The truth is something common, and that is why it is distinguished from personal opinion. That something is common doesn’t mean it is in plain view, or that it is easy to find. It merely denotes that it can be found by anyone who looks for it properly.
Does it mean that a personal opinion can’t be true? – Of course not. That something is a personal opinion doesn’t mean it is ipso facto[1] untrue. That would unwittingly make truth rest on something outside the person: an authority, ‘nature’, God. This would in turn presuppose an impotence of the person, an inability to find truth in his personal opinions and a need for an outside source to guarantee truth for him[2]. Personal opinions can be true. But they are true not in virtue of being said by a specific person, an institution, an expert or authority. The truths of physics are not true because they are said by a physicist. That would shift truth back to the idea of authority, that the truth is based on nothing more than personal opinion.
The desire to have your own thoughts, ideas etc. usually stems from the desire to be unique and to be recognized and most importantly praised as such. Thus it can be nothing more than an expression of narcissism, or if one wants to look deeper, an expression of an insecurity[3]. It can also be an expression of possessiveness. If something is taken from somewhere, it means it can be taken. But if I create it myself, from myself, then it is solely my possession and difficult, and ideally impossible, to steal. That is why narcissistic and possessive people tend not to acknowledge sources or influences for their ideas unless they know of the radical differences they have with them. Thus somebody who came up with a theory of the psyche which is remarkably similar to Freud’s, claims as an influence Aristotle, so as to simultaneously not appear ungrateful (parthenogenesis arouses suspicion) and original. This insecurity also leads scientists and intellectuals to remain intentionally blind to ways their own theories integrate with larger or better theories which belong to colleagues of their own or of some other department.
But knowledge is not like candy. If somebody does steal it, I still remain in possession of it. If I discover some new theory of light and a fellow physicist reads my notes, I do not, by such behavior, lose knowledge of my new theory. It is just that now both my colleague and I have ‘possession’ of this knowledge. The one’s possession of it doesn’t deprive it from the other. That is the wonder of knowledge – it is not depleted by being shared. What bothers a pioneer is not sharing his knowledge, but being deprived of the recognition of being the one who initially discovered it.[4]
However, that is not the only motivation behind the desire to think your own thoughts. To think your own thoughts is also an expression of our deep need to be free, and to be the agents of our freedom. To think our own thoughts, independent of all others is to assert that power within ourselves and affirm it. It is experiencing the power we have to be the savior of ourselves.
But truth is a relationship, and a relationship presupposes something outside oneself. Even the relationship we have with ourselves subtly demonstrates what Kant, Schopenhauer, the Buddha and others have been telling us for years. That in observing ourselves we realize that the observing self is distinguished from the observed self. Kant and Schopenhauer assumed that this shows that there is a self that resides apart from the phenomena of experience and makes experience possible. The Buddha[5], subtler, realized that this is an illusion. There is no ‘Self’ behind the multiplicity of phenomena[6]. Without the phenomena, without an observed self, there can be no observing ‘Self’. Our idea of self is as much dependent on the phenomena as they are on the self. That was his idea of ‘dependent arising’. And in that idea, he discovered that unity of ourselves with the world. A unity which is not merely in thought but can be experienced in meditation. Thus the Buddha was one among a few persons in history who solved the ancient riddle of how the Many are One and the One Many both in theory and in practice. That is why ultimately, the truth is One, because in realizing that we are many, and that we are not only the poles of the relationship but the relationship itself, we transcend duality, and transcend ourselves.
[1] Elegant Latin expression for the convoluted English equivalent of “by that very fact”.
[2] Incidentally, the role that God had in the philosophy of Descartes.
[3] For all narcissists are insecure. Otherwise they wouldn’t feel the need to receive excessive praise either from themselves or from others.
[4] This however, doesn’t cancel the observation we made as to the motive of possessiveness. The possessiveness of a person is not due to the nature of the possessions but due to the nature of one’s character. Thus if a ‘possession’ (like knowledge) is by its nature impossible to ‘steal’ in the conventional sense of deprivation, that doesn’t alter the character of the possessive person who is engaged with such ‘possessions’.
[5] And others like Nietzsche for instance.
[6] To be fair to Kant and Schopenhauer we must mention that both of them entertained the idea that ultimately, there is no ‘Self’, because in the noumenal realm the categories of the understanding like individuation and causation do not apply, thus it makes no sense of talking about ‘a’ Self. In that realm everything is unindividuated, uncaused etc. But how can we understand unindividuation if we don’t refer to individuation? That is the problem of the ineffable, but yet nevertheless graspable, and according to the mystical traditions, experientially confirmable.
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