, like the weather; they must be received, interpreted, understood. And such understanding requires the active participation of each of us: our attention, thinking, honesty, memory, and sometimes suffering. It matters who we are, what character we have, what our educational and social-cultural background is, and what we care about. In this sense, a philosopher wrote: “Die Wissenschaft denkt nicht” (science does not think). Which is precisely why it is attractive to many: it seems to promise a path to knowledge that doesn’t ask anything of our inner lives, no risk, no transformation, no self-involvement. It also puts our “subjective” inner lives beyond thought and thus possible criticism. The appeal of applying science to the realm of meaning. But in matters of meaning – education, art, justice, love, vocation – that path is closed. You cannot outsource your thinking to a machine, a formula, or an algorithm.

 

Hermeneutic Reason vs. Positivism and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion

     Hermeneutic reason, which is reason at it deepest, what we use when we think about metaphysics, religion, morals, and art,  accepts that we are beings who come to relative truth through interpretation, and that our task is not to eliminate ourselves from the process, but to purify and discipline our involvement through dialogue, inquiry, study, and attention to the particular. This kind of reason listens, waits, and works to see more deeply. In stark contrast, positivist science seeks to eliminate interpretation, to reduce all knowledge to what can be measured or controlled. It does not ask what a thing means, only how it works or what it is composed of. When applied to the human world, this becomes reductive: it cannot grasp moral depth, beauty, or vocation because these are not causes, but meanings.

    The hermeneutics of suspicion (found in Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault, etc.) begins by questioning appearances and asking what hidden interests or power structures lie behind them. This is often valuable. It can uncover forms of self-deception, manipulation, or hypocrisy. In my life I have recognized all these hidden interests in my thinking at one time or another, and no doubt I have not cut every puppet string. (That’s why we need others.) But when applied absolutely, it becomes another form of positivism: it denies that any expression of human meaning can be true on its face. Every claim is reduced to something behind it, whether economic motive, repression, or will-to-power. The result is a world like The Matrix, in which all experience is assumed to be a simulation or ideological trick, and the only true knowledge is unmasking the lie. But if everything is a lie, then nothing is true. And people are left alienated, cynical, and epistemologically paralyzed.

   Any philosophical “theory” taken as absolute is self-refuting. Logical-positivism claimed all meaningful statements must be verifiable or true by definition (in many more complex variations) – a statement that is meaningless on its own criterion as it is neither empirically verifiable nor true by definition. A theory that claims all truth claims are masks for a will-to-power falsifies itself as it too must be an expression of the will-to-power of its author and thus is not binding on anyone. Any theory that imagines it can step outside the hermeneutic circle to judge all experience from outside it, judging the whole of our subjective inner lives to be illusory, to deny any access to the real world, refutes itself. It is like taking an approach that has validity in a limited area and making it absolute to apply to the whole of the life of the mind. And then making reality as it appears in that limited perspective, the absolute interpretation of reality. That’s a fallacy.

 

Conclusion

   The hermeneutic circle, rightly understood, is not a trap but a path: it shows that we are not machines recording data, but persons called to understand and to be transformed by what we learn in the process. In the realm of meaning, truth is disclosed in and through personal and especially inter-personal engagement, and only those who dare to interpret honestly, patiently, and with reverence for the real can hope to see what we can see of what is.

 GL