Monday, August 20, 2018

Truth IS Truth

Rudy Giuliani, in defense of Trump has claimed that for Trump to testify before the Mueller investigation would be for him to enter a "perjury trap." You can only be caught in a lie if you've been lying. But Giuliani claims further that "the truth is not the truth." What that means, only his kind of lawyer might pretend to know.

Plato, a seeker of truth, had said in his Divine Dialogs:
"...the simplest and purest way of examining things, is to pursue every particular by thought alone, without offering to support our meditation by seeing or backing our reasonings by any other corporal sense."
Perhaps with that in mind Giuliani (and Trump) can  just make things up and call them truth so as to create an alternative universe of mis-shapen reality. If enough folks can be convinced we will have completely lost our way as a nation of truth, of facts and of laws. 

To Plato and Giuliani, I offer William James' rejoinder: "Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late." – William James.

Today in the wood shop at Clear Spring School we will begin fall in service training with a study of Kindergarten and making Froebel's gifts.

The following is from Charles H. Hamm.
It is easy to juggle with words, to argue in a circle, to make the worse appear the better reason, and to reach false conclusions which wear a plausible aspect. But it is not so with things. If the cylinder is not tight, the steam engine is a lifeless mass of iron of no value whatever. A flaw in the wheel of the locomotive wrecks the train. Through a defective flue in the chimney the house is set on fire. A lie in the concrete is always hideous; like murder, it will out. Hence it is that the mind is liable to fall into grave errors until it is fortified by the wise counsel of the practical hand.
The human hand is constantly seeking the truth and finding it. By leaving laboratory science and wood shop and the arts outside of education, we have diminished our children in both character and intellect, and sacrificed our human culture on the altar of foolishness and stupidity. For some reason Giuliani seems to have missed one of the essential lessons to be found in wood shop. Truth is truth.

Make, fix, create and offer to others inspiration for learning likewise...

No comments:

Post a Comment