The Truth of Ourselves

Wittgenstein's brilliant student, Elizabeth Anscombe, on what we can learn about practical truth from Aristotle

The Truth of Ourselves

“Can it be that there is something that modern philosophy has blankly misunderstood: namely what ancient and medieval philosophers meant by practical knowledge? Certainly in modern philosophy we have an incorrigibly contemplative conception of knowledge. Knowledge must be something that is judged as such by being in accordance with the facts. The facts, reality, are prior and dictate what is to be said, if it is knowledge. And this is the explanation of the utter darkness in which we found ourselves.” - G. E. M. Anscombe, 1957

What do we lose when we treat ‘truth’ as a matter of matching up our statements to the observable facts of reality? This is where we get the ideal of ‘information’ as a carrier of truth, and in so doing miss how thin and inadequate this way of thinking must necessarily be in practice. What’s especially disastrous about this approach is not its method, which by itself might contribute to our collective understanding (even if it has tended to show the precise opposite). Rather, when we treat truth as an attempt to mine facts out of the inscrutable rockface of reality, we remove any role for truth in our own lives, except through our deranged passion for claiming that ‘we know’ and others ‘merely believe’. We thus lose sight of the truth of ourselves, and this is the essence of Elizabeth Anscombe’s criticism.

Anscombe was Ludwig Wittgenstein’s most brilliant student. She published all her work as ‘G.E.M. Anscombe’, perhaps to conceal that she was a woman working at a time when the brilliance of women philosophers was far from appreciated. It was World War II that created the opportunity for her and the other ‘Oxford Moral Philosophers’ (Mary Midgley, Phillipa Foot, Iris Murdoch) to set up conceptual counterweights to the catastrophic direction of twentieth century ‘analytic’ philosophy that was inspired by - and reviled by - Wittgenstein. Mary Midgley once told me how excited these four friends were every time Anscombe brought over one of Wittgenstein’s notebooks, which they scoured for insights and riddles, and discussed until the early hours.

Anscombe was a practicing Catholic Christian, and like Phillipa Foot (who wasn’t) she was firmly grounded in Aristotle’s moral philosophy. Anscombe’s reinterpretation of Aristotelian ethics has been hugely influential, especially (but not exclusively) within the Catholic tradition. She successfully captured and refined something the ancients understood, but that we have lost: the idea of the good as a practical question. Indeed, Anscombe expressly talks (following Aristotle) of practical reasoning and thus of practical truth. How can it be that there might be a coherent truth about the good of ourselves, much less that this kind of truth could be practical...?

Aristotle and Anscombe shared a conception that the forms of life that are appropriate depend upon what kind of creature we are. Aristotle claimed that concepts such as ‘white’ and ‘straight’ mean the same regardless of our what we are, while ‘healthy’ and ‘good’ apply very differently to humans or to fish. If I might dispute ‘white’ on technical grounds, it’s still clear that we cannot apply what is good for humans to any kind of fish without calamitous consequences. Thus the practical reasoning required for living well entails an understanding of what kinds of life can be lived by the sort of animal we are. For Anscombe, this practical reasoning cannot be limited to the dry factuality attempted by, for instance, biology, psychology, or medicine. Pragmatically, it must connect our intentions to our chosen actions.

The practical truth of any course of action is therefore related to the good of the kind of creature humans are, and this is only contingently related to facts. As long as we are monomaniacally focussed on the factual, we cannot practically relate to our truth at all, since this is entirely absent from the merely true-or-false world of informational statements. It can be found instead in the treacherous gap between intentions and actions. We may hold intentions that are good yet still cause great harm, especially if we fail to understand what a good life means for beings such as ourselves. This is what Anscombe calls “the utter darkness in which we found ourselves”. If we remain divorced from the idea of ‘a good life’ altogether, we will not only cause unprecedented harm - as indeed we have already inflicted on the most monstrous of scales - we shall fail to even attempt to understand the truth of ourselves.